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> What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around

They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.

Found this, source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

On 7 July, MEPs voted 331–303 to fast-track the return of Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning. A binding vote follows Thursday, 9 July, where an absolute majority of 361 MEPs is needed to stop it. Take action now to demand they defend your private messages.

"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject. Parties in favor of chat control were:

- European People’s Party and

- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

Countries in favor of chat control were:

Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus

If you look at the initial vote from July 7, there are a few countries who actually wanted to make it an "urgent decision" (other than the countries above):

France, Czechia, Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg

Well, the No vote triggered some adjustments, so this is indeed relatively democratic. What would be the alternative?

How did you connect the linked Wikipedia article to EU courts and ECJ?

This journalist was not sanctioned by the court.

We're currently running a long-term offshore experiment to see if 2A has any measurable impact on dragnet surveillance and the NSA.

True, the solution is to just start murdering politicians. Thanks for the advice America.

Why would big tech be in favor of having to scan message content? It puts more regulatory requirements in place on their activities. Would they not be in favor of _less_ regulation so they can provide services to their users with fewer legal considerations?

If big tech _wanted_ to they could already backdoor their encryption and scan the message content, they don't need regulation to do that. The only thing that changes with regulation is that they now _have_ to, which cannot possibly be in their favor.

Do you have source for IWF funding being by big tech?

Haven’t found anything that breaks their funding down by source and the majority on the UK govt site is from “charitable activities” (https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...)

Then I'm not very moved about this. I always assumed that anything unencrypted is scanned one way or another. What I care is not having a backdoor for E2E, i.e. like client-side scanning telling me what I am allowed to talk about like with the LLMs. CSAM excuse is a great excuse to turn every conversation to what we have with AI today.

Don't downplay Skype, as Teams is still just rebranded Skype for Business (LYNC).

Are my AIM chats safe?! /s

This is the whole point though. They are allowed to do this because of the original chat control from 2021 which was temporary and expired in march. Without chat control it is very debatable what companies can legally thanks to eprivacy directive.

Yes. I see no reason to think otherwise.

To be fair, lack of regulation didn't stop us in America from passing the Patriot Act.

Multiple active wars on the global stage, huge changes in tariff and job impacts, large scale shipping and oil impacts.

I’m not saying this legislation impacts any of this positively or negatively, but we can’t pretend the prior world order isn’t making some drastic changes lately. Governments are slow to change laws but I would expect much of the current push has actual ties to the larger global shifts.

> at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately.

This isn't surprising to me at all.

The World Cup is on, and it draws attention away from politics. This has been a pretty common observable pattern for as long as I can remember.

The reason is more than apparent.

So long freedom, it’s been nice living in STASI free society for a while. Too bad power attracts the people who will make sure they keep it in their hands.

At least in some member states, that's a well used pattern when the soccer world cup is on (as in: people are focused on something else). Which at least has been going on in the last weeks.

unpopular with whom?

Every time HN posts another one of these privacy-invading EU regulations, a bunch of pro-bureaucracy people are in here cheering on regulations and knocking down anyone who suggests that maybe this time they've gone too far.

for no apparent rason? the way they are preparing to bring the population into a war hardly can be any more apparent...

Whenever you see people complaining that the EU is "too slow", more often than not it's because they benefit directly from EU rushing things without thinking.

My guess is that with non-left political movements on the rise better surveillance tools were needed to prevent them from winning the elections around europe.

I really don’t but any other reason, as other tools (legal and technological) are already in place.

>with no regard for the impact of the decisions on the theoretical next turn

They know the impact of the decisions: more power for them as bodies.

> I'm really surprised at the hurry.

Well, once you realise that the so-called "EU parliament" is nothing but a lobbyist group (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...) it is no longer surprising. To me nothing here is surprising, neither the hurry nor any slowness.

Lobbyists are winning the war.

>for no apparent reason, lately.

for some godforsaken reason left-lib parties in europe think accepting infinity migrants forever is the most important thing to do

this is becoming more and more unpopular with the voters, leading to right wing parties surging across europe (Denmark, which has an immigration restrictionist left wing government doesnt seem to have an issue here, true mystery)

obviously the solution here is total control of the internet, so that you can suppress dissent

It's a US data pump, and the EU is a bunch of vassal states. That's the hurry, shutting down the data flow because the permissive legislation runs out is not allowed.

well, bread is running our at beakneck speed...

that's the reason they are busy igniting a war by the time the defaulting begins, so that there's some external boogieman to blame instead of them...

This removes circus from the children.

This comment does not add any value to the discussion.

PS: Sorry, but "haha nothing matters" cynicism does NOT add anything to the discussion. In fact it straightforwardly breaks a whole bunch of HN guidelines: "Be curious", "Don't be generically negative", "Don't be snarky", "Don't post shallow dismissals", etc. This forum is supposed to be better than the R-site.

Afaik, EU rules provide for urgent procedure only for proposals at first reading, while here it was used to compress a second reading vote and skip committee, just perfectly timed for the last sitting before recess.

The absolute majority seems to be an anti-paralysis instrument, where the onus is on the Parliament to reject something put in motion by the Council. I think the the asymmetry is that a vote to trigger the urgency procedure only requires a simple majority, whereas a rejection of that same legislation requires absolute majority.

To my reading, this reinforces the idea that Parliament is designed to be more of a rubber stamp for the Council.

The urgency procedure is not the issue here, the problem is that this was Parliament's second reading, and the treaties (article 294 TFEU) say:

> Second reading

> 7. If, within three months of such communication, the European Parliament:

> (a) approves the Council's position at first reading or has not taken a decision, the act concerned shall be deemed to have been adopted in the wording which corresponds to the position of the Council;

> (b) rejects, by a majority of its component members, the Council's position at first reading, the proposed act shall be deemed not to have been adopted;

> (c) proposes, by a majority of its component members, amendments to the Council's position at first reading, the text thus amended shall be forwarded to the Council and to the Commission, which shall deliver an opinion on those amendments.

The regulation was rejected today with 314 votes against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions, but because of Metsola's lawfare that classified this regulation as under an "urgent procedure", an absolute majority was required to reject.

Chat Control 2.0 is the censorship regulation. Chat Control 1.0 just legalized what Facebook was doing anyway.

It's absolutely legitimate to be upset. However, identifying a lawfare trick in a close vote to a dictatorship is serious hyperbole. I'm afraid that's counterproductive.

EU is doing some concerning moves but, looking at your points, Russia attacked Ukraine. EU is not at war with Russia, only supporting Ukraine.

Second, the relationship with US is deteriorating due to Trump. As a matter of fact all US relationships are deteriorating for the same reason. Where have you been the past years? Im not going to bother to respond to the following points because you mix some reality with propaganda and seem to live in a paralel reality.

Yeah, there are two scummy things happening here. This would not be possible if they did their job. What sort of weird example does it set, when they don't ever care enough to stay for all the voting?

But now you have governmental overreach and legalized spying on European Citizens by (mostly) US Companies, so i would say that Law is truly binary bad.

Also how the Law was forced is extremely bad.

But hey it's once more proof that the EU is not a democratically spirited institution.

There can be, but this isn't it. In the EU, a company can't send you an email, but it can read your email.

In this case, the phrase “consumer protections” is almost insulting when the things it’s supposedly protecting us from are a triviality compared to the horror show being introduced.

There will surely be some people who applaud your post for pointing this out. But the vast majority of people don't see "government spies on me" vs "private industry spies on me" as a meaningful distinction and there are MANY MANY recent examples of this: the discourse around Flock, the discourse around ICE using personal information to trace dissenters, the discourse around DOGE and Palantir.

But I suppose the OP said all that needs to be said, and so this spot was left empty for whatever nonsense comment dared to fill the void, and you won.

No, "strong digital privacy" and "governmental overreach against citizens private data" is mutually exclusive.

Yes, indeed.

In principle "for anything 3rd party want" would be illegal in the EU. However, Big Tech clearly doesn't care what's illegal in the EU.

Pertinent to this case: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/big-tech-defies-eu-law-...

Previously: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/french-sa-cookies-and-advert...

Even earlier, when they cared about the law: https://www.trtworld.com/article/13092354

I think a more realistic system would be hashing images and comparing them to known CSAM in some database.

I think Apple was going to implement something like this a few years ago before scrapping it.

I think you're probably wildly overoptimistic about the ratio of police officers to private nudes.

No government really wants to be fully enforcing all their own laws, just because it's way too expensive to hire that many cops. I think the closest anyone got was the Stasi, and they had a lot of "volunteers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator#Other_...

That was terrible. But then the NSA just started surveilling everything illegally anyway, laws be damned.

How many people are arrested for social media posts and other speech in each country?

At least I have still have a 2nd amendment - and, at least for now, still post on social media without getting a knock on my door.

Apart from this law-trickery used here: The EU could be a thing that helps fixing the problems that the single nations cannot overcome, even if it becomes unpopular. Fixing climate change involves completely restricting fossil fuel AND harvesting existing greenhouse gases (which costs additional energy) until the atmosphere is back to 1800. No government of this world spoke this truth to its people, because after the next election that government would be no more.

basically admitting they are pedos

Can you cite the text where it says this?

If they can't distinguish traffic containing hidden encrypted messages from humdrum non-encrypted traffic then they'd have to ban the whole thing for everyone.

Session was supposed to be shut down at start of July but looks like they got enough funding from donations to keep going for now.

Something something essential liberty, something something temporary safety.

the rest? they comply, or get labeled a criminal.

innocent men cannot be ruled over. authoritarians want a population of such "criminals", because then their power becomes the choice of which law is executed on whom.

The thing is... It's not even reported on the news here (Lithuania).

Just now I scrolled through our most popular news sites. 0 mentions. Wasn't on TV either.

The vast majority of the population didn't even have a clue that the vote was happening.

I checked the top 5 most popular local news sites. There was one article about chat control in April and then 2 more from 2025. That's it.

Imagine an issue as big as this and it's not even reported. Yeah I don't feel confident about the future at all.

What is the false positive rate that you would be comfortable with such a scan having? What would be the risk of your personal photos and videos being recognized as CSAM and reported to your local police (and thus being shown to your local police) that you would be happy to accept?

Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?

If local scanning of CSAM flags a post, that post will have to be analysed by a human operator. If you send a sensitive photo of your kid's rash to your spouse, and it gets flagged, are you ok with a random cyber enforcement officer seeing your child in that way?

I have a question: who trains the CSAM model?

Okay, since it is already working system - how could I verify it scans for CSAM, not my dissident books and saved eps*ein files?

Weaponizing our own property against us, mandating that it spies and tattles on us, turning inanimate objects into policemen to construct the most total surveillance dystopia, is not in any way "reasonable". In no way does it "preserve privacy".

And let's not pretend there are not already many other ways in which child abuse is detected and fought. When schoolteachers or doctors or neighbors or other family members notice something is amiss, when a CSAM group is infiltrated by police, or when a predator falls for a honeypot. This triggers an investigation, and at that point no digital lock can withstand modern targeted covert surveillance. But we are supposed to pretend none of this exists, and that encryption is an unassailable castle, and play along with the "going dark" lie, despite being more surveilled than at literally any point in history, including under the Stasi.

They only don't address child abuse, if by "child abuse" is meant a photo existing in some private shared-with-nobody hard drive, and not an actual human child being abused.

Discord recently had an AI malfunction that resulted in square grids getting detected as CSAM and reported to cops.

No, it's the other way around. Quoting another comment:

>"Yes" means stop control, because it's a "proposition de rejet" we're looking at. rejet = reject

Indeed. The vote, however, was about stopping Chat Control. The key term is "derogation" in the title.

A "yes" vote was a vote against Chat Control. It failed because it needed an absolute majority of 361/) votes to defeat the "urgent procedure" lawfare by Metsina, a conservative.

I mean sure, but there's no meaningful commie contingent in the EU.

The war on privacy at the EU level always comes from conservatives.

What are you even saying? As a leftist, I want nothing to do with those fascists.

Here's a thought: maybe liberal democracy was never very free.

Exactly. I consider myself euro federalist but bullshit like this creating a very strong antipathy.

If this is not some shady maneuver to scan user messages for security reason, because of, for example, possible incoming war then it's beyond absurd.

I would doubt that politicians pushing this are not understanding that pedophiles simply do not need to use these apps they are scanning. But I saw questioning of tech CEOs by older US officials and the lack of even basic knowledgeable about current technologies was ridiculously astounding.

Slippery slope is not a "fallacy" by default. It can be occasionally but its a perfectly reasonably argument in plenty of cases.

What "constructive" argument is anyone supposed to give about authorities having warrantless access to all private conversations?

"Slippery slope" does not by itself invalidate an argument, because slippery slopes do exist.

Constructive argument? Just disband the EU as a whole, including all laws, treaties, contracts ...

Europe would be a much better place if the EU stayed what it was, a trade union of sovereign nations without any political power over the people.