alt Hacker NewsI am the creator of Fight Chat Control.
Thank you for sharing. It is unfortunately, once again, needed.
The recent events have been rather dumbfounding. On March 11, the Parliament surprisingly voted to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects following judicial involvement [0]. As Council refused to compromise, the trilogue negotiations were set to fail, thus allowing the Commission's current indiscriminate "Chat Control 1.0" to lapse [1]. This would have been the ideal outcome.
In an unprecedented move, the EPP is attempting to force a repeat vote tomorrow, seeking to overturn the otherwise principled March 11 decision and instead favouring indiscriminate mass surveillance [1, 2]. In an attempt to avoid this, the Greens earlier today tried to remove the repeat vote from the agenda tomorrow, but this was voted down [3].
As such, tomorrow, the Parliament will once again vote on Chat Control. And unlike March 11, multiple groups are split on the vote, including S&D and Renew. The EPP remains unified in its support for Chat Control. If you are a European citizen, I urge you to contact your MEPs by e-mail and, if you have time, by calling. We really are in the final stretch here and every action counts. I have just updated the website to reflect the votes today, allowing a more targeted approach.
Happy to answer any questions.
[0] https://mepwatch.eu/10/vote.html?v=188578
[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/the-battle-over-chat-contro...
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/OJQ-10-2026-03...
[3] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-10-2026-03-...
Replies
I am always curious when I see these kinds of movement. It seems abundantly clear that the options on any vote in any legislature for a proposed bill are always “yes” and “ask me later”. So when I see things like Fight Chat Control, it feels like the call is “we must tell our legislators to press the ask later button!”
Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.
Thank you for what you're doing, this is an important fight.
The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.
Great work! There is maybe some bug. When you click on one of the 4 "opposing" countries (e.g. Czech Republic, Poland), it scrolls down and then shows that majority of the representatives from the country actually support it. Is that intended? Won't that make people from those countries "relax" even though they might have an impact by contacting their represenatives?
>let's vote on this proposal
>rejected
>let's vote on it again!
Is it still a democracy if you just keep redoing the vote until you get the outcome you want? The politicians involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.
I swear to god if the UK gives the world yet MORE surveillance state...
Thanks for your work. Just how is it possible for non-EU lobby to make vote a law in EU, and push for it ?
Is there any point in fighting it given that they will rename, repackage and resubmit the legislation in mere days if it doesn't pass?
Don't get me wrong: my blood boils reading those legislations, but rationally I don't see a path to victory here.
I've just used it to send email to my representatives (Croatia). Thanks for the effort.
You're a hero
How can people support your work?
You're doing God's work mate.
It's really surprising to me that this issue keeps coming up time and time again, until I realised that it's non-voted in parties actually trying to pass this stuff!
I didn't realise that the EU parliament simply says yes or no to bills and doesn't actually propose new laws, whilst the EU Commission are appointed and decide on what bills to push through.