I keep bringing it up since people forget about it: in 2006 the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive that forced all ISPs to save the browsing history of everyone.
It was eventually declared invalid by the European court of human rights, but it was still in effect for many years. Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
The EU's attempts to spy on people go back decades. You'll also note that government gets exemptions from all the privacy stuff the EU pushes.
I hope the EU changes course on this, but as with their handling of other tech... I'm not holding my breath.
Is that directive the reason why website operators do not want to implement ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) which allows to encrypt server name in TLS connection? I tried googling this, but Cloudflare blog only says that they disabled ECH without disclosing the reasons: [1]
No, and other sites seem to not support it. This is a list of top 10 000 sites and it seems that virtually nobody supports this TLS extension: https://divested.dev/misc/ech.txt .
> Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
This is funny because the secret service abuses citizens' privacy in Romania all the time. But this turned against corrupt politicians which is probably why they sued. The secret service wiretapped them and gave the recordings to the anti-corruption directorate which was then led by the current EPPO chief prosecutor. Some high level politicians ended up in prison after much friction, but in the end a few heads had to roll in order to at least give the impression of fighting corruption, which the US Embassy and the EU asked for.
Romanian establishment parties would vote anything that comes out of the Comission. CSAM? They will vote for it. The opposition is basically Kremlin funded right wingers which were barred even from joining Viktor Orban's conservative group and two small parties like Macron's, one which didn't get any votes and the other has like three MEPs after making an alliance with two other small parties. If the right wingers vote against CSAM it's just to sabotage the EU decision process.
"Welp.. funding terrorists and then pretending like we're afraid of them didn't work, how about we fund child pornographers and then pretend like we just can't catch them if encryption exists."
Typical modern law enforcement incompetence. They don't care about you. They just want to protect their access to your data.
> Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.
> The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
> The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.
> The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.
Modern day EU, is a sharing of power structure over the EU between France and Germany. The institutional seats for the EU are in Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Poland and the UK wanted Turkey to join the union to provide voting balance against Germany and France. This didn't happen and France made it clear that they'll never agree to it. The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
One way to think about the current EU in medieval terms: A personal union between France and Germany; and a bunch of associated vassal states.
I don't think the CIA had much to do with it. I am pretty sure they tried to soft-power their way through some decisions though. Europe is too big for the CIA to control.
> The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
The UK had a very beneficial (for the UK populace) position. Disinformation campaigns fueled by oligarchs and Russian money got the population to score an own goal. Gains for the few, destruction for the others.
But as one of those wealthy politicians said, "at least the fish are now happy".
With its creation, by which I mean Lisbon Treaty. Before that EU was basically just a free trade zone, after Lisbon the eurocrats took over, trying to turn EU into socialist's version of heaven on Earth.
The censorship initiatives in the west largely originate from the US „Blob“, the amalgamation of the State Department, Pentagon, CIA and the soft-power NGOs.
Mike Benz, a former insider, spends his days explaining how this works.
This is not the best introduction that he has done, but it is the latest space he recorded on the Telegram affair:
„A turbo-charged 10 mins on Telegram as an instrument of US statecraft, why the US State Dept selectively promotes Telegram as a free speech tool in some countries but pressures gov'ts to censor Telegram in other countries, and Who Dunnit behind Pavel's arrest.“
Let me tell you ...seeing the amount of crap this American gets from Europeans regarding all our messed up institutions and also seeing how much the EU does try to fight for its people, the EU is pretty darn good.
This is definitely a "grass is always greener" situation.
I like a lot of things the EU is doing, but this spread of surveillance is something I'll always protest against. That's my biggest gripe with the EU, and I hate the Big-Brother-like thinking that gives us the GDPR and also mass surveillance.
It's clear the EU's mindset is "nobody can compromise your privacy except me, but it's OK, I'm benevolent", and I'm not a fan of that exceptions.
The GDPR is the "nobody can compromise your privacy" part and the surveillance is the "except me" part. Big Brother's whole spiel was "we're watching over you for your own good".
To clarify, I like the GDPR, and wish the EU would give us more of that and less of the surveillance.
That's good, though I suspect it's a bit of a losing battle. I'll keep protesting, at any rate. I look forward to more GDPR, DMA, etc. Those make me glad I live in the EU.
WUT? GDPR gives you controll of your data, which all those "saint" vc-blessed startups from siliconvale hate with passion... (and they can go * themselves :D)
At any rate - the mass surveillance effort is just an idea pushed by some MEPs/comissioners... it would be nice to be able to dimiss those.
Besides, there was also a complain about "cookie" banners but the UE didn't mandate to make annoying popups - the intent was to force services harvest less data... as it shows - if the law is not explicit enough then private business will try to circumvent it and push users to hate the entity/the law ('buuuu, stupid EU'... no - it's stupid and abusive corporation). At any rate I do hope that there will be push to make the configuration a browser setting akin to "DNT" with various levels ("allow all cookies", "only functional", "no cookies"; maybe more) and make websites follow it...
Reddit is very far from representative. Try posting anything there that isn't far left and you'll get banned or modded into invisibility pretty quickly. The only people obsessed with speech enough to want to moderate subreddits for free are all people who, surprise, think controlling speech is really important.
Free speech is not something they value. Individual rights aren’t valued.
Nonsense. Of course Europeans value those things, but they're also mindful of the fact that such freedoms can be abused, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
I fail to see what this has to do with European conceptions of free speech in general. You may recall that Britain went out of its way to leave the EU, in part citing its dislike of the EU's legal concept of fundamental rights.
Of course people who don't value much free speech say that they're mindful of the fact that freedom can be abused etc. Nobody will ever say "yes I like censorship because I am a reactionary".
In general, remember that villains almost always justify their action as necessary or just- only in movies their stated motive is obviously egoistical.
> Nobody will ever say "yes I like censorship because I am a reactionary".
Yes, because no one except idiots will say "I am reactionary", and no one except idiots believe that "because I am reactionary" is a valid explanation of anything. Political categories are dumb, and most people aren't stupid enough to define themselves by them.
Like reddit is representative of what EU citizens think.
Also hopefully LinkedIn will get banned indeed, or have you already forgotten how Microsoft has been (at least theoretically) illegal for nearly a decade already in the EU, because they were (and most likely still are) complicit with the US government in violating human rights, and that is even before considering the monopoly issues ?
So a website you don't like you would ban for everybody else as well just because you decided that it is merely marketing crap there making you nauseous. So you then conclude it should be banned for everyone else? How do you think the world would look if everybody had the power to ban things with similar reasons? We'd have nothing left in the world. Scary.
PS: I'm just annoyed being pretty much forced to "profile myself" there in order to be considered for jobs. I used to avoid it but several recruiters told me they would rank people without a linkedin profile lower and even people inside the company where I work now insist on it.
I really hate that kind of corporate evangelisation. If it didn't exist I wouldn't have to take part in it, that's all.
The company I work for is the same. We were one of the last to close our Russian offices when the war started. They say they're committed to LGBTIQ+ rights yet do huge business in Saudi and the rest of the middle east (and don't even display the rainbow banners on our site there). The C-Suite say they care about sustainability yet fly all over the world in private jets.
You don't have to take part in it, period. I've been doing fine in my career with no such corporate nonsense. Heck, I've been doing fine saying "no" to a lot of bullshit.
Free speech is not unrestricted speech, nor freedom from consequences. The market is also not free when it’s uncontrolled, that would just result in blatant manipulation.
And hate speech is a serious crime, not sure why you believe otherwise. In many aspects, most EU countries have much freer speech than the US.
no they are not lying, they just have a different meaning for "democracy", it just means "them". So if you are against them, you are effectively against "democracy".
Most of officials in every democracy, purported or otherwise, are unelected. For practical reasons, you always elect a group, which then sets up or elects other groups, which together form the government.
And your point is? Generally only unelected officials are allowed to formulate or propose EU policy (the EU "parliament" is only there for rubber stamping it) how is that similar to most countries?
>we've got to save democracy by restricting free speech and enforcing laws and regulations created by unelected officials