> At the same time, we are still far from the end of the legislative process. This means that we must stay alert to how the other two law-making institutions – the Council of EU Member States and the European Commission – respond

To be able to fight these ludicrous attempts at privacy, we must put a spotlight on those behind these proposals (lobbyists). Coincidence or not, it wasn't transparent, but at least some journalists investigated https://privatecitizen.press/episode/160/

https://twitter.com/echo_pbreyer/status/1721558597769818496

Inc. people from Google. Deserve to called out.

The shady politics and the corruptive US software companies that pushed for this:

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...

Some of the folks on that list are certainly pro-scanning: it's an absurdly biased list. But to me that's reflective of the EU Commission having a desired policy from the start, then mainly seeking out experts who could help them achieve their goal.

So private message scanning is off the table, we now just save meta data and build a communication graph for every citizen for the last 10 years.

No idea if this bill includes such laws, but that is usually the strategy to get people distracted.

It makes sense - in parliamentary democracy, the coalition in government has majority in parliament and government members are often party leaders (or other important people in parties), so legislature could be pushed through parliament by party lines.

In EP there is much weaker connection between government (EU Commission) and EP, which makes EP more independent.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/european-parliament-scr...

https://agenceurope.eu/en/bulletin/article/13274/20

https://www.thejournal.ie/emissions-trade-system-fit-for-55-...

(Somewhat unsurprisingly, being currently dominated by right-wing parties, it happens often on "green" legislation...)

It doesn't happen every day simply because 1) MEPs typically don't want to be seen as "Mr. No", and 2) plenary votes are the end of a long legislative process, involving several steps; the Commission will typically not bring legislation to the floor if it understands, in previous committees, that it will likely be voted down.

The process is roughly this: EU Council (i.e. national governments) agree that "we should really do something about X"; the Commission drafts legislation to that effect, and brings it to Parliamentary committees; MEPs provide feedback and instructions on how to change things; Commission decides if the changes are acceptable, and if not they go back to Council asking "is this still ok if we do it in XY way?"; and back and forth they go, until the Commission decides to either withdraw it or put it to a plenary vote (in which case it's typically in a shape acceptable to Parliament, because nobody likes losing).

It's not quite clear what happens next - the Council of ministers may apparently decide to continue working on the legislation regardless of the Parliament's vote.

In other words - it is not evidence of an "ultimate veto power"

How do you reckon it is "dominated by right-wing parties"? Those parties make up about 20% of the parliament, whereas left-wing parties make up some 35% (with the rest being centrists and 'other').

If you think that Social democrats (S&D; center-left) are "left", then Christian democrats and conservatives (EPP; center-right) are "right". Those two are the traditional mainstream left-wing and right-wing groups in Europe. With these, we have 141 seats for the left and 178 seats for the right.

Then we have more radical parties with a clear position on the left-right axis. The inconveniently named The Left in the European Parliament have 37 seats, while their right-wing counterparts are ECR (66 seats) and ID (60 seats). This brings the total to 178 seats for the left and 304 seats for the right.

There are also two centrist-groups: Greens/EFA (72 seats) and ALDE (102 seats). The former is a weird amalgamation of greens, regional parties, independents, and pirates ranging from left to center. The latter consists of center to center-right parties that usually have some connection to the liberal tradition. But in some cases, the party in ALDE is more conservative and less liberal than their national counterpart in EPP. If we include these centrist groups in the calculations, the balance shifts further to the right.

Finally there are 49 MEPs outside the major parties, bringing the total to 705.

If you consider them like that, traditionally-conservative parties account for over 65% of current MEPs.

Oh, and that 'mostly'? Take it down a notch. There are no actual nazis in the European Parliament.

The "centrism" framing, btw, is fundamentally useless. In postwar Europe, PSE parties are left-wing and PPE parties are right-wing; other parties are fundamentally defined by their primary relationship with one of these two. The "centrism" mantra is reactionary twaddle to justify one's ideological vacuum.

ALDE-PACE is basically Emmanuel Macron's party, so more socially liberal, and by that i mean he does accept that gay people do exist and can do whatever they want, if they want (the bar is low). They also are very pro-immigration in sectors that boost economies, but accept that immigrant workers can have equal rights. Extremely pro-Europe. I'd call them right-wing, but to be fair, only its leader is, most party members are pretty much center, center-right (they would be liberal-democrat in the US), and they push a lot of the legislation the greens want to pass, for multiple reasons (the green are seen as an "acceptable compromise", citing an EPP member i ate with).

I would not call the current Green left-wing either, its a torn party. I guess after the Covid and last summer, the wars and the resulting immigration, a lot of young people joined, and politically active young people are more left-wing, but the leaders are more center, center-left. But they hold major power on the left and can work with the other center party, and sometimes even the EPP. They are also on point (and have/propose good formations) with privacy and civil liberties, which might seems left-wing if you're in the US, but to me it's basically to political proposition of the old french party "les radicaux" which was so much in the center they split in two 30 years ago).

Part of the problem is that there are no negative consequences. Again, look at the US: Snowden reveals massive, illegal surveillance. Consequences to politicians and government officials: zero.

Besides, every member state's constitution probably already has a variant of "privacy is a fundamental right except in cases defined by law".

I will argue that we _definitely do_ want cases where privacy is not 100% respected (sadly, "investigating crime" is not always a red herring, newspeak, lobbying propaganda, etc...

People really do that for a living, and in the common interest.)

In the end, it will always be a policymaker's job to draw the lines.

What I would love to enshrine in a constitution is that "People shall choose policymakers wisely.". But I'm not sure of how to enforce that :/

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized

Given privacy is fundamentally related to the expression of free will, it's not surprising so much touches it.

That's a narrow reading of it. "Papers and effects" ought to extend to our data as well, something the authors could not have called out more explicitly at the time of its writing. Call it inconvenient or impractical, whatever, but it's ridiculous to conclude their intent was that government can spy on presumed innocents as long as they don't make a physical mess.

I think third party doctrine is also a pile of crap... and that data brokers shouldn't have a square inch of legal ground to stand on. GDPR sets a good example in that regard.

Third-party doctrine is indeed a pile of crap. Still, the fact remains that zero-cost (okay, effectively zero-cost) digital information breaks virtually all historical ownership models which legal systems protect. GDPR is okay, but compliance with it is so burdensome to small businesses that corporate-driven cloud infrastructure is the only way to survive.

(Note that this article of the constitution doesn't include E2E encryption because there's a carve out for the judiciary to limit this freedom).

In summary, there are no rights that are guaranteed even if they are in a constitution.

They spent millions on campaigns advertising this stuff and asking for feedback only to get

They need to start working together with higher education institutions or something rather than just hoping that people will take an active interest, instead of everyone going about their lives and only finding out when the laws are being ratified.

* (except about personal matters)

Forbidding something is never “it”. People do prohibited things all the time.

“Prohibit” is not “magically prevent”.

Or, to take another angle, why don't the prohibitions in FISA effectively stop the government from abusing foreign intelligence apparatus for domestic spying?

Of course the judicial, legislative and executive branches should be independent and they're not that much right now.

In any case, even in such a system the proposal might have more positive than negative effects, and maybe lead to gradual improvements to everything else.

Lies are obvious in most cases, and I think there are established judicial systems to assess if a crime has been committed or not...

Of course investigations and indictments have to occur only with sufficient elements to suspect a malfeasance, we're not arguing for wiring politicians to mind readers

Surely the creators of the policy will not forget to exclude themselves from being affected.

They're already blackmailed puppets to the spy agencies, that's why they keep pushing this stuff. There's a reason none of the people Epstein was accused of trafficking young girls to went to jail.

The most salient point, I think, is that it is worthless, from a LEO perspective, to tap into communication systems used by the masses--whether through provider taps or client-side scanning like Apple's purported CSAM AI--unless what you're really after is a way to monitor the general public at large.

There's no way in hell that a nefarious player with technical resources, or chops themselves, would use one of these public systems to communicate with their compatriots. There are infinite and myriad bespoke channels of covert communications that these laws would never be able to touch which are much more likely to be the hubs of serious malfeasance.

[0] https://youtu.be/qUQQerrs52w?t=54

Which makes no fucking sense, as pretty much all data crosses borders now. When you use facebook/twitter/tiktok/gmail/whatever, you have zero knowledge what (geolocation) server instance the owners of those products are using.

And even if one service uses one "local" (as in within borders) server, many of the others could very well not.

This is of course in the name of fighting terrorism, which makes up for such a small percentage of all data traffic, that it might as well be ZERO.

Terrorism and CP, the two things that will usher in lots of overreaching laws.

Now the real fight begins. We need every message sent or received by the politicians who supported this absurd proposal to be public record. The public's need to stop abuses of power outweighs privacy rights they do not value.

Then it doesn't matter what the government wants, they will have simply no ways to read my texts.

The issue is that only the technically and privacy savy will be able to continue to encrypt their message. The masses will happily comply and continue using facebook messenger/whatsapp or whatever new bigtech "cool app of the day" full of backdoor.

Most of people use smartphones and there isn't secure smartphone platform. Even on PC, all you can do is to hope nothing in the chain leaks your messages.

My point is that all this legislation is pushed as anti-criminal because it's the best spotlight to put mass data surveillance under. In reality, the powers that governments will reap from this ability stretch much further. Would you be okay with the exact same measures in real life? Should large gatherings of people require everyone to wear a wiretap, lest they conspire to commit something illegal? Should we mandate inspection of every postal package, just in case there are drugs or other illegal contents?