The EU Council and its participants have decided to withdraw the vote on the contentious Chat Control plan proposed by Belgium, the current EU President.
Moritz Körner, member of the European Parliament, disclosed the decision on Twitter. Swedish publisher SVG said,
Moritz Körner, Member of the European Parliament, disclosed the decision on Twitter. Swedish publisher SVG said, “The question was removed at the last moment from Thursday’s ambassadorial meeting in Brussels”.
Wasn't this rejected once already? Perhaps if they wanted to do something useful, they should pass something that says that if something is majority disliked twice or something, then it should be withdrawn and not proposed again for at least 100 years.
Yep, and as I pointed out in another comment in this thread, Chat Control isn't the only piece of legislation like this that's in the works.
Considering that the extreme right just won big, I have no doubt that one of these fascist surveillance packages will go through. Yeah, at first it may be used for catching criminals, until it isn't
Source? In Germany at least that's not the case, it's mainly the conservatives who push for it. In the original vote, only the greens clearly opposed it. Later on, SPD (center-left) and FDP (liberal) changed course to also oppose it. Couldn't find results for other countries though, so I'm genuinely curious.
The labels get confusing especially between countries, but left and right are normally viewed as being economic policy classifications, but you can have authoritarians on right and left and all need to be fought.
I think of authoritarian as being up and down, and social and economic views as left and right. Check out the political compass if you haven't. It would be nice if it was 3D with economic and social policy being separated though.
I've seen the compass, but in real life conversation when people say left or right they don't exclusively mean economic views. For example, access to abortion or LGBT rights are generally seen as supported by the left and opposed by the right.
You're right it's reductive, and really there are many dimensions to political thought.
Exactly, and I try to point people to things like this to try to break that left vs right thought. I hope it helps someone.
I'm left on some issues, right on some, and disagree with both on others, and I think that's pretty common for most people. However, we only get two realistic options, and they split up issues and "force" you to pick which basket you prefer. I'm worried people will slowly adopt views from the basket they pick since the alternative is needing to pick the other basket.
I believe all parties in EU are not really understanding technology in general. So I think it's a very bad decision to give these people power over these kinds of rules. They just have no idea what they are doing frankly.
Yes. Technically, a similar vote could repeal the law just as easily but there is a history of governments not giving their power away easily; implementing it also sets a precedent and creates technical enforcement options for other governments willing to go through with something similar in the future, or for hackers to exploit because gov-rooted devices will remain in operation for years after the potential repeal.
And "Chat Control" isn't even the only thing like this in the pipeline. There's the so-called "security by design" bullshit (which does the opposite of what then name implies) that's actually even worse than Chat Control and has also been worked on in secret, and which'd include mass scale surveillance of not just photos but pretty much everything, and is much more likely to pass than Chat Control.
Either way they can just give it a new name and change some details to propose it again. Like how they made it "voluntary" this time (but you can only send text if you don't agree).