alt Hacker NewsOne-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill
Related: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Comments
I love it. Especially since:
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
It is a dialog. Millions are against it, a few (powerful people) in favor. The powerful are too detached from reality and consider this "not a dialog".
On a meta level, it even gives them a taste of the millions of messages that‘d get flagged false positively monthly, overwhelming police and other systems.
One interesting anecdote about this bill was that the European Commission allegedly funded digital advertisements promoting it, targeting specific political demographics, which is something that could possibly be prohibited by their own regulations.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-commissio...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...
Absolute hero, and a slap in the face to many commenters here who seem to believe that individuals can’t have a political impact through the clever application of technology. Fairly simple technology at that. A good comparison is the deflock.me site that seems to be successfully raising awareness of widespread surveillance.
Note that this technology complemented ongoing campaigns rather than standing alone; that’s important. It would be difficult to have an impact by building a tool in isolation.
> A website set up by an unknown Dane
> The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark.
That's a lot of knowledge about an unknown person.
> Joachim himself declined to provide his last name or workplace because his employer does not want to be associated with the campaign. POLITICO has verified his identity. Joachim said his employer has no commercial interest in the legislation, and he alone paid the costs associated with running the website.
This type of approach from the journalist always confuses me. Why would his employer matter? What does that have to do with anything?
Politico is being overly dramatic as usual.
While of course we’re grateful to the person who setup the website, this isn’t the first time a campaign against a piece of policy has included a website. Politico makes it sounds like it’s a fight between the little man and the “big parliament” but emailing your MEPs (the ones you elect every couple of years) has always been an effective way to signal your views. And yes, for bigger issues there have been websites and flyer actions to remind people to voice their views.
It’s democracy and absolutely a form of debate.
Also, I think Politico should absolutely review how they try to protect the identity of people they’re writing about because naming the guy and providing so much information in this day and age is just plain doxing.
Politico is so wack, they cant cope with the fact people dont want a surveillance state.
FYI: Politico is owned by Axel Springer SE, a hateful, aggressive and undemocratic German media and news company.
The site is linked in the article but adding it here: https://fightchatcontrol.eu
the article is more-or-less fine, but the headline is ridiculous
> one-man ... campaign
it's a website that drafts an email for you, and then you send it yourself. it's an organizational tool, yes, but broad involvement is sorta the point
> spam campaign
gross mischaracterization, citizens sending emails to their govt representative for legitimate purposes - making their political opinion known to the politician - is not spam under any sane definition
The site fightchatcontrol.eu was posted here, though not much discussed per se - like all of these threads, it's pretty generic:
Fight Chat Control - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44856426 - Aug 2025 (498 comments)
(As for Chat Control threads in general, there are too many to list.)
For any Danes out there, you can sign here: https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-2115...
I used the service and got 3 emails back, they were probably as ready-made as the one I sent, but still nice. The reply's were all from politicians from my country why are against ChatControl.
Isn't this an egregious headline for such a neutral article? I guess it's just clickbait, but I haven't previously found Politico to be this extreme.
And the article itself describes the actual setup accurately in one of the opening paragraphs, so clearly the author knows the facts:
> The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it...
And most of the other headlines on their current front page are quite boring and descriptive.
Worth looking at the website even if you're not in the EU or especially interested in privacy matters. It's well-designed and has a decent user flow for picking who to contact or omit.
>But Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, one of the loudest proponents of tough measures to get child abuse material off online platforms, said in a statement that his proposal is far more balanced than the Commission’s original version and would mean that scanning would only happen as a last resort.
That is the whole problem isn't it?
Should government be able to scan your personal data without your permission to fight crime?
If people want to get child abuse material off online platforms, then there are other things that needs to be dealt with than installing back doors for government to scan your personal files. This comment is just seems like some kind of hand weaving of excuse on the politician side to create infrastructure of massive surveillance state.
There is a last minute petition from Chatkontrolle stoppen (German) which you can sign here: https://weact.campact.de/petitions/chatkontrolle-stoppen?sou...
318K signatures at the time of this posting, which means it gathered ~90K since yesterday. Please consider signing.
Ah, nice. This actually helps me to feel less impotent about the issue. It feels like the umpteenth attempt, the politicians are starting to wear me down.
But now I've taken the time to send mails and at least feel like I have done _something_. See you next time, I guess! @ Politicians
Joachim is the one-man in right place. Thanks.
How will the bill stop organized pedophile operations which certainly use specialized covert technologies, websites, messengers, sharing platforms unavailable in official app stores? Anyone thinking it's going to improve detection of such stuff is an idiot.
The EU hero of 2025.
I just hate how even in that article, they can put the phrase "those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online." and to most regular people, it makes this dude sound like a bad guy. I mean why would he want to stop that?!?!
It's sad how complex us humans think we are when our behaviours boil down to fairly predictable animal and tribal responses.
And what I love about the general suffix above is that you can pop it on anything to make someone oppose to it sound bad: "those trying to implement mandatory home camera systems aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from happening."
Archive of FightChatControl [1] and Politico article [2]
[1] - https://archive.is/jchny
[2] - https://archive.is/0Dqys
If they can put Twitter links into their article, one would think they can also add links to the website they're writing about.
Thanks OP for adding it here!
Is it possible to do this in the US or do I have to go through each politicians web form?
> a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.
No, what the actual fuck: it's a bill rolling out a CSAM scanner of unproven efficacy, but with severe side effects for privacy! See, one sentence, and immediately a reader sees that this is a nuanced, contested issue.
What kind of reporting is this, extremely one-sided. Politico, many such cases. Sad.
I wrote a personal message.
But huge thanks to Joachim for making it easy!
> a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance
Why not call it: "a proposal to break encryption and enact mass surveillance, claimed to be used to fight CSAM"?
How did the author decide which part to present as plain fact, and which as mere activist opinion? The choice isn't arbitrary - the proposal definitely will break encryption and enact mass surveillance - that's what the text of the proposal directly commands governments to do!
I guess such subtleties fade compared to the two bald lies in the title alone - it is not "spam" to simplify EU citizens contacting their representatives, and since that "spam" was sent by those citizens themselves, it is not a "one-man" campaign either, but a mass movement.
Joachim - we need more of you.
Chat Control seems unabashedly evil.
What service is there that will allow this quantity of outbound email traffic? Asking for a friend.
I love the idea of making tools to make it easy for people to email their representatives, from their own mailboxes. Here's one I vibe coded for a specific purpose:
After I made it, I came across something similar on another web site, but with some cool additional features:
- support for multiple 'campaigns'
- per-campaign questions (with drop down responses)
- AI to customize the email and subject, instead of just filling in a template
> EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules
This right here is the problem, a good leader leads by example, not exemption.
>> this is not a dialog
"I do not think that word means what [she] thinks it means"
Can we do something similar in the US?
> Joachim's campaign is blocking more traditional lobbyists and campaigners, too, they said. Mieke Schuurman, director at child rights group Eurochild, said the group’s messages are no longer reaching policymakers, who “increasingly respond with automated replies.”
So, previously they could blow off people like Mieke personally, and now they're getting too many messages to be able to do that. That seems like a pretty clear win.
I'm fascinated by ultra high impact, nonviolent interventions by individuals, such as this.
My favorite example was when a few people made Twitter accounts masquerading as large companies, bought a verified stamp, and then issued a couple tweets that single handedly wiped billions off the companies' stock prices.
If anyone else knows of similar interventions, I would love to learn of them. It makes me think about how individuals can force multiply their impact, and whether there's methods for personal empowerment to be learned from these examples.
I love how we’re wringing our hands about the technological side of this fight.
If every time we found someone with CSAM on their hard drive, we swung them from a tree—folks would think twice before engaging in the production and distribution of CSAM.
We don’t need to break encryption. We need real, permanent, consequences that fit the crime.
How are the EU legislators complaining about this like its a novel idea or somehow undemocratic? This sort of email templating website has been a fixture of contact your reps movements on the state and federal level for years in the states.
I also get a kick out of lobbyists complaining about it.
Sorry, but this is what democracy looks like.
I love tech and don’t want chat controls. It’s what I just get.
The current situation does not work.
Chat controls, government controls - are coming.
The underbelly of social and chat tech is filled with logic gremlins and impossible objects. They’re just constant metastasizing into monster.
And it’s absolutely natural that legal entities get legislated into existence to oppose them.
Go sit in a T&S Que. See the absurdity that has to be wrestled into workflows. See how individual voices and requests are reduced to KPIs.
Knowledge is power and so on - but knowledge must also be earned.
See what reality is for T&S or Ai safety or risk and compliance or what have you.
See the rift in reality as ideas, people and tech are mangled together.
At the very least you can know the absurdity of the reality we live with.
> Elon Musk's X said Monday that the bill could enable "government instituted mass surveillance"
Do they have to mention that Elon Musk owns X every time they mention a post? I don't see how Elon owning X has anything to do with the content of a random X post.
Where is that spam?
> trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.
Nice try on framing. No, you don’t stop the spread of the material that way. It will just change distribution channel for the price of creating a tool for mass surveillance.
> Peter Hummelgaard, Danish Minister of Justice: "I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ...
Yeah I feel so safe with hundreds of unknown people constantly looking over my shoulder /s
> A website set up by an unknown Dane
Next sentence,
> The website was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark
? Is this what journalism has come to? On top of calling this a spam campaign?
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Thanks Joachim! Still frustrating that Politico still implies that the bill has any power to stop CSAM, given that everyone who wants to trade it will obviously just use another layer of encryption.
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
What is a dialog, then? A dialogue between well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, and everyone else should just shut up and take it?
Or, or, "normal people" sending emails only for the lawmakers to go "thanks for the feedback, we're doing it anyway"?
> One EU diplomat said some EU member countries are now more hesitant to support Denmark’s proposal, at least in part because of the campaign: “There is a clear link.”
> Ella Jakubowska, head of policy at digital rights group EDRi, said “This campaign seems to have raised the topic high up the agenda in member states where there was previously little to no public debate."
This is amazing, and makes me regain a bit of (much destroyed) faith in democracy.
> But Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, one of the loudest proponents of tough measures to get child abuse material off online platforms, said in a statement that his proposal is far more balanced than the Commission’s original version and would mean that scanning would only happen as a last resort.
If the option is there, it will be abused.