Chat Control didnt pass - they didnt even vote because they were afraid the result would be embarassing.
And we got told so many times, that EU now wants Chat Control. But it was a big fat lie.
EU is a democracy with different opinions, and when a small group of facists tries to read your chats, it does not represent the EU opinion.
But the whole media got you thinking so. Proving even on Lemmy, you and me are extremly prone to propaganda.
I quoted the article here with the news:
In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU’s controversial Chat Control regulation yesterday after facing massive public pressure.
The government did not take a position on the proposal.
This blocks the required majority in the EU Council, derailing the plan to pass the surveillance law next week.
We will have to fight Chat Control again and again…
Mass Surveillance should be blocked at the constitutional level in all countries.
On another point, my country, France is in a very deep political turmoil right now, so thanks for the robust response of our German friends that was definitely critical. I wish we could have mobilized better in France but we are struggling to just have a working government right now…
Mass surveillance is a very bad solution to a real problem. The more years pass, the bigger are the chances of a war with equal adversary or worse, a conventional normal war or not. And the real problem would be cutting the flow of intelligence and control messages the potential adversary possesses.
If that potential adversary is US or close to US, this would require either going offline with jamming all communication over EU borders and other such things, while not doing mass surveillance, so that nothing got through, or mass surveillance to proactively filter out and find the specific actors leaking intelligence and neutralize them, while not having the expenses associated with the previous variant. Those expenses would be such that they could kill the EU economies very quickly, not even talking about protests and such turmoil that what you have now won’t feel anything deep.
Just playing devil’s advocate.
It’s either that or limiting flow of information over EU borders, which, honestly, is not so bad, except without wide popular understanding and support it would lead to what I said.
The fact that wars are rarely declared in our time really hurts.
And if you think this is nuts, then you haven’t been paying attention in history classes.
What does any of this have to do with the government forcing backdoors into otherwise encrypted chats? The point is that nobody but the recipient should be able to read it, not even governments.
That people who can, do. Sometimes that means forcing others. Sometimes that means breaking good things for others. And sometimes locally that’s the lesser evil.
Anyway, I’ve described, why a truly competent well-meaning imagined government would possibly be doing this, and what would be one alternative for it without backdoors. An EU-wide intranet. Probably with outside communications whitelisted and analyzed similarly to the GFW of China.
It’s hypothetical, in reality, of course, we all should be judging to the best of our knowledge, not on imagination. Which means resisting such legislation.