EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum(cointelegraph.com) |
EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum(cointelegraph.com) |
I'd say in general people are more concerned about The Bad People than about privacy. Probably because they mostly trust their governments, certainly more than they trust Big Tech.
Then why would they want big-tech employees to look at their nudes flagged by automated dumb scanning and unbeknown to them sent for human verification?
And gladly Telegram does not cooperate. That is a feature.
>Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that France risks societal collapse if it continues down a path of political censorship and regulatory overreach. Durov was arrested in France in August 2024 after being accused of failing to moderate his app to reduce criminality
Telegram is the messenger of choice for cybercriminals (not signal, interestingly). Most stealers and many other malware families use telegram to exfiltrate data and stolen credentials. It's also used as public announcement channels for criminal groups. Telegram ignores all reports about known malicious chats, despite it being easily provable, not to mention it's not e2e encrypted.
At this point this is not resisting censorship but knowingly profiting from crime. Continuing the analogy, it's like post office was sending mails for terrorists, despite police staying in the hallway and begging them to stop that.
(my job is related to anti-malware and cybercrime prevention)
The same applies in the physical world. Police has no right to enter your house. Except when they have a warrant, because you are already known to be guilty.
>The criminals will just move to another operating scheme.
Great! This is not an excuse to do nothing. They would use e2e if they were smart anyway. But they don't, because they like telegram and e2e is annoying to use (no channel history etc).
I will oppose any government that outlaws encryption and privacy. There are numerous accounts of peoples personal info being misused for crime. More than there are proven cases of encryption being used by criminals.
I neither have nor want to have the capability to spy on telegram users. But criminal groups use telegram as infrastructure all the time - for example telegram webhook used as a exfiltration method for stolen credentials.
Telegram refuses to cooperate in any way, for example to close the group chat exfiltrated credentials go to, or even to disable the webhook.
This is analogous to Facebook knowingly letting ISIS use it for terrorist attack coordination. You can't just operate a company and ignore every abuse report.
My point (which I probably explained badly) was that telegram ignores all abuse reports. As a company operating in the first world you can't really do that legally.
You probably don't want to die on the hill of defending telegram. If they really cared about privacy, they would push everything to e2e. Instead they absolutely know what people talk about. Even if they're 100% pure hearted and really never take a peek, three letter agencies from all over the world are probably less honorable.
I literally don't know, that's my whole point. Telegram ignores abuse reports and law enforcement and that's why CEO got into trouble.
I never suggested spying on telegram users or extrajudicial powers, and i abhor the idea.
Also, warrants are when there is evidence to suggest guilt. You are not known to be guilty. That is the point of the warrant, to collect more evidence to prove guilt.
Unfortunately the only answer that I know of is eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty.
I decided to look up who that saying is attributed to, and apparently it's John Philpot Curran, not Thomas Jefferson. But I like Orwell's saying better, because it shows why all of you are just as ineffectual at steering government policy as I am:
https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...
After a quick search - and ignoring Google's helpful clanker who tries to point you to the _wrong_ Orwell text - it's not hard to find a clean source:
https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/RoadToW...
If your Member of European Parliament supports chat control stop voting for their parties and politically support their opposition
The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the population as well. It's such a dumb political move, it seems like it could only come from extreme fear, greed, or manipulation. Switch it around and make them afraid of the alternative.
Maybe it is a result of sending the biggest idiots off to the EU when they failed in national politics, but the problem remains.
For better or for worse the EU itself is about as much of a democracy as some of the European empires were back in the in early 1900s with their sham parliaments which had very little real power.
Like when the Irish electorate rejected the Lisbon Treaty, and then was then harangued into accepting a reheated version. Opponents of the treaty reasonably asked if it could be best-of-three.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Dutch_European_Constituti...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constitut...
After receiving concessions.
That sounds exactly like you'd expect it to work, and yet people seem outraged by it.
Why?
They circumvent the accountability of nation states, it is a development catastrophe since people cannot have a reasonable influence on policies anymore.
The bad thing about the EU is that it opens up views like yours, trying to absolve your own nation of any culpability, when that is just not true.
If you don't like the direction of the EU, vote in a government and MEPs who will steer it in a different direction. If enough people do this, then the EU changes, as happens in every democracy.
What you're seeing is simply democracy in action. You think these things are going against the majority, but the reality is, the majority of citizens are ok for this to happen at the nation state level, and by extension at the EU level.
Stop blaming the EU. It is lazy and makes the problem worse. Look closer to home.
Your use of this then would translate to the governments wanting to read all the mail to constantly stay informed would be the bad guys where the other actors only have to get lucky once by having a mission complete would be the good guys?
Cops vs robbers? Christians vs lions in Rome?
Or, we're merely fish in a barrel and trying to convince ourselves we have any control over whether we get shot?
If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible?
In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t work out how people wanted.
Yes, this proposal has been around since long before those parties got as big as they are now, but even back then the quadrants were roughly similar, and as such the level of support (including now looking to pass, unlike before) has also roughly been in step with the growth of those parties.
I don’t think this is a fair explanation of what’s going on.
That sounds worst to me.
That would make illegal any non official Signal client for example. Or worst does that mean it will be outside of the messaging app in the OS itself?
In the end, we need to take a step back and look at the situation:
- We know since at least Snowden the US listen to whatever they want
- China and Russia probably have advanced capabilities like this but maybe more limited geographically
- The EU is so incompetent they haven't figured it out. So now they are gonna force us to have some back channeling malware that is gonna slow and crash my phone every hour?
How low can we go?
And there's really no way to enforce this unless you mandate locked-down devices with attestation.
Then again, that's likely the long-term plan here.
I pity whoever is going to be the first false positive guinea pig for this csam process. Functionally a guilty (as decided by algo) until proven innocent logic
> The man... took pictures of his son’s groin to send to a doctor after realizing it was inflamed. The doctor used that image to diagnose Mark’s son and prescribe antibiotics. When the photos were automatically uploaded to the cloud, Google’s system identified them as CSAM. Two days later, Mark’s Gmail and other Google accounts, including Google Fi, which provides his phone service, were disabled over “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of the company’s policies and might be illegal”... He later found out that Google had flagged another video he had on his phone and that the San Francisco police department opened an investigation into him.
> Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision.
Less "guilty until" and more "guilty despite innocence."
If you know your not a theif having your bags checked after paying is an annoyance
The full accepted amendment reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...
The case for is "catch child abusers".
People opposing it are talking in abstractions like privacy and right to use encryption. Which are important but you need to identify concrete harms that ordinary people identify with. You can't oppose a harm people can visualise and feel emotional about with an abstraction.
Opponents need to say "if this passes your kids might be taken away because of a bot looking at your photos" . "Even if you send a picture of your own kid to your own mum, you will have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by some minimum wage worker at G4S from a completely different culture, who has to process 20 pictures a minute"
The opposition mostly sounds butthurt that politicians are making tech decisions. And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks chat control is a terrible idea.
- Keep casual conversations on mainstream crap to be reachable by the masses and give the appearance of being monitored.
- Send friends to a tiny URL that redirects to a tiny ephemeral private anonymous chat instance running entirely in RAM with an IP certificate [0] once available to remove domain name ownership from the picture. When done with that chat edit redirect to be something benign and wipe the chat instance. Block most crawlers using Anubis [1] and some other tricks. Chat crawlers that validate URL's are usually very obvious.
I would wager HN could come up with 1000% more clever ideas.
[0] - https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...
The issue is that the EU courts are easy to predict. I'm not afraid of this law for itself because I know how the EU works and this will be challenged. I'm afraid of this because once again the 'center right' (i.e liberals) and the traditional right manage to move power away from courts.
'Les irresponsables' should be translated asap in German, English and any other language in the EU, and hopefully politicians will find a mirror in this book and stop worsening everything.
So, a literal malware?
In the UK a massive surge in using VPNs happened in the last 2 weeks and the adoption only keeps rising.
Call me Nostradamus but if this legislation gets passed I can see how a lot of people will become familiar with the Privacy and Security aspects of the tech world (comms in particular).
ChatGPT thinks it was 'spook', but can't find any references.
Anyway, it seems we need such things again for messages, to overload any system the EU would have.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned into a European version of the Patriot Act — where the state takes advantage of the fact that people have become desensitized, and everyone ends up being monitored 24/7. In the end, every citizen would be under surveillance, while criminals would simply download an app that doesn’t comply with this absurd requirement.
Now we are policing speech?
Why wouldn't it be feasible to implement? Sadly, I don't share your optimism.
Maybe I'm delusional and I'll be severely disappointed I'm my country and the EU, but I don't think so. Who knows, time will tell.
Rules for thee but not for me. You can bet the MPs private messages will not be included.
https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...
The EC of yesteryear preferred issuing book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy.
The EC of today prefers burning those regulations [1] and writes legislation about how everybody should scan all private messages.
No more surprising than the In 1998 Conference of Anglican bishops rejecting any sort of homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, and the 2023 one approving the blessing of same-sex unions.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-gdpr-privacy-law-europe-p...
The privacy laws you talk about all also have carveouts for governmental, intelligence and military work. No matter the hand wringing here, most EU governments (and even citizens) don't consider privacy legislation to require equivalent footing for governments and for private corporations. A lot of EU citizens are fine with laws like GDPR not holding for law enforcement and other similar institutions. Despite the risks and history.
yea, no idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At least in countries where the terrorism emerged recently, I'd say...
And unlike the US, very few people are going to push back based on "freedom" and "my rights" which is unfortunate in my opinion. This lack of pushback is why those types of proposal even come to be.
Most actions taken by this administration have > 65% disapproval ratings, and according to historical norms, if the size of current protests double, the people will overthrow the government.
The last time I checked, the ongoing ICE raids against civilians were one of the more popular policies.
Demonstrations against are small.
Only few people write to their government and their MEPs.
This is probably sourced in not understanding it and not having enough information, but for as long as those three factors remain those are the results of democracy.
(Democracy in the EU is complex topic in itself, as EU isn't a state, but a union of independent states where states are primarily represented by their government and the directly elected parliament plays a smaller role ... but given the little protest that's the smaller issue in this case)
The moderators of r/denmark are also currently blocking any submissions of this story to the subreddit.
Can you shed more light on situation in Denmark? Why is this happening?
In short: fault of the nation states, not the EU. Most EU people won't even be aware of this, the same in other countries around the world. We here care, most people don't. Sadly.
People continue to misrepresent what the EU is and how it operates, which is actually harmful if you care about stuff like this. You're basically trying to send the message to everyone that they're powerless "because EU". The reality is that nation states are pushing this. If you want to signal your disapproval, write to your politicians, vote for different ones, both national and MEPs.
Unfortunately, this is simply a reflection of democracy. Most people are just not informed enough about this topic to care. We think it is a big deal here on reddit, but most of the population just ignore it.
I suspect that most here will agree with you. However in the interests of encouraging a sober analysis: https://www.villagenews.com/story/2025/06/20/opinion/is-trum...
It does not need to be particularly secure—the messages are still E2E encrypted so long as nothing trips the client-side scanner.
I think you are letting your ideological alignment (against surveillance state) push you into irrational standpoints ("more surveillance would not catch additional criminals").
I'm 100% with you on opposing legislation like this, but it is very important to not delude oneself about its likely effects, and to pick the right hills to die on, figuratively speaking.
It's a good model for identifying and closing gaps (especially if one is not, oneself, prone to think like a criminal), but like all other human population groups, half of all criminals are below average.
This is not some wild hypothetical, the recent explosion in VPN use by every country that has implemented an age restriction law should be sufficient to display this effect in place. In a world without weird country restrictions (whether that be intellectual property restrictions or content restrictions), VPNs would be a niche technology for business. Instead unbelievably large amounts of the general population are now not only using it, but paying for it.
I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
Does its prevention even help anyway? The adult porn industry is regularly criticized for seeing people choose it over real sexual relationships. Conceivably the same could hold true for CSAM. As in, if you can't access it, you're going to go get the real thing instead.
The narrative that it prevents child abuse sounds good in theory, but what does the data actually tell us?
That said, not sure that draconian, ubiquitous surveillance is the correct (or even effective) solution to the problem.
Not always but often. You think the amount of Pea Dough would go up with abolition. Doubts from me.
Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.
The anecdotal evidence is that most child abusers started with CSAM and continued escalation from there; not that they would have been abusers except for CSAM.
While it has never been proven to be a casual link, Ted Bundy, Brian Mitchell, Mark Bridger, Jeffrey Dahmer, and now Bryan Kohberger all accessed violent pornography before taking their actions. Dahmer stated it was his ritual - consume violent pornography before finding the next victim. Bundy meanwhile stated it was the tipping point for him psychologically, more than any other known factor, even describing it as his "fuel."
Meta made 1.8M CSAM reports to authorities in 2024 Q4 alone. An awful lot of these people aren’t taking any steps at all to avoid detection – they are posting it to social media.
You can argue the ethics of this scanning all you want, but if you’re arguing that it won’t be effective then you’re wrong.
If it were of real value they'd be touting arrests, not reports.
Another - funnier way - would be to send the image as a file, and the recipient should convert it back to an image. Of course this could be automated as well on the scanning side, but if the regulation only talks about images, it should be safe. Not that I would do this if chat control happened and I would need some way to secure the content
Would be great if regulators understood that serious criminals will have a way of communication that is not traceable with this regulations.
During peace time I would agree but when the screws are tightened enough and one makes a zero-friction anonymous chat instance it might just get some use. Zero friction or near zero meaning click a URL, enter a temporary name and hit the "Start" button. [1] Channels do not really matter in this example as private chats would be the primary use case.
Set up a simple IRCD on the backend that cloaks IP addresses. ngIRCD [2] takes 5 minutes to set up and one second to mask all IP's. There are many web front-ends [3] to make it happy-clicky. All of this can run from a ram-disk and deployed with automation and/or containers to low memory and low CPU servers.
CloakHost = temp.chat
CloakHostModeX = temp.chat
CloakUserToNick = yes
MorePrivacy = yes
The real problem was that the referendum commission (the state body in charge of informing the public on these matters) was deemed “too neutral” and was forever after hobbled and since then we have had to vote in a veritable information vacuum.
I agree. Puppets can’t fathom what the puppeteer envisions.
The conversion from that to "so therefore the .gov ought to have powers that amount turnkey ability to violate human rights on a whim" is the problem.
Any "well actually terrorists aren't that big a deal" discussion only serves to bog things down in the weeds and direct blame away from bad people who believe bad things.
Replace terrorism with whatever the cause of the day is, drugs, satanic cults, tax evasion, etc, etc all you want, doesn't change anything. There are people who believe (though they'll rarely admit it when you lay it so bare) that you can take something that is flagrantly bad in its base or default form (like for example letting the government just read everyone's personal communication by default) and think that the fact that because it can be applied toward noble ends then it is a power the .gov ought to have access to by default.
As a European that lived in the US for a long time, a big difference is that there is also a lot of "European Conformism". You don't want to be seen as the weird one protesting things if nobody else does it. It's just easier to go with the flow and accept things.
The question was what was their logic, how could they possibly believe these inconsistent things, so I’m offering what their logic might be. Not mine.
But even if it was what I think, your response is rude and thoughtless. I would like to imagine you can do better.
You see this all the time with all sorts of areas of law, not just guns. The real evil-doers are the enablers cheering it on. "Well they didn't have a permit so they deserved it" and the like.
The bomb was handed off across a political boundary and detonated at some arbitrary point on the way to its target, an hour earlier than expected.
(And then there was the one in France, where a cellphone-triggered bomb detonated prematurely and eliminated its builders because the mobile carrier they were using sent a "HAPPY NEW YEAR" SMS to every customer).
Where do you draw the line/how do you strike balance? And I'm curious if you have an idea of an alternative for the regular coordination efforts that would be needed for the national/sub national governments in the absence of something like the EU.
Your argument doesn't make sense, you cannot just use abstraction to justify building new layers of governance.
I could give you an arbitrary line and say a common language would be the point. It is sensible as well because nobody in the Netherlands knows any politician from Spain and vice versa. On a national level this is not as pronounced.
I don't need coordination efforts about scanning encrypted messages if that is your question.
So in this case it is the fault of the EU as well because its structures allow this to happen.
I prefer battling one national government instead of 27.
The EU certainly isn't democracy in action, on the contrary it is highly technocratic. Without the promised proficiency though.
You're blaming the EU for something that is the fault of our populations, voting in governments who increasingly push these agendas. You're not helping anything by doing that.
There are no real polls. Any positive poll asks about protecting kids in a populist way or it is framed as something combatting big tech, which is just as dishonest.
But the real numbers will be in if people don't submit any photos or IDs for some flimsy age verification.
Be that as it may, there are also constitutional protection against surveillance, regardless of popular support, which I argue doesn't exist.
So now we're the baddies, what do we do? We don't mention it. Ignorance is bliss.
Given that we're talking about cybercrime here, what are the odds that the criminals in question are too dumb to Google "how can i get around whatsapp image scanning"?
This just isn't the case. Many criminals use non-encrypted phone calls, leave voice mails, etc. all the time. For example this recent theft of a gold toilet:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgeg39vr3j3o
> A photograph found by police on his phone showed a carrier bag stuffed with cash, which was sent on WhatsApp with the message "520,000 ha ha ha".
The only reason that was E2E encrypted is because everyone in the UK uses WhatsApp and they enable E2E encryption by default.
> I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
It absolutely isn't. Some would, but the vast majority of criminals are not security experts.
It's still a dumb law. Also the criminals that it claims to target (paedophiles) are probably the least likely to get caught because they're already used to lots of electronic scanning things. Though even there it's not like they're all criminal masterminds. I can't find it now but there was recently a story about a someone who tried to hide child porn just in a deep folder structure like .../secret/do_not_open/i_warned_you/...
Dumb law, but lets use real reasons to argue that.
How much CSAM? A PornHub's worth of content, or a couple of pictures? The data suggests that in the adult porn world, people aren't satisfied by a single Playboy magazine. Which, too, is the logic behind CSAM laws — that the insatiable search for more content incentives production of more content. But at some point there will be more content that can be consumed, and given how often CSAM producers are caught (not even counting those who never are) we've no doubt far exceeded that threshold. And with the way AI is going...
> Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
No, we haven't "no doubt far exceeded that threshold". Some CSAM producers getting caught does not make it so. I could say it's unlikely that CSAM production even approaches 1% of the magnitude of adult pornography production—but I too would be pulling numbers out of my ass. Without hard data on this, all we have is meaningless assumptions—and I'm not sure this sort of data is available to anyone.
> Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
Logical fallacies apply only to arguments.
Okay. Exactly how much CSAM data has been produced over the years? And what is the threshold where there is enough?
> Logical fallacies apply only to arguments.
Logical fallacies are most commonly associated with arguments, but are not limited to them. However, "Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.", as poorly thought out as it is, would be considered an argument if you stay within the bounds of how the term is normally used, of course, so what you say here doesn't even hold anyway.
Compared to the US and a lot of places in the world, Europeans generally care less and have more trust in their government. There is a general sense that elected officials generally do what is best for the people. This leads to less scrutiny and push back in general. Definitely way less than in the US.
For example in Switzerland, there's the instrument of a "Volksinitiative". If you can collect 100k signatures, the government must hold a national election on this issue. And these are quite common and popular in Switzerland. In Germany, those unfortunately only exist on a state-level, not federal level, but are also common.
So, in my experience, people are very much involved in government here. This might be different in different EU countries of course. Or maybe you have a vastly different bubble you live in than I do.
The main difference that struck me between the EU and living in the US is that by default EU citizens will assume good intent. I see European protests as interest groups that need to show that they are still important once in a while.
In the US, people will assume bad intent by default for politicians. This will lead to a ton more push back and scrutiny
Well yes, because most European citizens couldn’t care less about this fact.
Just as the existence of America as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes. But we're not going to watch over your shoulder to make sure you don't participate in American society and send you to jail if you do. As unfortunate as past damage is, life moves on.
Of course, that it incentivizes production of more CSAM is the logic behind the laws, and that is a pretty compelling reason. However, according to the continuous stream of news reports, a tremendous amount of content has already been produced. How much more content would need to be produced? If the adult porn industry stopped producing new content, nobody would ever really notice. Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.
There is a significant difference in that you can choose not to consume CSAM. Most Americans don't get to choose not to participate in American society.
> Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.
I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even—and keep letting adults make consensual porn with other adults if they so desire.
Most Americans don't participate in American society, other than maybe voting, and even then a significant number of them still don't.
> I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even
And I would be trillionaire, but I guess won't bother... The original comment asked for that argument. If you don't want to provide, I get it. You are under no obligation to do so. But what is the point of saying you would do it without actually doing it? If you don't want to provide why make up a fake story when you can just as easily be honest about it or say nothing at all?
Believe me, any historian will tell you, that tribes pillaging and raping other tribes was completely common before the European settlement. While this does not justify the European settlement by itself, we were the winners who beat the previous winners. Our atrocities are just better documented.
I think I would, if your at the point of seeking. But some would say it's causatory.
Why it is it different?
At what rate have child abuses declined?
Sexual choking has gone from a fringe behavior, into something that a study (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y) found over 50% of young Australians had tried; even though almost anyone with a medical background finds that extremely dangerous. This is a behavior that compounds, with women who went through it four times "safely" having brain damage markers in their blood (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c6zbv_v1). This is also why the UK (not sure if they did it yet) was even talking about banning all depictions, after an independent study said it was popularly perceived as "safe and common" among Gen Z.
I guess when you are desperate for any grain of data backing your totally failed "porn is bad" hypothesis (porn has been a click away for hundred of millions going on 30 years now), you'll latch on to anything.
Ironically if you read the study, it's basically "People enjoyed the act and consented to it, but it's bad because not breathing can be fatal and it's also illegal in Australia". It's also a singular study (rather than a long term trend meta-study) with an online survey data collection method, so about as low of a rigor as you can get.
Of course though, it's gone around heavily marketed as "Record levels of boys are watching porn and going around violently choking out young women because of it".
That's a massive stretch—there are many things that have been declining along with the rate at which people have been having sex. Porn is in no way "the most compelling answer". It certainly could be a factor, sure, but by no means the only one.
What are you seeing people finding more compelling? There was that whole "the chemicals are turning frogs gay and now you too" or whatever it was, but that wasn't compelling. Tell that to the average Joe and he will simply wonder what kind of drugs you are on. Tell the average Joe that "increased porn consumption is diminishing partnered sexual activity" and you'll at least get, "Huh. Maybe."
> It certainly could be a factor, sure, but by no means the only one.
Case in point. But it seems you're confusing a compelling explanation with a scientific explanation. Whether or not porn is actually a factor is entirely immaterial. It might have absolutely nothing to do with it. It can still be compelling even if that is the case.
Maybe... Again, this might differ from country to country. I currently live in Germany, and here scrutiny of the current federal government (and also the state government in my state) is pretty decent.
Also, some of the decisions that were made (mostly related to working with the far-right party AfD and on immigration law) led to nation-wide protests where over months and months millions of people went on the streets.
Most of the representatives there are local tokens that are there to pull EU money in the pockets of their parties.
EU is artificial state made only out of interest of political elites.
For better or for worse the core institution or decision making processes were never designed to be democratic in any meaningful way.
Seems like a bizarre waste of time considering that that you already made up your mind to such an extent that you ate not even willing to explain what are you even trying to say.
> and doesn't fit the reality which is modelled after most democracies on the planet
Well yes, because the EU is rather unique compared to pretty much any post 1800s democracy.
Paying taxes doesn't count as participating in "American society"? The same taxes that, say, have funded America's controversial military operations in the past?
> And I would be trillionaire, but I guess won't bother... The original comment asked for that argument. If you don't want to provide, I get it. You are under no obligation to do so. But what is the point of saying you would do it without actually doing it? If you don't want to provide why make up a fake story when you can just as easily be honest about it or say nothing at all?
I'm happy enough with maintaining the status quo. I'm not the one trying to demolish Chesterton's Fence here.
In the same way a child participates in CSAM production, sure. You haven't made yourself clear, but are you struggling to suggest that the children featured in CSAM should also be prosecuted? Is that the harsher law argument you keep telling us about? I mean, I suppose you are right that if they weren't involved it wouldn't be able to be created. You may not have completely thought that through, though.
> I'm happy enough with maintaining the status quo.
And you are welcome to your arbitrary feelings. But we are talking about your supposed argument.
Not quite a fan of deportations, but I'd rather risk people going back on their word than the alternative here.
I wholeheartedly refuse to vote for anyone who publicly supports this. It is integral to democracy itself. If my only alternative is "The party of kicking kittens and opposing chatcontrol" I will 100% support them.
Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of momentum. Must be the weather
Almost forgot: we're also in our third year of recession and the only investments are made in the military industry to prep for starting the next world war
>I don't want to get too political
Do you practice self censorship like the German media?
And you're really not sure this is less draconian than nazis?
Anyway, let's assume germany deported 0 people. It's telling that you're focusing in typical liberal manner on a single issue and disregarding everything else (war, genocide, recession, submission to usa as a vassal state etc.)
The vast majority of these deportations are just shuffling people around the EU in what seems like a game of hot potato over who is supposed to be responsible for a given migrant. Deportations that actually get people out of the EU seem to be extremely rare afaict.
This whole thread is about EU politics.
> Greens are even further right than cdu/csu who have the same policies in 99% of cases as libs
Trying to paint the greens as further right than CDU/CSU is just plain wrong by any measure. The greens are a green/social liberal party while the CDU/CSU are conservative center-right party. None of their politicians would ever argue that they are more left than the greens which is pretty obvious when looking at a quote from Friedrich Merz (German chancellor and party leader of the CDU/CSU) where he quite literally says that the greens are more left. [1]
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/merz-gruene-10... English: "In the coming weeks and months, we will once again significantly intensify the debate with the Greens and, above all, counter the impression that we are always looking to the left and saying that we absolutely must form a coalition with them at some point."
You trust what the parties are saying rather than what they're actually doing? Is this a joke? The biggest warmongering party the greens are supposed to be left? This is tagesschau levels of propaganda.
You are talking about greens, the party that wants to deport everyone who criticizes Israel, sues everyone who insults them, and they literally warned against a "linksruck".