21 comments

  • TheChaplain 1 minute ago
    These threads are amusing.

    In an earlier one about Iceland and EU, people criticizing EU were downvoted, called russian bots or far-right. I don't expect much difference here.

    Chat control and ProtectEU are certainly not the last totalitarian measures EU will invent, there will be more. And I find it interesting that people still defend EU without any hesitation.

    Now I think the initial trade union was great and a necessary counter weight when competing with larger economies and countries. But it rather quickly evolving into something that is less concerned about the citizens, and more about staying in power.

  • bradley13 3 hours ago
    The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

    If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.

    If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.

    So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

    • betteryet 1 hour ago
      The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.
      • shevy-java 1 hour ago
        You can. The way this works is via something called money. Or more generally, financial incentives, kickbacks, you name it.

        Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission).

    • p_l 1 hour ago
      Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.

      Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat

      • ajb 3 minutes ago
        This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.

        The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)

        The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).

        There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.

        • wbl 0 minutes ago
          The more democratic the EU the less sovereign legitimacy countries have. That's the tension that makes Euroskeptic parties oppose reforms.
      • Xelbair 41 minutes ago
        because it is a perfect tool for all governments to 'wash' unpopular political bills that would be a political suicide in local politics.

        You're asking the group profiting from current arrangement to change it.

      • shevy-java 1 hour ago
        That is also true - national countries sabotage any reform.

        Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.

        • LaurensBER 1 hour ago
          I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.

          Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.

          • Xelbair 37 minutes ago
            EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.

            The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.

            I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.

        • bojan 1 hour ago
          The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.

          That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.

          So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.

          And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.

    • AnssiH 1 hour ago
      > So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

      So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?

      There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).

      There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.

      • qwytw 1 hour ago
        Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).
        • AnssiH 1 hour ago
          "ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament.
          • fwn 1 hour ago
            Chat Control 1.0 is not at all voluntary for those controlled by it.

            For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control.

            This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.

            • inigyou 1 hour ago
              There's no setting in Facebook where I can tell Meta to bake me a cake either. But I'm still allowed to buy cakes.
    • MrBuddyCasino 1 hour ago
      > In reality, they want to be dictators.

      Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.

      • bartleeanderson 1 hour ago
        Very funny if it weren't so true!
        • MrBuddyCasino 1 hour ago
          I‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill.
          • plufz 30 minutes ago
            Are you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people?
    • inigyou 1 hour ago
      That is the structure of the EU. Wannabe fascists propose all kinds of laws, then a democracy chooses which ones it wants.
      • written-beyond 1 hour ago
        Secret Hitler(the boardgame) fan?
        • b112 25 minutes ago
          Wait, Hilter made a boardgame? I'm... curious. (Looks around with apprehension)
    • christkv 2 hours ago
      This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name
      • delichon 1 hour ago
        I agree, but to be fair, the US constitution is set of limitations on democracy from beginning to end, and I do support that document.
        • christkv 1 hour ago
          The U.S. constitution would be a much better constitution for the EU than what we have now.
          • inigyou 1 hour ago
            But the US doesn't follow it.
  • random3 3 hours ago
    And, of course, no thought is given to the implications this could have in conjunction with the next Orban. Europe is aligning against Russia as a threat, while at the same time shooting itself in the foot by disabling basic rights like privacy with absolutely no memory of how much more basic lack of privacy (enabled by Facebook) was leveraged with relatively simple tools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...) to help Brexit happen (effectively breaking Europe apart).

    This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

    • ronsor 2 hours ago
      Europe has learned the lesson that extremists are bad, but it has not learned the lesson that the tools shouldn't exist.
  • jbstack 2 hours ago
    With all the current concerns about rogue and mis-aligned AI, and about how we've made essentially zero progress on making sure that AI is safe and trustworthy, NOW you want to put backdoors in encryption algorithms? We should be doing everything we possibly can to make our systems more secure, not less.

    This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.

  • Kim_Bruning 3 hours ago
    Meanwhile the latest gen ai agents are able to crack everything not nailed down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494301

    Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm

  • teekert 1 hour ago
    Oh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me? I’m afraid that I, as a good person and father, am going to be punished for not letting them read my private messages. I’m afraid for my future in the EU.
    • TFNA 1 hour ago
      No one really cares about your individual comms. The goal of legislation like this is to ensure that E2E chat apps are no longer distributed on the app stores, so even if a tiny amount of nerds like us might use them among ourselves, they are no longer relevant socially.
    • microtonal 1 hour ago
      The problem is that we keep on voting in politicians (left and right) that do not fight for freedom and privacy. The EC in the end is only an extension of national governments (through the European Council) and the European Parliament (in the sense that they propose and vote for EC members).

      There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find.

      It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up.

      There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".

  • microtonal 4 hours ago
    Is the actual text of the workplan somewhere? The linked article refers to the text

    more effective tools for law enforcement

    in the press release and then infers or implies that this means more encryption backdoors, but I could not find that in an actual EU text?

    (Edit: I'm not doubting that they want to make backdoors mandatory, I'd just like to see the actual text.)

    • petre 4 hours ago
      It's linked in the second paragraph of article.

        More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies
      
        Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data:
      
        …
        · A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement,
        · A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules.
      
      This is pushing for encryption backdoors in eurocrat speech: lawful access to data, roadmap, impact assesment, updating rules.
      • microtonal 3 hours ago
        What you are citing from is an older press release from April 2025.
        • AnssiH 2 hours ago
          The article in this HA submission itself is from April 2025.
      • yyny 3 hours ago
        "Law enforcement need lawful ways to enter a home"

        "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"

        Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.

        • pdonis 1 hour ago
          The lawful way for law enforcement to enter a home is to get a search warrant (or whatever the EU equivalent is) and show it to the owner, who then lets them in because that's what the law requires. No need for law enforcement to even worry about the lock. If the owner doesn't let them in when they have a search warrant, they're violating the law, and sure, they can technically keep the doors locked and refuse to open them, but it's only a matter of time before they'll end up giving in one way or another.

          But if law enforcement wants to be lazy, they can say, look, this whole search warrant business is so tedious, and even then it might take time before the owner capitulates, so why not just pass a law that requires all locks to have backdoors in them so we can open them? Then we can just let ourselves into someone's home whenever we feel like it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave a bona fide need to do so in order to protect the public.

          The latter is what the EU Commission is trying to do.

        • JoshTriplett 2 hours ago
          > "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"

          Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".

          • inigyou 1 hour ago
            It's more like "locks are illegal because the police might need to get in".

            There's a matter of scale and friction. If the police have to work for six hours to get into something, they can't mass-surveil that way. While we still might not like that, it's much better than mass surveillance.

            It used to be like that - they'd have to clip an expensive machine onto someone's phone line to record who they called. They'd have to tail someone to know where they went. Criminal still got caught in those days.

        • ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago
          Maybe. I think that strengthening laws that force servers to be more diligent would be unpopular (especially with this crowd), but it's a lot different from forcing backdoors.

          The idea of backdoors needs to be drawn and quartered, and the pieces buried under crossroads.

        • rdm_blackhole 2 hours ago
          No that is not what they are doing.

          This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.

          You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.

          The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.

          And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!

          There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.

  • t0bia_s 47 minutes ago
    Backdoor is a weakness of design by definition. How it can possibly protect EU?
  • AnssiH 2 hours ago
    This is from April 2025.

    Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.

  • tonis2 2 hours ago
    Stuff like that make people want to leave EU, not some "enemy propaganda" which is real unfortunate in current times.
    • rdm_blackhole 2 hours ago
      If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls

      Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.

      It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.

      It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

      • vlyan 11 minutes ago
        r/europe represents Europeans about as accurately as r/politics represents Americans. it's a heavily curated consent manufacturing outlet. what you see there is what its political commissars allow to be seen.
      • inigyou 1 hour ago
        Here we see something posted from 18 months ago as if it's happening today. In the intervening time, the democracy rejected the proposal. So what is this post if not fearmongering by some kind of troll?
  • kristjank 22 minutes ago
    This is in a desperate need of a (2025) flag.
  • jruohonen 4 hours ago
    Google "security despite encryption" etc. It is some good rhetorical manipulation a'la EU over again.
    • dgellow 4 hours ago
      We see it in the EU here but the groups pushing for that are everywhere, including the US, UK, Australia, etc

      So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years

      • microtonal 4 hours ago
        Indeed. This is also why we should resist getting locked further into the Apple/Google duopoly. In such closed systems it will be straightforward to require backdoors. Much harder if we have general-purpose computers that we can run our own software on.
        • nerdalytics 3 hours ago
          That's why for wallet features only Apple and Google are allowed. Condition everyone picking only iOS or Android, but not Linux, or others.
          • inigyou 1 hour ago
            This is why you shouldn't use a phone wallet. Doesn't your bank give you a card?
          • microtonal 2 hours ago
            Yep, conversely, this wouldn't have happened if we had a healthy mobile ecosystem.
  • throw0101a 2 hours ago
    Signal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS.

    It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well.

    IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).

    • VorpalWay 2 hours ago
      There are peer to peer (or otherwise decentralised, e.g. multiple servers operated by many different people) alternatives to Signal. I haven't tried any of them, nor do I know which ones have been audited. But if the worst comes to the worst, there are alternatives that are hard to block.

      In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.

    • microtonal 2 hours ago
      FWIW, iMessage is largely unencrypted already. Yes, the messages themselves are E2E encrypted, but most people do not enable Advanced Data Protection, but do enable iCloud Backups, which causes messages only to be encrypted at-rest with keys that Apple holds [1]. And even if you enable ADP, most people that you communicate with didn't.

      A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default.

      The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups.

      So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages.

      [1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

    • inigyou 1 hour ago
      They don't have to. Signal, in particular, since it's not connected to massive revenue streams, can just wait to see if the country blocks it.
    • jbstack 2 hours ago
      As someone who uses Signal and WhatsApp, I would be extremely happy if those companies blocked access in my jurisdiction if such laws are implemented. In fact, if they agreed to insert backdoor access I would never trust them again, even if they subsequently reversed it.

      We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.

    • burnerthrow008 2 hours ago
      Sorry, maybe I'm dumb. Why would "gatekeepers" poke the bear?
    • rdm_blackhole 2 hours ago
      There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.
  • bartleeanderson 1 hour ago
    Let them learn their lesson. As soon as it comes together it will be taken over by the first AI to crack it and then they will be pwned and have to learn the hard way. No child, spoiled, stupid or otherwise will learn hard lessons without experiencing pain.
    • 331c8c71 1 hour ago
      Yeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol
  • ExoticPearTree 1 hour ago
    So "Think of the children" did not work and now they go about it with "Fear the Russians" or "Fear the Chinese" or whatever boogieman they're looking at creating.

    From the article: "The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented." - so a revival of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra?

    The question that I have: what do they fear so much they spend so much time and effort trying to weaken or outright ban end-to-end encryption for private communications?

  • shevy-java 1 hour ago
    The lobbyists are working hard again to abuse every EU citizen. This is quite typical of the fake commission here - not voted in by the people, not working for the people. An alien organisation that constantly wants to expand the EU and increase taxes to self-finance itself.
  • j45 43 minutes ago
    Politicians and the interests around them just don't quit.
  • 1e1a 1 hour ago
    (2025)
  • nekusar 3 hours ago
    I came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin.

    There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.

    And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.

    • notpushkin 3 hours ago
      The point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.
    • qiine 2 hours ago
      I think people use emoji for this
    • ETH_start 2 hours ago
      Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.

      The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.

      • nekusar 1 hour ago
        Fuck you, slop bot.

        Guess I found the trap phrases.

    • mohamedkoubaa 2 hours ago
      Rare AI slop use case
  • miroljub 3 hours ago
    Only a fascist like totalitarian government would keep pushing for more and control and les freedoms.

    Their biggest ploy was they convicted people 1984 was a description of a communist dictatorship, and not an execution manual for European democracies on how to strengthen their grips.

    • tokai 3 hours ago
      I'm so tired of reading stuff like this under any article covering the political struggle over surveillance in EU. While US posts about surveilling journalists, letting 'law' enforcement run wild with no oversight, and so on, either gets flagged to death or talked down.
      • DarmokTanagra 3 hours ago
        When you stop seeing it is when you know there is a real problem.
      • baal80spam 3 hours ago
        Funny, I see something completely opposite.
      • watwut 2 hours ago
        It has nothing to with EU itseld and a lot of to do with far right trying to turn people against EU. EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk. They want to push it over the line and break down.

        Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA were "standing on own feet".

        That disappeard, now EU is fascist. Somehow Orban never was tho.

        • qwytw 1 hour ago
          > EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk

          Funny given it's not and was never supposed to be a "democracy" or a federation for that matter.

          > That disappeard, now EU is fascist

          Not necessarily? Mass surveillance is something integral to totalitarian states of any leaning.

          • watwut 19 minutes ago
            Yes, European countries are supposed to be democratic.

            > Not necessarily?

            I dont think it is fascist, but yes people on HN call it fascist more often then is reasonable.

        • vixen99 2 hours ago
          From a comment further up: 'If you don't know, the unfortunate way the EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.'.
        • rdm_blackhole 2 hours ago
          > with far right trying to turn people against EU.

          The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.

          Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.

          > now EU is fascist.

          Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...

          Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...

          Here is small excerpt:

          The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.

          War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.

  • 293725903 8 minutes ago
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