Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
The whole point of governance in a democracy is consent of the governed. When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large, then they've entered into the realm of authoritarianism with an occasional election - which is exactly what we accuse the 'bad guys' of doing.
>When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large[...]
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
The tactic here is sneaking legislation through the system by bringing it up again and again, hoping for the public to eventually lose interest, or to catch a time with a lot of other drama going on so they can avoid the public attention/backlash.
I do think there are procedural ways to support this, like: proposed bills that are very similar to previous rejected ones need a preemptive vote with 60%+ support to be considered - if brought again with a certain time frame.
I do see your point though, there can be unforeseen consequences.
There's really no fixing that kind of failure state with a bandage solution. The whole idea of a representative democracy is premised on citizens being able to elect representatives who represent their interests. If that's not holding then that's the part that needs to be fixed.
So some cool off period that gets larger each time a bill fails. There is not a detailed proposal, but I would assume some max cool off period is reasonable/desirable as well.
So it could not be used to block legislation that society actually wants forever but it would block the legislature from passing it in a limited time frame.
Another reasonable addition that would work well at more local levels but would be a new challenge to implement at the national level in the USA is to have citizen lead referendums with minimum participation requirements to by pass this cool off period. That way if legislation is important the voters can bypass the cool off period.
I am not sure because this assumes a very well informed and educated population.
Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.
> Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
I think people might agree with that if they alone were going to get the money, but far too many people vote against their own interests to keep "the wrong people" from getting anything. They'd never allow a "give everyone 10M" referendum to pass.
We want the population to be well informed. But when you consider the history of literacy, journalism, and what media most people have access towards, that assumption was never really true in the first place. People were always getting propagandized as soon as they had the power to vote or even merely chose among suppliers. Probably long before that too.
The problem here is that many who are in favour of Chat Control (and of its predecessors) really do honestly think they're doing something for the benefit of society.
Focusing on these supposedly well-meaning individuals - I'm going to assume they somehow never consumed any dystopian fiction as a child, the purpose of which was to inoculate a generation against totalitarianism. They don't understand the overreach they are committing to. They think that, because they're a Good Person and wouldn't abuse it, nobody else will, and the massive security loophole created by this effort will not have any downsides. They'll just be able to stop all the baddies!
Meanwhile, those of us who live in reality know that:
* smart criminals will just use unlicensed technologies to get around this, trivially
* dumb criminals will figure out how to use code words for plausible deniability / bayesian "hide in plain sight"
* political dissidents who are exercising free speech will become more vulnerable than ever
And, of course, that's all if the government was only populated by good people who don't intend to abuse this! I have no reason to believe that; does anyone? Is there anyone who so truly loves their government in 2025 that they want them reading all their messages (even moreso than now)?
Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
> Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
For a second I thought that was a great hypothetical example, then I remembered that's a thing that actually happens now in the UK and got a little sad instead.
That's the benefit and frustration of the democratic or representative democratic process.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
But exponential backoff feels too open to be gamed by countervailing factions. Some small period of time within a session however could make sense.
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
Double jeopardy in the US means being prosecuted for the exact same crime more than once. It does not, however, prevent being prosecuted for similar or related crimes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
In many countries, it took multiple attempts to get gay marriage legalised. Having a double jeopardy type block for repeated attempts at passing laws would prevent social changes being captured in law.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
You're fighting a strawman there I think. He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
>He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
So if gay marriage or weed legalization was defeated in 2015 you shouldn't be able to have a go at it until 2025? Or if YIMBY zoning reforms or AI regulation were defeated in 2025 you shouldn't be able try again until 2035?
That sounds like a terrible idea. Suppose a malicious actor wants to prevent something you support. They can simply bring a bill with a poison pill.
To use the prior example: They could create a criminal reform act which makes weed legal, but also (by total coincidence) makes child rape legal.
Nobody will vote for the pedophiles, so now they have successfully prevented weed legalization for at least 10 years, and they can use a different poison pill next time.
Before you say "well, bring it back without the child rape part", see my other comment in this thread about deciding whether two bills are the same.
I understand where this "exponential backoff" idea is coming from as much as anyone. Chat Control would have been an effective continent-wide ban on my own startup, Cyph, and it's been dismaying to watch the consistent background erosion of civil liberties due to the world's inability to maintain a constant state of SOPA-style blackouts and and similar massive grassroots influence campaigns.
That being said, I agree that it probably isn't the most practical approach. It feels too vague to have any teeth, and if we were to collectively spend political capital to implement something like that, we may as well be more direct and push to constitutionally enshrine digital bills of rights that nip all this nonsense in the bud for good. No more E2EE bans, VPN bans, mandatory backdoors, age verification laws, undermining of Section-230-style protections, or criminalization of online speech — throw it all out, and roadblock any such future attempts.
Should an outgoing Republican legislature be allowed to deliberately introduce a gun control bill, vote not to pass it, and thereby block an incoming Democratic legislature from passing gun control for their entire term?
So if party A votes down proposal X and the next election party B that publicly supports it wins they shouldn't be allowed to propose that law?
Logical conclusion would be for the governing party to get some stooge to propose all the policies they oppose, get them far enough to the voting stage and reject them. Now your opponents can't do anything even if you lose the next election...
Of course doesn't really apply to pseudo-democratic institutions like the EU..
And there is in most parliamentary law, but usually restricted to sessions. Additionally, there's usually a proscription against passing negative laws (i.e. "we will not do X"), meaning that when something passes it becomes law and needs a supermajority to repeal, but when it fails, all it needs is a majority to be passed (in the next session.)
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
Interesting seeing people downvoting this. I mean this is literally what happened after Brexit:
> you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain .. and even backbenchers in government have no power at all
All pro EU Conservatives were forced to either get in line or commit political suicide since local party constituencies aren't allowed to pick their representatives. US at least has primaries...
It is not at all obvious to me that a government, acting from the authority of a public mandate, has to be able to pass controversial laws—which by definition lack that same consent.
Yes but so would a "stop asking" option. I don't find this as a flaw, instead it's a pretty good feature. Everything should be able to be revisited, if only because times change and there's unintended consequences.
Just because you can still drive over speed bumps and knock over road blocks doesn't mean that they aren't effective tools.
So if a party which rejects some policy loses the election (possible even directly because of that) their opponents who always supported that law wouldn't be allowed to vote on it again?
Not sure how true that is, but I heard people mention that the law would be unconstitutional in Denmark, where this iteration was born. If so, I think that should be a limitation as well.
Maybe on the condition that the law was struck down by courts. Otherwise it would block iterations on any controversial topics that need time to reach consensus.
Some others here asked how would we decide what is the same law. That’s pretty easy: same as with many other not so clear things, if some sues a judge/jury hears both sides and makes a decision.
I doubt that this can be actually done as intended because the wording of a bill can be changed enough to pretend it's not the same as the previous versions. I can't really think of a way to make this work, but indeed it would be a great addition to law passing.
Good idea. yeah at this point, law making every were just seems like brute force attack at this point. We need some kind of security assure to keep out these 'law making crackers'
It exists but the proposal must be voted on. These people will not put the proposal to vote if they know it will not pass. That's why they ask countries' positions up front.
Trying to prevent stupidity by regulations and rules is proving to be problematic: Because we have very successfully prevented stupid from destroying themselves, and let them thrive on the successes of others built (e.g. anti-vaxers are relatively safe thanks to everyone else vaccinating their children, or you can thrive on benefits in the UK which is great when you genuinely tried your best but fail, but terrible when it is motivating you to stop trying).
This fundemantally conflicts with a lesson startup scene learned very early: Fail fast, fail often. Our societies do not fail fast when they make mistakes, thanks to the incredible safety and stability intelligent and sensible people created.
This is preventing people from learning from their idiocies, which in turn allows them to reach to critical mass and forcing their idiocy on the whole society in the form of bullshit or hurtful laws and orders.
We should change this and let idiots fail fast before they become a danger to everyone.
As other comments on this post have mentioned, exponential backoff would still have some issues.
However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.
I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
> There should be sorts of an exponential backoff mandated for the contents of bills.
I don't think that's workable:
* If it only works for exact bills, they'll just change a tiny bit and resubmit, and we're back to square one but with frustrating procedures/paperwork.
* If it works for approximate bills, then it will be abused by opponents that introduce fatally-flawed versions of your good bill in order to block you from ever getting it voted-on.
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
I am polish, please *do not spread falsehood*.
EU funds suspension came because of Polish non-compliance with several EU laws.
Most notably the previous government had created a "new" government-controlled chamber of judgement that gave de facto the executive branch control over the judicial one.
Judges in Poland could be suspended and punished if politicians didn't like their rulings. Not only that, judges could be suspended, fined and even jailed over any public comment.
This created a situation where essentially judges where promoted, punished or cherry picked according to how aligned they were to the ruling party.
This was a blatant violation of Polish constitution as well as the treaties Poland itself signed when joining the EU.
Well an euroskeptic government is out and a new as pro-EU as is possible to be (Donald Tusk was President of the EU Council) is in, so all is well... You may recognise a pattern that is at play in other countries both in the EU and outside.
Whether the government was EU skeptic or not is irrelevant. Plenty of EU countries had similarly EU skeptical governments.
What matters are facts: Poland violated several points of the Treaty of the European Union, the EU Charter and CJEU rulings all stating the same thing: to be part of the European Union rule of law must be respected.
In other words: the judicial branch of power has to be independent. Politicians write laws. Judges and not politicians, rule on whether they are respected or not.
And again, I'm Polish, I know what I'm talking about: the previous government went far in bending the constitution, controlling the press and the judges taking our country step after step towards a dictatorship.
I can't see any relation either. I get the impression, that the concept of "law", as in written and formalised law, opposed to the spoken will of a leader is going over the head of a lot of people and that missing this conceptual foundation is causing the seemingly nonrelated nature of what they were saying.
So what you say is that you accept one side of extremum but not other side? Democracy as in having common goal is bad but democracy as in tribalism is good?
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
On the other end there is the "don't interfere with anything" and you get totalitarianism as a side effect, eventually.
If a democratically elected government passes a law that makes killing some category of people lawful, should they be allowed to do it?
Because nazis were peak of totalitarianism disguised as democracy and stemmed directly from seemingly (that is while looking at smaller parts of it) democratic process
I don't know if you noticed, but some things awfully similar to Nazism are currently popular again, worldwide. Mostly not popular enough to actually win elections in most cases, but enough that many people are thinking about how to stop almost-Nazis from winning elections, which of course gets the latter group labelled as almost-Nazis for trying to interfere with elections.
There are many groups with agendas to kill or expel gay people, trans people, Muslims, atheists, etc. It's sadly normal for those groups to exist; it's not normal for them to be anywhere close to power and we need to stop them getting power because we already know what happens if they get power. "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" and all that.
It is the courts' job to block unconstitutional or otherwise illegal laws.
I believe someone said in a previous thread that a court in an EU member state had already found this mass surveillance on citizens who are not criminal suspects to be illegal under either their constitution or the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but I can't find it anymore. I am wondering why that is not sufficient to permanently block this.
Edit: This is not to say that you shouldn't resist the laws at every other level, too, because you definitely should.
Well, realistically, if this were to pass, it would likely run into trouble with the courts. There's a bit of a history of this; in particular the Data Protection Directive got struck down by the ECJ for violating fundamental rights.
That's probably the plan anyway. The plan is to defang the courts, and especially the ECHR, since the beginning. The AfD explicitely said it was their plan, the National front in France didn't, but would be very happy if it didn't had any power, and a lot of media close to the neolib/conservative/nationalist are more than happy to shit on the ECHR (Pericles project is only from one of those).
Each time the courts disqualify a parliamentary law or executive decision, it has to spend political power. If the decisions or laws it stop are all from the same side, that side can start chipping the courts power away. The reason for the legislative part to exist is to avoid a dictatorship of the majority (basically X is arrested for something, Y is not even though he did the same thing, because Y is from the majority group). Having the ECHR censoring the law would have been sold by a lot of media as "the ECHR is supporting pedophiles" and "those non-elected judges wants to keep abusing children", and hopefully after a dozen years of similar attemps, the court would be either defanged or totally partisan.
Never trust the courts to protect your rights, even if you think that a law obviously infringes on obviously well enshrined rights that still is no guarantee of victory.
I think the implication was that there's something like a tipping point after which the surveillance leads to people not daring to oppose it in an organized way anymore. Which, at least to me, is a way more realistic danger than, for example, AGI.
What kind of government will on its own initiative want to give citizens more privacy not to say actively push for it against other governments? EU parliament cannot propose laws, so it would be nearly impossible to grassroor such an initiative
Except ... where do you get the idea that the police forces will respect the law? If you want to get an indication of that just read the judgements here:
Note, especially, how many judgements are about the state already getting convicted a first time and then immediately violating the judgement, and in some cases the size of the convictions tells you something:
(over 6000 very serious individual violations by law enforcement)
Or take https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-greece-9 where the Greek state illegally abducted 2 children and moved the to the US. Obviously this court provides no recourse, and the Greek state is entirely free to just totally ignore the judgement.
So where do you get this idea that law enforcement or the state will respect the law when they don't get what they want?
I would really like to know from a perspective of an informed Danish citizen, why the Denmark chose to focus on the Chat Control legislation as one of their priorities during its EU presidency. It somehow doesn't fit with my view of the Scandinavians as a technically competent people. The proposed solution is absurd and can easily be overcome by the real offenders.
- Scanning of your emails and storage etc. is illegal in EU. The EU parliament voted for an exception which allows it (https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/167712). It has been extended twice and is set to expire in April 2026. EU parliament threatened to not extend it again. This proposal should become a law which permanently replaces it and is revised every 3 years. A nice opportunity to include scanning of your encrypted communication too.
Can't speak for the danish, but at least in Sweden i think its more of a "moral police" issue. Our politicians just scream about catching pedophiles and then close their eyes to any privacy issues. Lots of "well if you have nothing to hide then what is the problem?". The people pushing the issue are not really that technically competent either.
All this means there's a blocking minority (supposedly) which can go away immediately if Germany flips. The debate is happening today. Nothing is repelled.
The title needs to be corrected. It's borderline maliciously incorrect.
The most depressing and disgusting - though not surprising - part is that the politicans want to draw out exemptions for themselves with these laws, under supposed "professional secrecy" rules.
What do they have to hide, exactly? After all, their logic tells us that they shouldn't worry if they have nothing to hide, right? And if anyone should have their chats publicly available, the number 1 people should be the scumbags that are pushing for this so adamantly. Let's see them lead by example, then maybe I would consider this as anything other than a draconian power grab.
I mean, how else could to work? Beyond a new EU treaty (Lisbon treaty replacement) banning discussion of it, I'm not sure that there's any way to prevent it coming back.
Voting should be on specific clauses, and if anything is rejected there should be a cooling period before it can be brought up for voting again.
The cooling period does not preclude discussion of course. That's why we pay the MEPs: They are actually expected to show up in the EP and discuss. Not only show up on voting day and follow what their party dictated.
With the EU being only nominally democratic in operation, the minority will face pressures on unrelated fields (EU funds, etc) by Brussels and larger dogs, until it yields. Happened time and again.
meanwhile more and more public schools roll out cameras and surveiled environments for the students
when those students enter the workforce, they expect the surveilance. they grew up under chat control so they're used to it. get with the times to live and die another day
And how camera is supposed to prevent shooter from firing bullets? You think like shooter cares if they are filmed or not? If anything it will encourage them to shoot because there will be more permanent record of their actions…
If really implemented, this thing would generate so many false positives that it would force law enforcement to waste a lot of money going through them.
Chat Controls will inevitably lead to concentration camps and mass killings once the power learns what people actually talk about. They become paranoid and afraid. They will try to nip dissent and perceived threat in the bud. We are on the slippery slope and people should stop seeing EU as roses and fluffy bunnies. They are corrupt autocrats and if you think they are not, you are rejecting evidence of your eyes and ears.
Just ridiculous how authorities are perservering with this.
The ruling should come with a timeout period; they're not allowed to try anything similar again for 20 years or whatever, and even then only if circumstances have changed.
I prefer a simpler system if possible, adding further rules ("don't try anything similar for X years") seems to me that will make matters worse (who decides if it is similar enough? can you challenge that? at what stage you have to decide? etc.)
Also, are you sure most population is against ? I did not see a poll on that. I know enough people that like "authoritarian" governments and laws, so I think we (the ones that don't agree) should make an effort to convince people that too much "authority" is not the most efficient/smart way. Some of those people are in fact just afraid even if they would not admit it...
Yes you are right, the people and the authorities should be better informed.
The problem is that these kinds of laws tend to be one-way streets. Once systems are in place, they are hard to remove, so there should be some protection against unenlightened authorities just trying again and again and 'getting lucky'.
Well, if you will allow the steelmanning, I can think of a couple of reasons why the authorities of _Italy_, of all countries, would want to follow organized groups conducting illegal activities.
I mean, "organized crime" and "Italy" probably appears in a couple of n-grams in LLMs index, right ? Maybe even if you narrow it down to reviews of movie trilogies from the 70s ?
That being said, I'm sure you will disagree.
The whole discussion on those topics is about mistrust:
- law enforcement claims to need tools to prosecute organized crime (which does exists), and claims any opponents is just mafias masquerading as concerned citizens.
- opponents claims the new tool is only meant for surveillance, and claims any opponent is just an autocrat masquerading as concerned parents.
- fun fact 1 : both autocrats and mafias exist
- fun fact 2 : reading some messages mean reading all messages
Which is why we have the debate every few years.
Meanwhile law enforcements use other tools (they have been for years), mafias are still out there, organized crime is still harming lots of people, and encrypted messages are relatively safe - but people use unencrypted FB's messaging because it's easier.
There should be sorts of an exponential backoff mandated for the contents of bills.
Now, every lobby group keeps pushing their sketchy agenda, knowing well that they will eventually pass it. Worst case, it will be passed bit by bit.
That's also problematic.
Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
The whole point of governance in a democracy is consent of the governed. When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large, then they've entered into the realm of authoritarianism with an occasional election - which is exactly what we accuse the 'bad guys' of doing.
>When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large[...]
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
The tactic here is sneaking legislation through the system by bringing it up again and again, hoping for the public to eventually lose interest, or to catch a time with a lot of other drama going on so they can avoid the public attention/backlash.
I do think there are procedural ways to support this, like: proposed bills that are very similar to previous rejected ones need a preemptive vote with 60%+ support to be considered - if brought again with a certain time frame.
I do see your point though, there can be unforeseen consequences.
Good thing we have paid professionals whose job it is to vote on these things.
But the whole premise is that those paid professionals have gone rogue?
There's really no fixing that kind of failure state with a bandage solution. The whole idea of a representative democracy is premised on citizens being able to elect representatives who represent their interests. If that's not holding then that's the part that needs to be fixed.
I'd say it's premised on the naivety of citizens to believe what they elect are representatives
A political party can table any motion they want and other political parties will vote against it. That is not going rogue it is doing your job.
Newsflash: it's the paid professionals that are doing this...
It's those paid professionals that are the problem
> There should be sorts of an exponential backoff
So some cool off period that gets larger each time a bill fails. There is not a detailed proposal, but I would assume some max cool off period is reasonable/desirable as well.
So it could not be used to block legislation that society actually wants forever but it would block the legislature from passing it in a limited time frame.
Another reasonable addition that would work well at more local levels but would be a new challenge to implement at the national level in the USA is to have citizen lead referendums with minimum participation requirements to by pass this cool off period. That way if legislation is important the voters can bypass the cool off period.
I am not sure because this assumes a very well informed and educated population.
Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins. So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.
> Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins.
I think people might agree with that if they alone were going to get the money, but far too many people vote against their own interests to keep "the wrong people" from getting anything. They'd never allow a "give everyone 10M" referendum to pass.
Making mistakes is a critical part of learning. What legitimate authority stands above the will of the people?
Such bullshit hypotheticals are used to justify the dismantling of democracy and keeping it only in name.
In actuality, most of the stupid decisions that drove countries to the ground are made by "respected statesmen".
We want the population to be well informed. But when you consider the history of literacy, journalism, and what media most people have access towards, that assumption was never really true in the first place. People were always getting propagandized as soon as they had the power to vote or even merely chose among suppliers. Probably long before that too.
>We want the population to be well informed.
Who is "we" though? The elites with interests counter to what's best for the people, for example, surely want the opposite.
We the collective. The elites would like to remain the god kings they always were, and they have done a good job of it over history.
The problem here is that many who are in favour of Chat Control (and of its predecessors) really do honestly think they're doing something for the benefit of society.
Focusing on these supposedly well-meaning individuals - I'm going to assume they somehow never consumed any dystopian fiction as a child, the purpose of which was to inoculate a generation against totalitarianism. They don't understand the overreach they are committing to. They think that, because they're a Good Person and wouldn't abuse it, nobody else will, and the massive security loophole created by this effort will not have any downsides. They'll just be able to stop all the baddies!
Meanwhile, those of us who live in reality know that:
* smart criminals will just use unlicensed technologies to get around this, trivially
* dumb criminals will figure out how to use code words for plausible deniability / bayesian "hide in plain sight"
* political dissidents who are exercising free speech will become more vulnerable than ever
And, of course, that's all if the government was only populated by good people who don't intend to abuse this! I have no reason to believe that; does anyone? Is there anyone who so truly loves their government in 2025 that they want them reading all their messages (even moreso than now)?
Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
> Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
For a second I thought that was a great hypothetical example, then I remembered that's a thing that actually happens now in the UK and got a little sad instead.
The UK is totally screwed, they need another Guy Fawkes moment. Which would probably get branded as terrorism nowadays, but still.
That's the benefit and frustration of the democratic or representative democratic process.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
But exponential backoff feels too open to be gamed by countervailing factions. Some small period of time within a session however could make sense.
> When lawmakers start actively going against
The bill is being pushed and reintroduced by elected representatives from each country, both in the council as well as EP.
People electing populist elements and then being surprised pikachu at the suboptimal policies.
It's not the populist elements that push for such things, it's the right, the "responsible centrist", and the fake-ass left of center scum
I disagree on this one.
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
Double jeopardy in the US means being prosecuted for the exact same crime more than once. It does not, however, prevent being prosecuted for similar or related crimes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
In many countries, it took multiple attempts to get gay marriage legalised. Having a double jeopardy type block for repeated attempts at passing laws would prevent social changes being captured in law.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
You're fighting a strawman there I think. He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
>He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
So if gay marriage or weed legalization was defeated in 2015 you shouldn't be able to have a go at it until 2025? Or if YIMBY zoning reforms or AI regulation were defeated in 2025 you shouldn't be able try again until 2035?
Yes, even for things you support.
That sounds like a terrible idea. Suppose a malicious actor wants to prevent something you support. They can simply bring a bill with a poison pill.
To use the prior example: They could create a criminal reform act which makes weed legal, but also (by total coincidence) makes child rape legal.
Nobody will vote for the pedophiles, so now they have successfully prevented weed legalization for at least 10 years, and they can use a different poison pill next time.
Before you say "well, bring it back without the child rape part", see my other comment in this thread about deciding whether two bills are the same.
I understand where this "exponential backoff" idea is coming from as much as anyone. Chat Control would have been an effective continent-wide ban on my own startup, Cyph, and it's been dismaying to watch the consistent background erosion of civil liberties due to the world's inability to maintain a constant state of SOPA-style blackouts and and similar massive grassroots influence campaigns.
That being said, I agree that it probably isn't the most practical approach. It feels too vague to have any teeth, and if we were to collectively spend political capital to implement something like that, we may as well be more direct and push to constitutionally enshrine digital bills of rights that nip all this nonsense in the bud for good. No more E2EE bans, VPN bans, mandatory backdoors, age verification laws, undermining of Section-230-style protections, or criminalization of online speech — throw it all out, and roadblock any such future attempts.
Maybe we should also ban all parties that don't win the election for the next 10-15 years? Makes as much sense...
Should an outgoing Republican legislature be allowed to deliberately introduce a gun control bill, vote not to pass it, and thereby block an incoming Democratic legislature from passing gun control for their entire term?
That's not double jeopardy then
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy
The clause in the US constitution specifically has no time limits and it looks like it's the same for all the countries listed on wiki.
>perhaps 10 or 12 years
So if party A votes down proposal X and the next election party B that publicly supports it wins they shouldn't be allowed to propose that law?
Logical conclusion would be for the governing party to get some stooge to propose all the policies they oppose, get them far enough to the voting stage and reject them. Now your opponents can't do anything even if you lose the next election...
Of course doesn't really apply to pseudo-democratic institutions like the EU..
That would be a boon to the conservative movements, for sure. And also ensure that almost nothing gets done unless it is extremely populist.
He did make a reference to the double jeopardy law in the US though which, if I'm not mistaken, explicitly prohibits exactly that type of behaviour.
That's brilliant. Chat control discussions should totally get derrailed to gay marriage and weed legalization.
And there is in most parliamentary law, but usually restricted to sessions. Additionally, there's usually a proscription against passing negative laws (i.e. "we will not do X"), meaning that when something passes it becomes law and needs a supermajority to repeal, but when it fails, all it needs is a majority to be passed (in the next session.)
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
The EU doesn't even have that level of democracy.
Interesting seeing people downvoting this. I mean this is literally what happened after Brexit:
> you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain .. and even backbenchers in government have no power at all
All pro EU Conservatives were forced to either get in line or commit political suicide since local party constituencies aren't allowed to pick their representatives. US at least has primaries...
There are a bunch of people in my country who have been pushing against abortion rights for 50 years. So far they have never even come close.
Now I suppose theoretically one day all the other 100 members of parliament accidentally push the wrong button but it seems farfetched.
It would be nice, but they change it a little bit so it's technically a different law.
It is not at all obvious to me that a government, acting from the authority of a public mandate, has to be able to pass controversial laws—which by definition lack that same consent.
I wish there were a “No, And Stop Asking” law where you couldn’t propose a law again within X years after it fails to pass.
I know a million reasons why that’s probably impossible, starting with “what makes it the same law?”, but I can still wish we had one.
It would be possible to proactively pass a law that is incompatible with future attempts, right?
E.g. in this case something like a "right to chat secrecy" law.
Yes, but whatever law you pass that is incompatible with future attempts can just have its repeal included as part of future attempts.
Yes but so would a "stop asking" option. I don't find this as a flaw, instead it's a pretty good feature. Everything should be able to be revisited, if only because times change and there's unintended consequences.
Just because you can still drive over speed bumps and knock over road blocks doesn't mean that they aren't effective tools.
We already have this. It's even a law you can't change easily. We call it constitution, what ever that is. It obviously doesn't matter here.
Well, this kind of thing really belongs in a constitution, where it would block any attempt to pass creeping mass-surveillance laws like Chat Control.
So if a party which rejects some policy loses the election (possible even directly because of that) their opponents who always supported that law wouldn't be allowed to vote on it again?
Seems extremely easy to abuse...
I did mention that it had a million problems.
Not sure how true that is, but I heard people mention that the law would be unconstitutional in Denmark, where this iteration was born. If so, I think that should be a limitation as well.
Maybe on the condition that the law was struck down by courts. Otherwise it would block iterations on any controversial topics that need time to reach consensus.
Some others here asked how would we decide what is the same law. That’s pretty easy: same as with many other not so clear things, if some sues a judge/jury hears both sides and makes a decision.
I doubt that this can be actually done as intended because the wording of a bill can be changed enough to pretend it's not the same as the previous versions. I can't really think of a way to make this work, but indeed it would be a great addition to law passing.
Good idea. yeah at this point, law making every were just seems like brute force attack at this point. We need some kind of security assure to keep out these 'law making crackers'
It exists but the proposal must be voted on. These people will not put the proposal to vote if they know it will not pass. That's why they ask countries' positions up front.
Wouldn't that potentially be exploited by the opposition where they could push a similar bill but with unpopular additions?
Also an expiry date for every bill. All things should have a timeout.
We should fund another lobby that pull in the other direction.
Trying to prevent stupidity by regulations and rules is proving to be problematic: Because we have very successfully prevented stupid from destroying themselves, and let them thrive on the successes of others built (e.g. anti-vaxers are relatively safe thanks to everyone else vaccinating their children, or you can thrive on benefits in the UK which is great when you genuinely tried your best but fail, but terrible when it is motivating you to stop trying).
This fundemantally conflicts with a lesson startup scene learned very early: Fail fast, fail often. Our societies do not fail fast when they make mistakes, thanks to the incredible safety and stability intelligent and sensible people created.
This is preventing people from learning from their idiocies, which in turn allows them to reach to critical mass and forcing their idiocy on the whole society in the form of bullshit or hurtful laws and orders.
We should change this and let idiots fail fast before they become a danger to everyone.
As other comments on this post have mentioned, exponential backoff would still have some issues.
However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.
I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
> There should be sorts of an exponential backoff mandated for the contents of bills.
I don't think that's workable:
* If it only works for exact bills, they'll just change a tiny bit and resubmit, and we're back to square one but with frustrating procedures/paperwork.
* If it works for approximate bills, then it will be abused by opponents that introduce fatally-flawed versions of your good bill in order to block you from ever getting it voted-on.
But that's exactly how the EU works. If you give the "wrong" answer they'll keep going until you give the "right" answer.
France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU constitution... nevermind, the same was in the later Lisbon treaty.
Ireland rejected the Nice and Lisbon treaties... nevermind they still passed when asked again after cosmetic changes and "information campaigns".
Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
I am polish, please *do not spread falsehood*.
EU funds suspension came because of Polish non-compliance with several EU laws.
Most notably the previous government had created a "new" government-controlled chamber of judgement that gave de facto the executive branch control over the judicial one.
Judges in Poland could be suspended and punished if politicians didn't like their rulings. Not only that, judges could be suspended, fined and even jailed over any public comment.
This created a situation where essentially judges where promoted, punished or cherry picked according to how aligned they were to the ruling party.
This was a blatant violation of Polish constitution as well as the treaties Poland itself signed when joining the EU.
Well an euroskeptic government is out and a new as pro-EU as is possible to be (Donald Tusk was President of the EU Council) is in, so all is well... You may recognise a pattern that is at play in other countries both in the EU and outside.
Whether the government was EU skeptic or not is irrelevant. Plenty of EU countries had similarly EU skeptical governments.
What matters are facts: Poland violated several points of the Treaty of the European Union, the EU Charter and CJEU rulings all stating the same thing: to be part of the European Union rule of law must be respected.
In other words: the judicial branch of power has to be independent. Politicians write laws. Judges and not politicians, rule on whether they are respected or not.
And again, I'm Polish, I know what I'm talking about: the previous government went far in bending the constitution, controlling the press and the judges taking our country step after step towards a dictatorship.
How is that related to the comment above?
I can't see any relation either. I get the impression, that the concept of "law", as in written and formalised law, opposed to the spoken will of a leader is going over the head of a lot of people and that missing this conceptual foundation is causing the seemingly nonrelated nature of what they were saying.
So what you say is that you accept one side of extremum but not other side? Democracy as in having common goal is bad but democracy as in tribalism is good?
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
On the other end there is the "don't interfere with anything" and you get totalitarianism as a side effect, eventually. If a democratically elected government passes a law that makes killing some category of people lawful, should they be allowed to do it?
That escalated quickly from my comment to "but Nazis"...
Because nazis were peak of totalitarianism disguised as democracy and stemmed directly from seemingly (that is while looking at smaller parts of it) democratic process
I don't know if you noticed, but some things awfully similar to Nazism are currently popular again, worldwide. Mostly not popular enough to actually win elections in most cases, but enough that many people are thinking about how to stop almost-Nazis from winning elections, which of course gets the latter group labelled as almost-Nazis for trying to interfere with elections.
There are many groups with agendas to kill or expel gay people, trans people, Muslims, atheists, etc. It's sadly normal for those groups to exist; it's not normal for them to be anywhere close to power and we need to stop them getting power because we already know what happens if they get power. "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" and all that.
It is the courts' job to block unconstitutional or otherwise illegal laws.
I believe someone said in a previous thread that a court in an EU member state had already found this mass surveillance on citizens who are not criminal suspects to be illegal under either their constitution or the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but I can't find it anymore. I am wondering why that is not sufficient to permanently block this.
Edit: This is not to say that you shouldn't resist the laws at every other level, too, because you definitely should.
I believe it was Germany's constitutional court, which given the experience of East Germany is understandable.
Chat Control repelled 4th time in the EU
Nice! They will keep trying until they wear people down. Keep up the great battle!
We have to win every time, they only have to win once
Well, realistically, if this were to pass, it would likely run into trouble with the courts. There's a bit of a history of this; in particular the Data Protection Directive got struck down by the ECJ for violating fundamental rights.
That's probably the plan anyway. The plan is to defang the courts, and especially the ECHR, since the beginning. The AfD explicitely said it was their plan, the National front in France didn't, but would be very happy if it didn't had any power, and a lot of media close to the neolib/conservative/nationalist are more than happy to shit on the ECHR (Pericles project is only from one of those).
Each time the courts disqualify a parliamentary law or executive decision, it has to spend political power. If the decisions or laws it stop are all from the same side, that side can start chipping the courts power away. The reason for the legislative part to exist is to avoid a dictatorship of the majority (basically X is arrested for something, Y is not even though he did the same thing, because Y is from the majority group). Having the ECHR censoring the law would have been sold by a lot of media as "the ECHR is supporting pedophiles" and "those non-elected judges wants to keep abusing children", and hopefully after a dozen years of similar attemps, the court would be either defanged or totally partisan.
Never trust the courts to protect your rights, even if you think that a law obviously infringes on obviously well enshrined rights that still is no guarantee of victory.
No? If they win it mostly flips who pushes the proposal to change the law and who opposes it.
I think the implication was that there's something like a tipping point after which the surveillance leads to people not daring to oppose it in an organized way anymore. Which, at least to me, is a way more realistic danger than, for example, AGI.
It's usually much easier to pass a law than to get rid of it once passed.
What kind of government will on its own initiative want to give citizens more privacy not to say actively push for it against other governments? EU parliament cannot propose laws, so it would be nearly impossible to grassroor such an initiative
Except ... where do you get the idea that the police forces will respect the law? If you want to get an indication of that just read the judgements here:
https://www.echr.coe.int/
Note, especially, how many judgements are about the state already getting convicted a first time and then immediately violating the judgement, and in some cases the size of the convictions tells you something:
https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-t%C3%BCrkiye-...
(over 6000 very serious individual violations by law enforcement)
Or take https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-greece-9 where the Greek state illegally abducted 2 children and moved the to the US. Obviously this court provides no recourse, and the Greek state is entirely free to just totally ignore the judgement.
So where do you get this idea that law enforcement or the state will respect the law when they don't get what they want?
I would really like to know from a perspective of an informed Danish citizen, why the Denmark chose to focus on the Chat Control legislation as one of their priorities during its EU presidency. It somehow doesn't fit with my view of the Scandinavians as a technically competent people. The proposed solution is absurd and can easily be overcome by the real offenders.
Choose:
- Lobbying. Thorn and other "NGOs" are shaking in excitement about new revenue streams by providing the surveillance software. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
- Scanning of your emails and storage etc. is illegal in EU. The EU parliament voted for an exception which allows it (https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/167712). It has been extended twice and is set to expire in April 2026. EU parliament threatened to not extend it again. This proposal should become a law which permanently replaces it and is revised every 3 years. A nice opportunity to include scanning of your encrypted communication too.
Can't speak for the danish, but at least in Sweden i think its more of a "moral police" issue. Our politicians just scream about catching pedophiles and then close their eyes to any privacy issues. Lots of "well if you have nothing to hide then what is the problem?". The people pushing the issue are not really that technically competent either.
All this means there's a blocking minority (supposedly) which can go away immediately if Germany flips. The debate is happening today. Nothing is repelled.
The title needs to be corrected. It's borderline maliciously incorrect.
Edited, thank you
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45209366
The most depressing and disgusting - though not surprising - part is that the politicans want to draw out exemptions for themselves with these laws, under supposed "professional secrecy" rules.
What do they have to hide, exactly? After all, their logic tells us that they shouldn't worry if they have nothing to hide, right? And if anyone should have their chats publicly available, the number 1 people should be the scumbags that are pushing for this so adamantly. Let's see them lead by example, then maybe I would consider this as anything other than a draconian power grab.
Great! Crazy that it can be brought back every time though, it makes me very uncomfortable.
I mean, how else could to work? Beyond a new EU treaty (Lisbon treaty replacement) banning discussion of it, I'm not sure that there's any way to prevent it coming back.
Voting should be on specific clauses, and if anything is rejected there should be a cooling period before it can be brought up for voting again.
The cooling period does not preclude discussion of course. That's why we pay the MEPs: They are actually expected to show up in the EP and discuss. Not only show up on voting day and follow what their party dictated.
With the EU being only nominally democratic in operation, the minority will face pressures on unrelated fields (EU funds, etc) by Brussels and larger dogs, until it yields. Happened time and again.
meanwhile more and more public schools roll out cameras and surveiled environments for the students
when those students enter the workforce, they expect the surveilance. they grew up under chat control so they're used to it. get with the times to live and die another day
This is illegal in Germany at least.
> meanwhile more and more public schools roll out cameras and surveiled environments for the students
...for the school shooters, i presume.?
And how camera is supposed to prevent shooter from firing bullets? You think like shooter cares if they are filmed or not? If anything it will encourage them to shoot because there will be more permanent record of their actions…
> meanwhile more and more public schools roll out cameras and surveiled environments for the students
...for the school shooters, i presume?
Am I correct to understand that the amount of arrests thanks to end-user backdoors for CSAM, ever, is zero?
If really implemented, this thing would generate so many false positives that it would force law enforcement to waste a lot of money going through them.
I know normal ordinary people that were defending this...
Chat Controls will inevitably lead to concentration camps and mass killings once the power learns what people actually talk about. They become paranoid and afraid. They will try to nip dissent and perceived threat in the bud. We are on the slippery slope and people should stop seeing EU as roses and fluffy bunnies. They are corrupt autocrats and if you think they are not, you are rejecting evidence of your eyes and ears.
Just ridiculous how authorities are perservering with this.
The ruling should come with a timeout period; they're not allowed to try anything similar again for 20 years or whatever, and even then only if circumstances have changed.
I prefer a simpler system if possible, adding further rules ("don't try anything similar for X years") seems to me that will make matters worse (who decides if it is similar enough? can you challenge that? at what stage you have to decide? etc.)
Also, are you sure most population is against ? I did not see a poll on that. I know enough people that like "authoritarian" governments and laws, so I think we (the ones that don't agree) should make an effort to convince people that too much "authority" is not the most efficient/smart way. Some of those people are in fact just afraid even if they would not admit it...
Yes you are right, the people and the authorities should be better informed.
The problem is that these kinds of laws tend to be one-way streets. Once systems are in place, they are hard to remove, so there should be some protection against unenlightened authorities just trying again and again and 'getting lucky'.
What is the UI from in the twitter screenshot? I'd like to read the positions of the Supporting/Undecided countries.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
(And I need to understand why the hell my country, Italy, supports the motion)
Well, if you will allow the steelmanning, I can think of a couple of reasons why the authorities of _Italy_, of all countries, would want to follow organized groups conducting illegal activities.
I mean, "organized crime" and "Italy" probably appears in a couple of n-grams in LLMs index, right ? Maybe even if you narrow it down to reviews of movie trilogies from the 70s ?
That being said, I'm sure you will disagree. The whole discussion on those topics is about mistrust:
- law enforcement claims to need tools to prosecute organized crime (which does exists), and claims any opponents is just mafias masquerading as concerned citizens.
- opponents claims the new tool is only meant for surveillance, and claims any opponent is just an autocrat masquerading as concerned parents.
- fun fact 1 : both autocrats and mafias exist
- fun fact 2 : reading some messages mean reading all messages
Which is why we have the debate every few years.
Meanwhile law enforcements use other tools (they have been for years), mafias are still out there, organized crime is still harming lots of people, and encrypted messages are relatively safe - but people use unencrypted FB's messaging because it's easier.
Mafia has been around in Italy for more than 200 years, even before messengers were invented. It's likely this won't change it.
Meanwhile Meloni has deployed NSO against Italian journalists.
Contact them, and ask!
see you next year