Bad News: Chat Control is back!
And we must fight back!
If you haven’t heard about Chat Control before, it is vital that you learn more about this pressing issue if you value privacy, democracy, and human rights.
For Europeans:
If you are located in a country that is part of the European Union, we need your help to contact your representatives this week, before September 12th.
For people outside of Europe:
This regulation would affect you too, in one way or another. We must all work together to stop it and spread the word. You are concerned too.
For democracy, for privacy, and for all other human rights, we cannot afford to lose this battle.
This is terrible indeed. I live in the EU, in France for that matter and I will talk about it around me! However, I still fail to understand how this would be implemented in practice. Do apps or services are supposed to implement chat control in their own manner? Or perhaps operating systems like Windows, Macos, Android, iOS would be responsible for it? Or both? But then, what about companies like Proton and Tuta? They will never implement such a thing because if so they disappear. Their entire business model revolves around privacy, if you take it away they have no selling argument. And what about VPNs then? So many questions!
FightChatControl website just added contact information of responsible ministers in each country who directly work on the decision. So if already wrote to members of European Parliament, now can also contact ministers too.
I read somewhere that countries representing 65% of the EU population need to approve it and basically if Germany were to vote against it, Chat Control it stopped for now?
Maybe, but that is how it was for a few years already, that a minority of countries were blocking it.
It would be nice if a lot more countries would vote against, so chat control rules would be stopped instead of paused.
Congratulations. I see some positive movement in my country as well, directly because of our action, but unclear if my country will reverse position yet.
Salut, tu as des réponses sur chatcontrol.fr
In fact it is not implemented at the OS level, only at the application level, and only if it is technically possible to do it. Decentralized apps with E2EE will not be technically able to implement it, they will only have to warn users on how to use the app in respect to the law
Thank you @em for this fantastic and very comprehensive piece.
So far, all the friends and family I have reached out to are completely unaware of this legislation, and I suspect this is the case for most people, which is absolutely devastating. I have also not seen a single mainstream or independent news outlet cover this topic or treat it with the urgency that it deserves.
All this leads me to believe that the privacy community is not as impactful as I had hoped.
We must organize! That means reaching out to the media and urge them to cover this story, especially independent outlets and journalists in your respective countries.
I’m sure many of you follow some on social media. Impel them to cover this and use the hashtags.
Some independent media outlets and journalists in Europe have over a million followers on social media. If enough of us comment on their channels and profiles, we can get their attention and hopefully get them to cover this.
We need more grassroots initiative. We are very good about groaning and moaning, and technically reacting to things, but we are NOT good at grassroots initiative or journalism.
Seriously, most people don’t even realize that the chat control proposal is on again.
Even the EFF, they just aren’t that great at getting the media to talk about issues. And controversial legislation is harder to pass when the public knows about it, so it is really important to get the media to cover it
It depends on what the issue is and which news outlet. I’ve seen a lot of news outlets reference the EFF. A niche news outlet is not going to have the same impact as a big news outlet. Another factor that plays a role is the medium. Regular folk prefer video and may be averse to reading articles. If Louis Rossmann was European, he’d probably make bigger waves in European media outlets. But one Louis Rossmann is not enough. We need many influential voices with different audiences, in different languages. We still have a long way to go, but we will get here.
Indeed. That’s why it’s important to identify the news outlets and journalists whose attention we are likely to get from our collective efforts.
Good news: Germany is not supporting the Chat Control bill in its current form! The blocking minority is secured, at least for now.
[…] the danish position could not be supported 100 percent. For example, they [the german Federal Ministry of the Interior] are against breaking encryption. The goal is to work out a unified compromise proposal. […]
So we’re not out of the woods yet, but still a good and important development. Even if there’s a compromise, as long as they don’t budge on not breaking encryption, much harm will have been averted.
If I’m not mistaken there needs to be some threshold before a law can pass that country need to not oppose, others joining on the opposite side makes it less likely!
