> That would be against everything european governments stand for.

I really struggle to understand why the hell this is always only applied to european governments? The idea to take 1984 as a book of requirements seems to extend *far* beyond europe.

this is simply not true

it was the EU which had stopped many similar unhinged attempts from the UK when the UK was still a member

similar it had been the EU which had shut down various other surveillance nonsense of the EU

you are basically pretending the EU is a person with one uniform opinion and goals

but it's like the opposite of it, like in a lot of way

it's a union of states, each having a vastly different goals and culture and non of them having a "single uniform opinion" either but (in most cases) a more complex political field then the US (on a federal level)

Furthermore the most influential organ of the EU when it comes to making changes is literally a composition of the elected leaders of the member states. So for most big controversial decisions the driving and directing force isn't "the EU" but but the various elected leaders of the member states. For EU citizens blaming "the EU" instead of blaming your own elected leaders is common, but pretty counter productive, as it's basically pretending you have no power to change things.

Furthermore in the EU you have an additional parliament which (in general) needs to ratify laws and two high courts which can (and in context of mass surveillance repeatedly have) shut down misguided "laws", including in many cases local attempts at mass surveillance laws.

So while some parts of the EU have consistently pushed for mass surveillance in recent years other parts also have consistently moved against it.

In general while the EU needs a lot more transparency and some more democratic processes in some aspects a lot (not all) of the "stories told to make the EU look dump/bad" have a lot of important context stripped from that (like e.g. that a lot of the current push for surveillance comes from the locally elected leaders not the EU parliament or some other abstract "the EU" thing, it's your own countries leader/lead party(1) which does or at least tolerates that shit).

Is that why they rejected Chat Control 1.0?

They're supposedly against genocide but that hasn't stopped them from shamelessly supporting one.

I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted.

Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.

You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.

And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.