>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
This was actually law for 8 years until the Court of Justice of the EU found it to be violating fundamental rights and was declared invalid.
It's still a law in Denmark, despite being rendered illegal in the EU, and likewise in national courts.
It was last used to convict a murderer of the murder of Emilie Meng (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Emilie_Meng). At the time, he had kidnapped a 13 year old girl (IIRC), that he had sexually assaulted for 24+ hours, and various dashcam recordings were used to piece together what had happened. He was also convicted of attempted kidnapping of a 15 year old girl from a school.
They found the 13 year old in his home, so not much doubt about that, but the other two cases were partially proven with phone metadata logging, proving he had been in the area at the time.
In the light of that, it's hard to disagree 100% that it's a "bad idea". It's a question of balance I guess, and the mass surveillance proposed in ChatControl is way out of balance. Not only does it scan in the background, it also scans for things that are unknown to you, and alerts authorities without alerting you. That's the perfect tool for facist regimes to get rid of political dissents.
It's always a tradeoff. Nothing is ever going to have zero benefit, the problem is that these laws use the marginal benefit as an excuse to institute something that actually has massive downsides.
Article 8 point 2. They're missing the provisions of data retrieval. If available, that would immediately take down the whole monitoring system as a full message history request would have to be available since they don't know which data is private or personally identifying.
Additionally, this falls under GDPR legitimate concern category so must be possible to reject by the user. Otherwise it's an involuntary measure making the law contradictory.
True, it's sad to see activists needs to be on duty 24/7/365 and yet it's useless if they can't get normal people to follow them and spam the inbox of every single EU employee just to delay more whatever chains they're trying to pass.
Hmm. So, as I read the article, they've dropped the mandatory universal scanning (which has the effect of no longer requiring on-device scanning)... but added age verification.
Voluntary scanning (voluntary for the provider, not for the serfs^H^H^H^H^Husers) is already happening under some kind of temporary directive. So that's kind of codifying the status quo.
If they had just dropped the mandatory scanning, it might even be good to see it passed, in that it could eventually, slowly, drive all the users either to providers that don't scan... or better yet to P2P. There are probably some players who accepted the lack of mandatory scanning because they're betting they can find "noncoercive" ways to coerce all the major providers... but P2P is a lot harder to pressure that way. Even "mostly P2P" is harder to pressure, just because the infrastructure required is smaller. And it's not clear that all of the people doing the horsetrading understand that P2P is even possible.
They've been coming back with this Chat Control bullshit every year, in an obvious "keep demanding it until you get a yes" strategy. But once they've passed something, it'll be harder politically for them to change it to ban effectively encrypted P2P messaging. They could end up screwing themselves.
BUT the age verification ruins the whole thing, since it torpedoes privacy in general, and it probably, depending on how it's phrased and who it binds, effectively bans P2P messaging.
I wonder how many people involved intentionally took that into account, versus how many just saw AV as something vaguely authoritarian that could be put in to placate the forces of Control(TM).
> Yesterday, this revised version was quietly greenlit by Coreper, essentially paving the way for the text’s adoption by the Council, possibly as early as December.
Politicians and bureaucrats who lacked a strong father figure is my genuine unironic non-disparaging answer.
There are a great many people in this world who not only look to government for a sense of safety and direction, but seek to impose that paternalism on everyone else for “their own good”.
As a liberal person, I have an unpopular opinion, but I’m a national who’s country is at war.
These are adequate reactions and preparations before war.
The West should be done with its rosy glasses. There’s still almost religious rejection of the possibility of war in their territory.
We are on the brink of a fierce war with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and a few traitors you are not aware of. They have more resources (oil, gas), production capabilities, as well as intelligence, and what’s more important, counter-intelligence.
This move improves counter-intelligence. Essentially, it’s an attempt to prevent the looming war. It’s not an evil act; it’s a cowardly measure compared to the direct acts of aggression of NATO.
If you think this time America will save the entire West like in movies, you are wrong. With recent drone capabilities without going nuclear, no place is safe.
> These are adequate reactions and preparations before war.
> Essentially, it’s an attempt to prevent the looming war.
I don’t see how mass surveillance is going to be effective against Russian/Chinese/etc agents, let alone prevent war. Why do you assume that spies and saboteurs are going to use the surveilled systems? I think this is more about controlling citizens than it is about monitoring foreigners.
Yeah no. That's not what any of this is about. This is exactly what they claim it is: more power for domestic law enforcement.
Your apocalyptic vision is very, very far from certain, but also...
> This move improves counter-intelligence
Evading any kind of mass surveillance is basic tradecraft for spies. You're not going to get a lot of counterintelligence out of it. Especially because it's all structured to filter the information through mostly-non-spooky operators of communication services before your counterintelligence people get to see it.
What it does improve is good old fashioned non-counter intelligence for the other side. A lot of intelligence targets don't have the kind of OPSEC that spies have. And with adversaries at that level, you can't assume you control who has access to your back doors.
Most HNers won't listen to you, but frankly they truly do not matter. There's a reason legislation like the Espionage Act, the G10 Act, and Official Secrets/NSA Act 2023 exist, and why personal heroes of mine like Abe Lincoln enabled their administrations to prosecute sedition during states of war and near states of war severely.
Much of Europe has been seeing near weekly grey scale warfare [0] that in most other cases can be treated as an act of war.
I had friends in Ukraine who acted the same until their family had to leave Donetsk due to shelling during the 14-16 period, and others who voted for Zelensky's olive tree which the Putin admin unceremoniously rejected in 2022 (at least Zelensky decided to stay in Kyiv and own up to his admin's mistaken policies in their beginning). Being well paid techies, they all paid bribes and left for Vietnam, the US, Germany, Czechia, and other countries while those who couldn't afford to leave were paying for those techies votes.
So will other HNers (and Redditors) who act high and mighty until the shoe is on the other foot - they would all leave the moment war started with nary a sense of loyalty nor the wherewithal to support policies that can act as a deterrent. The kind of people on HN will keep their heads in the sand until they are personally affected, because people who base their life on ideals and ideology don't understand how messy the world actually is.
Hell, most of them probably never heard of the 2010-12 purge China's MSS did against CIA informants - a number of whom were summarily executed in public in a government office courtyard [1]. Counterespionage is dirty work.
As a non-European who sometimes reads EU news, I think this is spot on. If you're a politician in Europe, the real goal is a position in your national government or parliament; the EU institutions are nothing more than a consolation prize, and so they're full of marginal opinions, also-ran politicians, disgraced former ministers, etc.
So is GDPR the "good" part of it and we should just reject Chat Control? Or is GDPR also some sort of trojan horse that sounds great, but has downsides
The EU is a big organization woth a lot of prople with different agendas. It was easier for the privacy advocates to regulate companies thsn for them to stop government surveillance. So far the Parliament has mamsged to block new surveillance.
These carrier bureaucrates of EU will split the EU apart with their needless over legislation where member state's fascist far left and far right elements would want to be done with the union.
I feel like this just fundamentally misunderstands Europe stand on privacy. Privacy is for citizens and companies to each other not something the government is subject to.
Obviously Europe is huge, and in Sweden we've obviously regarded some privacy as unnecessary with respect to the government, however, that has been about financial things, which, being financial, affect everybody.
We've always believed in things like postal secrecy.
I can't read the full article, but I would like to remind everyone that this is not the first time the EU has done something like this.
In 2006 the EU passed the Data Retention Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
This was actually law for 8 years until the Court of Justice of the EU found it to be violating fundamental rights and was declared invalid.
It's still a law in Denmark, despite being rendered illegal in the EU, and likewise in national courts.
It was last used to convict a murderer of the murder of Emilie Meng (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Emilie_Meng). At the time, he had kidnapped a 13 year old girl (IIRC), that he had sexually assaulted for 24+ hours, and various dashcam recordings were used to piece together what had happened. He was also convicted of attempted kidnapping of a 15 year old girl from a school.
They found the 13 year old in his home, so not much doubt about that, but the other two cases were partially proven with phone metadata logging, proving he had been in the area at the time.
In the light of that, it's hard to disagree 100% that it's a "bad idea". It's a question of balance I guess, and the mass surveillance proposed in ChatControl is way out of balance. Not only does it scan in the background, it also scans for things that are unknown to you, and alerts authorities without alerting you. That's the perfect tool for facist regimes to get rid of political dissents.
It's always a tradeoff. Nothing is ever going to have zero benefit, the problem is that these laws use the marginal benefit as an excuse to institute something that actually has massive downsides.
Um, the data retention directive didn't apply to dashcams, only network metadata... and that Wikipedia article isn't curing my confusion.
> can't read the full article
Reader mode seems to work.
They will literally use the christmas holidays to pass this while people are spending time with their families and won't notice it.
It will be challenged in the Tribunal if it passes, and will lose as it is incompatible with baseline EU laws.
Specifically, the charter: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng
Article 8 point 2. They're missing the provisions of data retrieval. If available, that would immediately take down the whole monitoring system as a full message history request would have to be available since they don't know which data is private or personally identifying.
Additionally, this falls under GDPR legitimate concern category so must be possible to reject by the user. Otherwise it's an involuntary measure making the law contradictory.
With this in mind, it's toothless if corrected.
Even if they did, what are they going to do about it?
True, it's sad to see activists needs to be on duty 24/7/365 and yet it's useless if they can't get normal people to follow them and spam the inbox of every single EU employee just to delay more whatever chains they're trying to pass.
https://archive.is/20251127215257/https://unherd.com/2025/11...
> We value your privacy
> UnHerd and our 5403 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store/access and process personal data on your device.
Oh, okay.
"We value your privacy" means they ve put a pricetag on it
Hmm. So, as I read the article, they've dropped the mandatory universal scanning (which has the effect of no longer requiring on-device scanning)... but added age verification.
Voluntary scanning (voluntary for the provider, not for the serfs^H^H^H^H^Husers) is already happening under some kind of temporary directive. So that's kind of codifying the status quo.
If they had just dropped the mandatory scanning, it might even be good to see it passed, in that it could eventually, slowly, drive all the users either to providers that don't scan... or better yet to P2P. There are probably some players who accepted the lack of mandatory scanning because they're betting they can find "noncoercive" ways to coerce all the major providers... but P2P is a lot harder to pressure that way. Even "mostly P2P" is harder to pressure, just because the infrastructure required is smaller. And it's not clear that all of the people doing the horsetrading understand that P2P is even possible.
They've been coming back with this Chat Control bullshit every year, in an obvious "keep demanding it until you get a yes" strategy. But once they've passed something, it'll be harder politically for them to change it to ban effectively encrypted P2P messaging. They could end up screwing themselves.
BUT the age verification ruins the whole thing, since it torpedoes privacy in general, and it probably, depending on how it's phrased and who it binds, effectively bans P2P messaging.
I wonder how many people involved intentionally took that into account, versus how many just saw AV as something vaguely authoritarian that could be put in to placate the forces of Control(TM).
Another law that will only apply to the poor.
Politicians and the rich will be exempt.
> Yesterday, this revised version was quietly greenlit by Coreper, essentially paving the way for the text’s adoption by the Council, possibly as early as December.
It hasn't been passed yet. We'll see.
Who are these fucks working to further mass surveillance when the people have already said 'no', twice?
Politicians and bureaucrats who lacked a strong father figure is my genuine unironic non-disparaging answer.
There are a great many people in this world who not only look to government for a sense of safety and direction, but seek to impose that paternalism on everyone else for “their own good”.
As a liberal person, I have an unpopular opinion, but I’m a national who’s country is at war.
These are adequate reactions and preparations before war.
The West should be done with its rosy glasses. There’s still almost religious rejection of the possibility of war in their territory.
We are on the brink of a fierce war with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and a few traitors you are not aware of. They have more resources (oil, gas), production capabilities, as well as intelligence, and what’s more important, counter-intelligence.
This move improves counter-intelligence. Essentially, it’s an attempt to prevent the looming war. It’s not an evil act; it’s a cowardly measure compared to the direct acts of aggression of NATO.
If you think this time America will save the entire West like in movies, you are wrong. With recent drone capabilities without going nuclear, no place is safe.
Scanning my messages with my mom is going to give that much extra edge in a war with Russia.
> If you think this time America will save the entire West like in movies
Ugh
> These are adequate reactions and preparations before war.
> Essentially, it’s an attempt to prevent the looming war.
I don’t see how mass surveillance is going to be effective against Russian/Chinese/etc agents, let alone prevent war. Why do you assume that spies and saboteurs are going to use the surveilled systems? I think this is more about controlling citizens than it is about monitoring foreigners.
Yeah no. That's not what any of this is about. This is exactly what they claim it is: more power for domestic law enforcement.
Your apocalyptic vision is very, very far from certain, but also...
> This move improves counter-intelligence
Evading any kind of mass surveillance is basic tradecraft for spies. You're not going to get a lot of counterintelligence out of it. Especially because it's all structured to filter the information through mostly-non-spooky operators of communication services before your counterintelligence people get to see it.
What it does improve is good old fashioned non-counter intelligence for the other side. A lot of intelligence targets don't have the kind of OPSEC that spies have. And with adversaries at that level, you can't assume you control who has access to your back doors.
Most HNers won't listen to you, but frankly they truly do not matter. There's a reason legislation like the Espionage Act, the G10 Act, and Official Secrets/NSA Act 2023 exist, and why personal heroes of mine like Abe Lincoln enabled their administrations to prosecute sedition during states of war and near states of war severely.
Much of Europe has been seeing near weekly grey scale warfare [0] that in most other cases can be treated as an act of war.
I had friends in Ukraine who acted the same until their family had to leave Donetsk due to shelling during the 14-16 period, and others who voted for Zelensky's olive tree which the Putin admin unceremoniously rejected in 2022 (at least Zelensky decided to stay in Kyiv and own up to his admin's mistaken policies in their beginning). Being well paid techies, they all paid bribes and left for Vietnam, the US, Germany, Czechia, and other countries while those who couldn't afford to leave were paying for those techies votes.
So will other HNers (and Redditors) who act high and mighty until the shoe is on the other foot - they would all leave the moment war started with nary a sense of loyalty nor the wherewithal to support policies that can act as a deterrent. The kind of people on HN will keep their heads in the sand until they are personally affected, because people who base their life on ideals and ideology don't understand how messy the world actually is.
Hell, most of them probably never heard of the 2010-12 purge China's MSS did against CIA informants - a number of whom were summarily executed in public in a government office courtyard [1]. Counterespionage is dirty work.
[0] - https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2025/08/the-scale-of-rus...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...
We need better leaders. Regards, a disappointed EU citizen.
Good luck removing this caste of bureaucrats through voting. This is one of the final nails in the coffin to keep power forever.
> Von der Leyen was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, to German parents. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the first European civil servants.
We are sending our scum to the EU parliament, a citizen of another EU country.
As a non-European who sometimes reads EU news, I think this is spot on. If you're a politician in Europe, the real goal is a position in your national government or parliament; the EU institutions are nothing more than a consolation prize, and so they're full of marginal opinions, also-ran politicians, disgraced former ministers, etc.
The good ol' "we don't like the EU, so we'll sink ourselves and everyone else trying to sabotage it, just to prove everyone that EU was a bad idea".
Here, being MEP is perceived as being on a lucrative political exile - those who are there cannot do damage to local politics.
And frankly, it's the commission ordinary citizens have least control of.
It is that scum which has so far stopped these proposals. The Parliament does not like surveillance while the Council does.
I agree, a citizen of yet another EU country
[dead]
So is GDPR the "good" part of it and we should just reject Chat Control? Or is GDPR also some sort of trojan horse that sounds great, but has downsides
The EU is a big organization woth a lot of prople with different agendas. It was easier for the privacy advocates to regulate companies thsn for them to stop government surveillance. So far the Parliament has mamsged to block new surveillance.
Yeah, I know. I'd just heard rumblings GDPR has flaws but considering how predatory corporations are I'm very willing to give it the old college try
The GDPR is not a trojan horse. Rather, it did too little, too late. There are no negatives to it that I am aware of.
These carrier bureaucrates of EU will split the EU apart with their needless over legislation where member state's fascist far left and far right elements would want to be done with the union.
fascism, a notably far left movement. why the nazis first went for communists, trade unionists, and social democrats.
I feel like this just fundamentally misunderstands Europe stand on privacy. Privacy is for citizens and companies to each other not something the government is subject to.
Obviously Europe is huge, and in Sweden we've obviously regarded some privacy as unnecessary with respect to the government, however, that has been about financial things, which, being financial, affect everybody.
We've always believed in things like postal secrecy.