Quoting from the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12... :

"Article 7

Respect for private and family life

Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.

Article 8

Protection of personal data

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.

3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority."

Chat control is already illegal according to EU law, and has previously been ruled as such by the ECHR when Romania was trying to implement a chat control law that did actually pass, in 2014. But documents are documents (even the Rome statute), and can be rewritten.

It already violates Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter which is supposed to prevent stuff like this.

The reality is that they'll just keep pushing it from different angles, they only have to get lucky once, we (or EU citizens, we left and have our own issues) need to be lucky every time - much like an adverserial relationship where you are on the defending side from a cyberattack...funny that really.

(I mentioned this in another comment)

Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.

The right to private communication is already enshrined in the EU.

Article 7, EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: Respect for private and family life (and probably a couple other sections in there as well).

The problem is national security exceptions. Chat control and other similar bills are trying to carve out exceptions to privacy laws under the excuse of national security.

Also its politically cheap to introduce surveillance or to expand state power, it's comparatively extremely difficult to pass laws that specifically restrict state power.

Privacy laws are well and good, but they exist. The problem is we need to stop allowing "public safety" or "national security" to be a trump card that allows exceptions to said laws, and good luck getting any government to ever agree that privacy is more important than national security.

I think the greatest risk to the EU is the sheer volume of communications it allows to travel without end-to-end encryption. Financial, infrastructure, personal political sentiment.. What doesn't a foreign enemy get volumes of minable data on?

Past laws of this type are:

- The GDPR

- The ePrivacy directive, which is explicitly derogated (sabotaged) by chat control 1.0

There’s no point. The only way you can fix this is to pretty heavily market the situation and publicise and shame the lobbyist scum pushing this. And their associated ties.

I don't think that's a very sensical right (like most rights, frankly). Everyone has limits to the privacy they can expect. But we should have a social contract where we can expect privacy between mutually consenting parties intending to have private communication (eg not in a public square) without reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.

You don’t care by writing new legislation, you care by forming boycotts against the corporations that are not fighting back against the scanning. The world is not controlled by democracy, it is controlled by money and the oligarchs.

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