EU Revives Plan to Ban Private Messaging
The EU is reviving plans for mass surveillance by pushing to scan every private message before it’s sent – potentially ending encrypted messaging as we know it. Reclaim The Net has the story.
For over three years, talks have stalled over whether providers should be forced to scan every user’s messages for possible illegal material and forward anything suspicious to law enforcement.
The European Commission is still pushing for a universal scanning requirement.
In contrast, the European Parliament insists any checks should apply only to unencrypted messages from people already under suspicion. Attempts to strike a deal have repeatedly fallen apart, with Poland the latest presidency to walk away without an agreement.
July brought a change in leadership of the Council of the EU, with Denmark stepping in and putting chat scanning back at the top of the legislative pile. Copenhagen wants this handled as a priority and wasted no time tabling a new draft on its very first day in charge.
Leaked records from a closed door July meeting show the Danish text closely tracks earlier proposals from Belgium and Hungary, with no concessions for encrypted conversations. A softer version from Poland, which would have made scanning voluntary and left encrypted chats alone, has been dropped entirely. …
Italy, Spain and Hungary have been in favour of mandatory chat scanning from the start. France could tip the balance since blocking the plan requires four countries representing at least 35% of the EU’s population. Paris has moved from tentative support to saying it could “basically support the proposal.” …
Denmark has already circulated a lightly revised second draft. The next round of Council negotiations is set for September 12th, with advocates hoping for final adoption by October 14th.
Worth reading in full.
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All I can say is good luck getting it deployed and working. These people are clueless about everything, things don’t just work as required just because you want them to, or pass legislation to enforce it!
I agree with that.
However, article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights is supposed to protect people’s privacy from undue government interference and this includes their communication with other people. What the EU tries to mandate here is essentially the same as the state opening all letters and parcels to check them for illegal content and recording all telephone conversations for the same reason. Communication is communication and nowadays, telephone call data is transported of the internet in just the same way as non-SMS text messages. So, why is the former supposed to remain private but the latter supposed to become subject to universal government surveillance?
Technical feasibility, be it real or just imagined, is no justification for universal surveillance and neither is “But people could do illegal stuff!” aka “We must protect the children!”
ECJ and ECHR will find ways of giving the EU institutions whatever they want. As always.
The ECHR is not an EU institution.
That said, I think the present crop of judge there will be happy with such a privacy invasion provided the sex lifes of foreign criminals owning cats remain unaffected by deportation orders. But that’s not how this was meant to work and it’s worth mentioning this.
Agreed, but we never had a voice when we were “in” the EU, so what chance do we have whilst we are still in?
And where was the ECHR during Covid.
What is a “Right” seems to be flexible according to the needs of those in charge.
💯
All it takes is for the tech-savvies to get a bot to fabricate tens of millions of messages and swamp the monitoring Stasi.
I misread it as private massaging, and I thought that’s a damn cheek.
That really would be a ban too far.
Not to worry, we left the EU.
Didn’t we?
Yes but with current British Givernmebts it’s a case of monkey see, monkey do.
Starmer wants us to be an EU vassal state. Subject to the whims of the EU but powerless to oppose them. I imagine his Davos pals will tell him to ensure we have the same surveillance measures here. He’ll tell us it will help smash the people smuggling gangs, and the less discerning among us will fall for it.
Are they planning to open every postal letter mailed too. Will they run hidden code detection and cracking software on all communications including images, video and data-streams that can imbed communications imperceptibly.
Once all the tools of a despotic totalitarian dictatorship are in place what is left to prevent our supposedly benign rulers from
then morphing into becoming just that?
That this isn’t reallt technically feasible despite EUmoronocrats believe otherwise doesn’t excuse their bad intentions. They don’t have the right to 24×7 surveillance of everyone “just in case” and they perfectly well know that. They just hope that’ll manage to manufacture consent for this monstrous human rights violation by throwing a lot of “Internet”s and “Protect the chidlren”s around.
We have quite the reputation for “protecting the children” in this country.
Or so we are told.
It seems to vary from one “community” to the next.
The aim is to stymie debate, expression, thinking, communication. I sense this for example with people today being fearful of expressing accord with the objectives of Palestine Action – they don’t want to be arrested by the thought police. If you never know who is watching you and when you will turn to act as though you are being watched by everyone always.
Consent has become Coercion in the EU and UK. Mass surveillance is for one reason only—-To force alignment with all government agenda’s. We are now to accept that government is too complex for democracy to work, and technocracy is what is required.
The self-regulating system that derives from the inherent power of freedom, (forming free-markets responding to all the wants and needs of humanity and social order) is the only mechanism required.
I would go one step further: all mobile devices will have an app factory installed that will periodically prompt the user to send a message to all contacts extolling the virtues of the government and the EU.
Suggested messages:
“I thank God/Allah/Yahweh/Evolution each day for giving us such a fantastic government!”
“Hurray to the EU Common Agricultural Policy!”
“Did you guys see Ursula at the summit – she looked so sexy this morning!”
“In contrast, the European Parliament insists any checks should apply only to unencrypted messages from people already under suspicion.” Seen as “under suspicion” changes when the narrative changes. It could be everyone!
Hungary ???!!! So-called Bastion of Patriotism, battling fiercely against the Mass Invasion from the Third World?
Hungary, revealing itself to be reverting to Stalinism?
Reverting?
The bureaucratic machine never stops its advance.
There’s always something else to control. After this it will be something else. Then something else. No end. Ever.
It’s not ideological or part of a scheme to achieve something in particular. It’s just the nature of the beast. To control. This, the next thing, the next thing after that, everything.
A very slippery slope: ‘…..the prewar Habsburg state was far from dysfunctional and in many ways approximated its other nineteenth-century constitutionalist counterparts within Europe and across the world. Yet the war and the stresses surrounding it, especially along the seam of civil-military relations, tore that constitutionalist state apart as the Habsburg Army declared its own internal war against the Habsburg civilian state. The army focused its ire on the rule of law within that state, which it viewed as contributing to the state’s weaknesses, and ultimately its initial failures, in the first year and a half of the war. Thus, the Habsburg Empire descended into a state of exception as the army took advantage of an array of legal tools designed to accompany initial mobilizations to make deep and lasting incursions into the practice of managing civilians. These incursions caused widespread dismay among broad sections of the Habsburg populace, while simultaneously undermining the practices and procedures of the Habsburg administration. Yet in plunging into a state of legal exception, the Habsburg Empire was hardly an anomaly in the twentieth century. Rather, it was a harbinger of what was to come’ How to Break a State: The Habsburg Monarchy’s Internal War,… Read more »
If you want to demonstrate anything, a load of Entente polit-BS isn’t a good way of accomplishing that. [I was planning to write a longer text but then abolished the idea.] In 1914, it was widely recognized that only the authority of the ageing emperor Franz-Joseph II. held the diverging peoples of the dual-monarchy of Austria-Hungary together, at least those who weren’t already in more-or-less open revolt like the Czechs and, to a lesser degree, the Poles. Martial law was declared in 1914, parliament was suspended and the country was henceforth rule dictatorically. In 1916, the emperor died and was succeeded by his son Karl. In the vain hope to ease tensions among the many nationalities of the monarchy, he restored the peace-time constitutional order despite the war was still ongoing but this only amplified the centrifugal tendencies and the monarchy collapsed after failed offensive in Italy in 1918. Regardless of that, breakup of Austria-Hungary was one of the central war goals of the Entente powers which already supported the diverging tendencies of the various nationalities before and during the war. The multi-ethnic states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created from different parts of it after the war as reward… Read more »
Fourth Reich.
Starmer will probably parrot this unto UK legislation. China here we come. I suspect this is what all the new high powered data centres are going to be used for.
less than 5 years to go and it’ll be the thirties.
EU Über Alles!!
Fourth Reich. And idiots still want UK to be one of its provinces.
There was a time when we were all free to go about our business until perhaps criminality was suspected and then the authorities would investigate that. But now the citizen is to be forced into compliance with all government agendas through monitoring. So we are all now to be “suspected” until it can be shown we are not up to anything the government does not approve of. ——-But government are not just looking for the drug dealers and pedo’s, they want to check all our behaviours. They want to monitor our carbon output, our consumption, our travel, food choices, financial activity, our social media posts, and now private messages, because the only way to do that is to watch everyone ALL OF THE TIME.
Golly, they are really frightened now. Revolution is coming to the whole of Europe!