Ignoring the obvious hypocrisy, there's another point worth making here.

As much as we bemoan the corruptness, self-interest and narrowmindedness of various politicians, when it comes to tech in particular, you have to realize how incredibly clueless so many lawmakers are. Like they simplly do not have even basic understanding of how tech works.

You see this in Congressional hearings about backdoors about encryption. Pushed by various lobbying groups, lawmakers want US law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to read encrypted messages and will parrot the word "backdoor" or maybe "master key". I guarantee you none of these people know what any of that means. Worse, most of them don't care to know.

Those that do care to know can be convinced when it's explained that once a backdoor exists, it will be used by someone else and there's no way to control that. That's why backdoors are a bad idea.

In the case of Chat Control, the obvious problem is "how do you identify an EU minister?" You've created a huge identity problem. I guarantee you some people will end up figuring out how to mark themselves as exempt from monitoring, even if this system could work, which it can't.

Lobbyists and bureaucracies push this kind of thing and most of the time the lawmakers making these decisions have absolutely no clue what any of it means.

Unsurprising. In fact, I think this is exactly why their chats should be monitored and broadcast to the public. That is not the behavior of honest people.

Old article. This has been already rejected a couple of days ago. For now... It will come back though.

Maybe it's just me, but a blanket rule that no one can exempt themselves from a law they help pass seems like a good idea.

Despite the obvious hypocrisy how should that work?

Get the chat apps a list of these people and their devices to exclude them from scanning?

(The irony ...)