Citizen Protest Halts Chat Control; Breyer Celebrates Major Victory for Digital Privacy
www.patrick-breyer.de
In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU's controversial Chat Control regulation yesterday after facing massive public pressure. The government did not take a position on the proposal. This blocks the required majority in the EU Counci

…again. If it sounds familiar it’s not just you. But they’ve been back on “undecided” shortly after. Let’s hope this is the actual final decision.

  • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    The Czechs got upset at EU-level efforts on gun control — Czechia has permissive firearm law — and passed an amendment to Czechia’s constitution in 2021 guaranteeing certain firearm rights in Czechia. If the EU passed a directive that conflicted with it after that point without getting Czechs to approve an amendment to their constitution, Czechia would immediately begin violating the directive, which raises the stakes for people who wanted additional restrictions EU-wide.

    One imagines that the same tactic could be used in other areas; if one or more EU members prohibited restrictions on end-to-end encryption or the like, it’d create a legal bar that would first need to be undone to create a restriction EU-wide.

    That being said, if this sort of hardball tactic gets done too frequently, it’d make it really difficult to legislate at the EU level, because you’d have one state or another creating legal landmines all over.

    And any other individual member could still impose their own state-level restrictions on end-to-end encryption in such a scenario — it’d only create an impediment to EU-wide restrictions.

      • Neshura@bookwyr.meEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Forget other EU countries and laws, the German constitution guarantees private postal and remote communications for every citizen. It’s also why Germany has historically never (that I know of) voted in favor of this bullshit: it violates the Briefgeheimnis (article 10 of the German constitution)

        If they hadn’t rejected it the federal constitutional court in Karlsruhe would have sacked every single proposal on how to implement it, a process our current coalition is very familiar with from multiple attempts at trying to push preemptive collection of unencrypted data. They knew it wouldn’t pass here anyway and likely just waited on an opportune time to profit off the inevitable denial. Although I’ll give them that: some parts of the coalition were rather eager to meet the judges in Karlsruhe again anyway so it wasn’t a 100% guaranteed rejection either.

      • tal@olio.cafeEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        I believe that the point of the Czechia situation was that it was a modification to the constitution; this will have a higher bar to change than would be the case for simply enacting an ordinary law. The idea was to entrench the status quo behind the bar for constitutional modification.

        kagis

        Looks like it’s a 60% supermajority in each legislative house:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Czech_Republic#Amending_the_Constitution

        With reference to the provision of the article 39, paragraph 4 of the Constitution, which states that “for the enactment of a constitutional act, 3/5 of all deputies must agree, and 3/5 of senators present”, changing the constitution is a more difficult procedure than changing an ordinary statute, making it an entrenched constitution in the typology of constitutions. Despite the tradition of entrenched constitutions throughout Czech history, some voiced the opinion, during the preparation of the Constitution of the Czech Republic, that this one should be flexible.

        So to produce such an effect, if there are laws that would prohibit bans on end-to-end encryption, say, those laws would need to be constitutional law or similar in an EU member state where such a law has a higher-than-ordinary bar to change.

        • Neshura@bookwyr.meEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          Introducing: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_10.html

          Guarantees secret postal- and remote (original intent: radio) communications which applies to the internet ever since they thought they could make a quick buck by demanding radio broadcasting fees from youtubers, by which they placed the entire internet in the domain of radio laws.

    • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.netEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      The EU is an economic-political union, not a socio-political union. Attempts to impose any sort of social law across all member nations feels like abuse of purpose, and also beside the point of having distinct member states in the first place.