Take action to stop chat control now!

Would be handy if they included a pre-written pdf to oppose this proposition + emails or forms to easily submit your opposition to each of the countries.

Instead it's a general "contact your government",
which 99% of normal people do not know how to do, me included.

from the linked website:
Ask you government to call on the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal. Point them to a joint letter that was recently sent by children’s rights and digital rights groups from across Europe. Click here to find the letter and more information.
one paragraph below that:
When reaching out to your government, the ministries of the interior (in the lead) of justice and of digitisation/telecommunications/economy are your best bet. You can additionally contact the permanent representation of your country with the EU.
the bold parts are clickable URLs in the original text.
Is there was such a pdf, your government already received it. You writing in your own words is unique
Not necessarily the best idea. My representative went on national television accusing bots of spamming her email, even though every single one of those probably was a person using some template that was provided. Those forms go straight into trash unfortunately. Best to use them as a guideline and write your personal concerns instead.
Alternatively, ChatGPT. No idea if it works, though.

They'll keep bringing this up again and again and again until it passes, huh.

Next Council deliberations and vote in October-December.

That's the thing. People have to keep voting forever to keep this from coming into effect, but they only need it to pass a vote once for it to be enacted for basically ever.
- How I wish a chat privacy law could be passed to make more difficult to continue eroding our rights.
- Idk about yall but that feels like a bad system…
To quote the IRA, "We only need to get lucky once but you need to get lucky every time".
The real goal is to get the population to regret demanding things like gdpr.
Similar to the plastic industry's covert legislative push to ban plastic straw.
Irritate the public enough to stop them demanding more.
In this case it's a double whammy of also getting our sweet private data for their AI models.
- Got any more info on the plastic straw plot? Because I’d love for that to be true, but I’m just getting craploads of articles saying the opposite.
Yes and no As long as there is no wide spread opposition they will Long term we need to make this a very unpopular stance

If only in the same breath we would make all the politicians text messages public, guess they only want other chats to be controlled but not their own.

I keep mentioning this idea, hoping to someday make it seem less extreme: the government should be under total surveillance 24/7.
Like, anyone at any time can look through any of the tens of thousands of cameras saturating every government building.
- Honestly this is an intersting idea. Albeit, it may be hatd to implement since some buildings have to be private for national security reasons (specifically regarding military strategy and such).
Julian Assange tried to do that and he was nearly lynched for it.
- And then blamed for ruining the 2016 American election.
  Snowden showed the government was spying, had to flee, deemed a terrorist. Assange showed the government disobeys the laws it enforces on everyone else, deemed a terrorist. Manning showed that war crimes are constant, deemed a terrorist, subjected to inhumane torture.
  Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished. China, Russia, America, England, they're all guilty of it.
Even if I deeply like the Idea, something like this could backfire if it's done constantly and not just once. But I would like to see a law that makes the usage of government communications mandatory for all government-related communication while storing everything revision-proof on their servers with different access rights. And a second law that makes it possible to access it by requiring petitions to be singled by a low number of people. Less extreme but still makes it harder to be corrupt.

Make no mistake, Germany isn't opposing this out of a principled stance. The German government too wants more ways to control people's activity.

That's so fucking true. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Interior-ministers-want-data-retention-and-tougher-action-against-cyberbullying-9774193.html
- The IMK is not the national government

Folks, this should inspire you to start self-hosting a federated, decentralized chat server with freely available source code by yourself or with a small community. Governments can coerce these big, usually-corpo centralized servers to give up data but good luck if there are hundreds of thousands (of millions?) of small servers with 1–10 users on it & clients not controlled by a single entity for distribution (easier now that y’all coerced Mommy Apple to let you sideload applications & use alternative package managers).

All federated services grossly violate GDPR.
- Sounds like GDPR is the problem then, not federated services.
- I mean, GDPR is a fucking disaster. Nobody is getting it right, same with cookie consent. This is because the last time geriatric imbeciles at the European parliament seen a computer was back at 98.
  Since all those people are using it, it kinda doesn't matter for them. As if not having their data harvested from every single click makes them not care about GDPR and the other bullshit. What a surprise.
- How so?
- You don’t need to worry about data retention when you own the server & you are the only user. It’s the servers you or someone you know & trust don’t own where you should actually worry about this.
  It’s also more problematic with all systems built on eventual consistency models, so best to avoid those since you’ll never be able to get the data dropped. Chat being ephemeral is good.
Matrix I guess?
- No thanks

Oh for fucks sake. Again?

- When you’re delivering a powerful epigram and suddenly become hyper-aware you’re standing next to Jimmy Smits in a cheap plastic cape.
So tired. These Nazis should be called out for what they are.
- Just to be clear authoritarian is not Nazi

Can someone explain to an American what chat control is?

Basically scanning communications and breaking encryption, under the guise of predictably stopping child abuse
- and technically, how would they achieve this?
If I understand correctly, its what the NSA "allegedly" doesn't do to U.S. citizens already. Except, these countries are being public about it. This way they can actually follow through without the "secret getting out".

That's a lot of red

Yes, kind of weird, since chat control is postponed because too many countries opposed it. Is it on the table again?
- AFAIK chat control 2. First one was struch down by ECHR.

Relying on legislation to get passed or not get passed only gets us so far. Yes, absolutely, write your reps and vote, but also donate to your favorite decentralized, private tech project so they can improve the user experience and get more users. We need to make tyrannical censorship & surveillance not only technically impossible but politically unfeasible. The way we do that is by building better tech and getting more and more of the population to use it.

Honestly I just wish I could take the steps written in the article but it would most likely be of no use.

I have very few close relationships and am not widely liked or popular by any means, don't use social media because nobody sees my posts anyway, and the country I live in has a lot of media censorship, therefore the vast majority of the population is very conservative, uneducated and narrow-minded about most political topics.

I've been taking a lot of steps lately to reclaim my online privacy, and would hate to see it all thrown out the window by the EU, a union I thought was doing Europe justice before now...

That's a good move to re-share it! THX for the people 👍

My biggest takeaway from this infographic is that norway is not part of the EU, who would’ve thought

You can pry my fishing rights from my cold dead hands!
Norway just like Switzerland are too ~~rich~~ cool to join the club, we are still a part of the European Economic Area and Schengen though.
Good for them? Idk how good the EU is

I understand that this has been a recent topic in the EU but I'd really like to see information on government positions on this in more areas of the world.

Here's some more information about the world: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/
- This is good, thank you. I'm honestly surprised Australia is so open, but not completely.

once upon a time freedom of speech was a thing

The Netherlands only remains "neutral" because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or "grooming" material (last time I checked). It's only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly "minor" objections.

Therefore there is a real threat that the required majority for mass scanning of private communications may be achieved at any time under the current Hungarian presidency (Hungary being a supporter of the proposal).

Why did they let this Hungarian pro-Nazi idiot regime lead anything?

because it changes every 6 months and everyone get's a turn

As someone that is red/green colorblind... wut?

Did my best, but my European geography identity the best and may have missed a couple:
Germany & Poland oppose. Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Slovenia and Czechia neutral. Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Greece support.

On this map I see a Rastafarian llama with a duck for an ass and tail.

The Nederlands is the duck.

Huh.

All non-Eu members are shaded in grey as far as I can see, except for the Faroe Islands I suppose.

At first glance I thought it was only Belarus who opposed it. That'd be a weird world where totalitarian government opposes totalitarian control.

Let me guess: You are an American with no clue about Geography / foreign politics?
Belarus isn't in the EU. Its position doesn't matter, independent from which side they are on.
Belarus is part of the big grey blob in the east of the map (alongside Ukraine and Russia). So the map doesn't state anything about Belarus' opinion on the topic.
In case you thought the dark green blob in central Europe is Belarus: those are Germany and Poland.
- No, I'm Belarusian.
  In case you haven't noticed, I said "At first glance"
  Due to the map being zoomed in a little closer than usual, and because of the omissions of countries borders, it shifts visual appearance of countries towards right. A honest mistake if you ask me, and which I found to be funny, hence the comment.
  Why so serious?
  What being an American has to do with this? Anyway, I'll take that as a compliment for my English.

This was already long canceled wasn't it? This is old.

It was pulled from voting a second time, it will undoubtedly return for another round.
- But what about the cHilDReN?
Governments have been trying to impose chat control for over a decade now but so far they haven't been able to get it through. That doesn't stop them from trying over and over again though and this time their chances are looking better than usual. Even if they fail once more they'll do it all over again soon afterwards. This topic will never get old.
- Would there be any way to enshrine privacy/no chat control for the EU? Similar to constitutional amendments in the states, where it becomes exceptionally more difficult to revoke?
you can just click the link and read the first few sentences, it's free!
Sure hope so.