Germany slams brakes on EU's Chat Control device-scanning snoopfest Germany has committed to oppose the EU's controversial "Chat Control" regulations following huge pressure from multiple activists and major organizations. The draft regs would allow authorities to compel providers of communications services – such as WhatsApp, Signal, etc – to monitor user comms for potential child sexual …
The same AI that is known to lie and hallucinate?
Just a technical point: The initial tech would likely be a convolutional neural network for image classification which are far from immune to error, but their failure modes are a lot more restrained than LLVMs which have zero motivation not to lie and hallucinate.
...would also undermine E2EE, theoretically allowing the EU to spy on any citizen's private communications.
Theorically... Yeah, Right!
We all know and are completely certain it will be abused if allowed. It is as sure as the sun rising and setting for the next couple of billion years to come.
Seems like part of Germany is yearning for the Nazis and Stasi to come back.
It's bizarre that this whole Chat Control designed as an assault on human rights gone that far.
In a functioning organisation, someone proposing these ideas would have been asked to take some time off and attend therapy and to never mention this again - or simply sacked.
They shouldn’t have been voting at all.
Putting Chat Control to a vote legitimises an act of indiscriminate violence against the population.
A society that still remembers the Gestapo and the Stasi should have treated this as a criminal conspiracy against its citizens, not as a policy option to be politely rejected. The ‘no’ vote isn’t integrity; it’s moral failure for even allowing the question.
That perspective misses the fundamental nature of the threat and the state's duty to protect its citizens. The argument that "Voting NO is the only option" is precisely the moral failure we should be talking about.
A state, especially one built on the ashes of the Gestapo and Stasi, has a primary duty to uphold its constitution and protect the basic rights of its people. This duty is not passive. It is an active firewall. When a proposal is made that is, in its substance, an act of indiscriminate violence and an attack on the constitutional order, the state's duty is not to schedule a debate. Its duty is to identify it as an attack and shut it down.
Allowing a vote on "Chat Control" legitimised an unconstitutional premise. It moved an act of totalitarianism from the category of "criminal conspiracy" into the category of "debatable policy."
This is a classic historical error. Totalitarianism rarely announces itself with a thunderclap; it arrives cloaked in boring, bureaucratic language that obfuscates its true intent.
In 1933, the Nazis passed the "Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums" ("Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service"). It sounds mundane. Its purpose was to purge Jews and political opponents from public service. People at the time treated it as just another piece of legislation.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws were presented with the sterile language of legal statutes, defining citizenship and protecting "German blood." They were, in fact, the legal architecture for dehumanisation and, ultimately, genocide.
The Wannsee Conference in 1942 discussed the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" ("Final Solution to the Jewish Question"). The minutes are a chilling document of bureaucratic planning for mass murder, using euphemisms like "evacuation" and "special treatment."
In each case, the horror was framed as a procedural matter. The people who said, "it's just a proposal, let's follow the process," were complicit in normalising the unthinkable.
Germany's constitutional order was specifically designed with an "eternity clause" (Art. 79 GG) to prevent this from ever happening again. The legal and security apparatus of the state should have identified this proposal as a direct assault on that order and treat it as a criminal matter, not something for "debate". By treating it as a legitimate policy to be voted on, the state abdicated its most sacred duty. The "NO" vote isn't a victory; it's a record of the moment the system failed its most critical test.
That's a dangerously complacent view that misses the point on three critical levels.
A "No" vote is not a shield. The argument that Germany "protected its citizens" by voting no is based on a false sense of security. Under the EU's Qualified Majority Voting system, this proposal can still pass even with Germany's dissent. Treating this as a routine political disagreement is like watching someone plot to poison the town's water supply and thinking a politely registered objection is a sufficient response.
The state's duty is to prosecute, not just debate. A state's primary duty is to protect its citizens from criminal conspiracies. Procedural correctness doesn't legitimise an attack. Employment in the EU does not grant anyone immunity from national law for plotting an act of terrorism. This should have been treated as a criminal matter, not a policy option.
This is the original definition of "terror". People have forgotten that the term "terror" was coined during the French Revolution to describe the state using surveillance and intimidation to control its own people. It was never originally about rebels; it was about top-down control. This proposal is a high-tech return to that original meaning.
Therefore, the only response that aligns with the state's duty to protect its citizens is for the German Federal Prosecutor to open a criminal investigation under § 129a of the Criminal Code (Formation of Terrorist Organisations). The investigation should target the architects of this proposal on the grounds that they are a group conspiring to inflict mass violence and coercion upon the population. Anything less - including a simple "no" vote - is a failure to recognise the threat and an abdication of the state's most fundamental responsibility.
German anti-fascist here. You're completely off the rails, as everyone here has been patiently trying to explain, no matter how much off-topic text you spout. I have no sympathy for the political party that acted here because in many cases its distance to fascism and the new German neo-fascists is not large enough, but in this case, for once, they're doing the right thing, and there's nothing they could have done to prevent the voting from coming up apart from invading the countries in support of chat control. This is called democracy.
It's ironic to hear an "anti-fascist" champion the very procedural arguments that allowed fascism to take root in Germany in the first place. Your definition of democracy is dangerously naive and ignores the fundamental lessons of your own country's history.
You're confusing the procedure of voting with the substance of a free society. The modern German state was founded on the principle of militant democracy (wehrhafte Demokratie). This isn't just a theory; it's the core of the German Basic Law, created specifically because the Weimar Republic's procedural democracy was helpless as fascists used its own rules to kill it. This legal framework obligates the state to defend against those who use "democratic" means to destroy freedom. A vote on a totalitarian measure isn't democracy; it's a symptom of democracy failing.
The claim that the only alternative to voting was "invading other countries" is a ridiculous strawman. The real alternative is not an act of war; it's an act of law enforcement. A nation's sovereign duty is to protect its citizens from criminal conspiracies, regardless of where they are hatched. If the plot constitutes an act of terrorism against the German people, the German Federal Prosecutor has the jurisdiction and the obligation to act. This is about upholding national law, not military intervention.
The core lesson of German anti-fascism is preemption, not just reaction. It’s about recognising and dismantling totalitarian mechanisms before they are normalised. Fascism rose to power on the back of people who insisted on politely following procedure while the house was burning down. A true anti-fascist position isn't to legitimise an attack on freedom by putting it on the ballot. It's to demand the state use its constitutional and legal powers to crush the threat immediately. Your position defends the process that failed, not the principles you claim to uphold.
Bla, bla, bla.
1. While I would agree that it is, but that's just me, the opinions within the EU regarding whether the measure is "totalitarian" are diverging.
2. There is no law and no institution that would have stopped the vote, no matter what German officials would have said. There is no office German officials could have gone to that would or could have stopped the vote.
3. Calling a vote, even on this subject, even if it is correct to be viewed critically, 'terrorism', is a declaration of intellectual and ethical bankruptcy. Even if it is under different auspices and with different goals, it is not much different from the US 2025 republicans' calling everything 'terrorism' that opposes them.
4. I don't defend anything, and I don't like it significantly better than you. I just inform you that it would have been structurally impossible to achieve what you demand.
1. You say opinions diverge on whether the measure is "totalitarian." This is irrelevant. The function of a tool is not a matter of opinion. If a policy's mechanism is to create indiscriminate, suspicion-less mass surveillance, its effect is totalitarian, regardless of the stated intent. We don't debate whether lead in the water is poisonous based on "diverging opinions"; we look at the scientific evidence of the harm. The documented psychological and societal harm of mass surveillance is the evidence here.
2. This is the core of your misunderstanding. You claim there's no institution that could have stopped this. This wrongly assumes that EU bureaucratic procedure grants immunity from national criminal law.
Let me be clear: a state's sovereign duty to protect its citizens from a criminal conspiracy does not vanish because the plotters work in Brussels. If members of the European Commission were using their positions to plot a physical bombing in Berlin, would you still argue "there is no institution that could stop them"? Of course not. The German Federal Prosecutor would open an investigation and issue warrants. The principle is identical; the only difference is that the weapon here is legislative and digital, not explosive.
3. Calling my use of "terrorism" intellectually bankrupt is a lazy attempt to avoid the argument. I am not using it as a political slur, as you falsely equate with US politics. I am using it as a technical descriptor based on its standard definition:
- Violence: It inflicts measurable psychological and physiological harm, a form of violence recognised by law and medicine.
- Intimidation: Its entire purpose is to intimidate a population into self-censorship.
- Political Aim: Its goal is ideological population control.
It meets the criteria. Using an accurate term to describe a dangerous act is intellectual honesty. Hiding from that term because it makes you uncomfortable is the real bankruptcy.
4. You're just repeating your flawed second point. What you call "structurally impossible," I call a failure of political and legal will. The structure you're defending is one where a nation is expected to be passive while an external body plots an assault on its citizens. That's not a structure worth defending; it's a structure that proves the necessity of invoking national law as a firewall.
Again, your claims are complete BS.
And you need to learn to read. I defend nothing; I explain how things are.
You obviously are no lawyer and have no idea what you're talking about, thinking that your personal opinion on what should be law could replaces knowledge of the subject and what actually is law. I suggest you talk that through with a lawyer specialized on international law in general and EU law in particular. I've had enough. Have fun.
Yes, yes, yes. You're absolutely right.
Germany should have _abstained_ from voting on such a horrific mess -- leaving their vote uncounted, and allowing the resolution to pass! That's the _only_ acceptable resolution on this issue, isn't it? Germany certainly should not have voted! Let the others do whatever they want!
That's not what I said. The correct action should have been:
(...) the only response that aligns with the state's duty to protect its citizens is for the German Federal Prosecutor to open a criminal investigation under § 129a of the Criminal Code (Formation of Terrorist Organisations). The investigation should target the architects of this proposal on the grounds that they are a group conspiring to inflict mass violence and coercion upon the population. Anything less - including a simple "no" vote - is a failure to recognise the threat and an abdication of the state's most fundamental responsibility.
Dude.
You skimmed the article, accidentally understood the direct opposite of what it actually said, and went on to post something that doesn't make any sense.
It's fine. It happens. None of us has time to read carefully each and every article. Really, it's okay. You eat the downvotes, maybe apologize if you feel like it (but it's not really necessary), and that's it. Everyone forgets about it in an hour or two. Problem solved.
You really don't need to start digging a hole.
Thank you for the advice, but I believe you've fundamentally misunderstood the critique. My comment wasn't about how Germany voted, but the terrifying fact that this vote was happening at all.
You've mistaken a critique of the system's failure for a misunderstanding of a headline. Let me clarify:
If your government had to hold a serious, hard-fought vote on whether to reintroduce slavery, you wouldn't celebrate the "no" vote as a victory for freedom. You'd be horrified that it was even on the table. The "win" doesn't erase the profound sickness that allowed such a question to be asked.
My point is that "Chat Control" - a policy that even its proponents admit undermines the core principles of a free society - should never have been a legitimate policy option. In a healthy democracy, such a proposal would be treated as a criminal conspiracy against the public, not a bill to be debated.
You suggest I'm digging a hole. The real hole is the widespread complacency in the face of this threat. Let's be clear: Germany's opposition is not a veto. Under EU rules, this proposal can still pass. We are celebrating one engineer trying to gently press the brakes while others are still shoveling coal into the engine of a train heading towards a cliff. The problem isn't solved; the danger is still imminent.
This leads to the most critical point. For Germany, of all nations, this should never have been a matter for political negotiation. A state built on the ashes of the Gestapo and the Stasi has a unique and solemn duty to be the continent's immune system against the virus of totalitarian surveillance. Its role isn't just to vote 'no' at the last minute.
Its duty was to recognise this "Stasi 2.0" proposal for what it is - a criminal conspiracy wrapped in bureaucratic language - and use its full constitutional and legal power to neutralise it from the start. That it reached the stage of a public vote is not a sign of a functioning process, but a catastrophic failure of that historical vigilance.
While I do understand what you're saying and trying to say, I'm going to disagree.
Specifically: It is not terrifying that a topic could be raised that honestly should never have been considered: It's an acceptant and acknowledgement that this was an option, but it was deemed a bad one, and unacceptable, and so was specifically rejected.
Yes, the idea has been put on the table, and it could well return later but now people have seen it's there, heard about it, so are aware of it and they've time to prepare arguments against its return. Otherwise, at some later date, the same concept will be presented to solve a much more serious issue and people won't have prepared responses as to why it really isn't acceptable.
And for the example: Digital ID's. In the UK, we know why they're a bad idea 'cause this isn't the first time a national ID has been proposed. Just this time it's 'illegal migration' and not whatever bull T Blair came out with when he proposed the national ID card.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. The point you raise gets to the very heart of how a liberal democracy should function, but I believe it rests on a dangerous miscategorisation.
The disagreement isn't about whether bad ideas should be heard; it's about whether we can distinguish between a bad policy and a foundational threat. You're treating them as the same thing, and they are not.
You bring up the Digital ID as your prime example of a "safe" debate, but you fail to see the end-game. Let's be clear about what a Digital ID truly represents: it is foundational infrastructure that is just one software update away from becoming a tool for mass tracking and control. It's not a separate "bad idea" to be debated; it's the chassis onto which the engine of "Chat Control" like can be bolted.
This highlights the real distinction: A democracy is a game with foundational rules - privacy, free expression, due process. We can and should debate the policies we build on that foundation.
But "Chat Control" and a mandatory Digital ID are not policies. They are a proposal to blow up the foundation itself. They are an attempt to change the rules of the game to ensure one side - the corrupt state - can never lose.
You don't "debate" a proposal to rig the game. You expose it as cheating and disqualify the player. Treating this as just another "option" to be discussed is to agree, in principle, to play a game that is already rigged against you.
‘Thank you Germany’ completely misses it.
A country with Germany’s history shouldn’t be voting on whether to authorise indiscriminate violence against its own population - it should be launching a criminal investigation into how such an idea was drafted in the first place.
Treating institutionalised violence as a policy option is moral bankruptcy, and every time that happens, ‘never again’ loses its meaning.
That is a deliberate and frankly absurd misreading of my point. I am not calling for a dictator; I am calling for a functioning democracy to enforce its own laws.
You're creating a false choice between a passive democracy that must debate its own destruction, and a dictatorship. There is a third option, which is the foundation of every stable democracy on earth: the rule of law. Launching a criminal investigation is not an act of an "overlord"; it's a standard procedure carried out by the judicial branch of a democratic government.
Let me make it simple. If a group of politicians were caught plotting to embezzle public funds, would you say it's "undemocratic" for the police to investigate them? Of course not. You'd expect the law to be upheld.
My argument is the same. When a group drafts a policy that amounts to a criminal conspiracy to inflict mass violence on the public, the correct democratic response is not a polite debate, but a legal investigation. Calling for the law to be applied to those in power is the most pro-democratic position there is. You are confusing the enforcement of law with the suspension of it.
Most importantly, you're ignoring the specific nature of German democracy. The German Basic Law established a "militant democracy" (wehrhafte Demokratie). This principle was created precisely because of Germany's history. It requires the state to use its legal tools - including criminal investigations - to defend itself against those who would use its own processes to destroy freedom.
So, no, I am not calling to be an "overlord." I am calling for the German state to be true to its own constitutional identity and enforce the laws designed to prevent a repeat of the very history you seem happy to ignore.
I support your point of view. An initiative towards enabling and permitting screening all correspondence between private persons for possession and transmission of sexual abuse material - it should have been stopped before anyone in the public was even aware of it.
Then who are behind this concerted initiative? We can look for suspects among forces with a known record of scheming and pressuring and abusing democracy. We have regimes, we have presidents and prime ministers, we have oligarchs within the information technology sector, and all their hidden money. Those with access to lobbyist logs in parliaments and governmental offices might make interesting finds (but will the lobbying be logged, and will any logs remain unredacted?).
Sexual abuse of minors is a serious crime.
Spying on people is a crime, too.
If these two crimes are to be weighed against each other - I would think breaking privacy for an entire population is the worst of them.
And if there is a snooper catch in the communication - how are the sensitivity and the specificity of the screening tools used? How will the percentage of false-positives be in cases with innocent family pictures exchanged within the family?
I would not have cared if I thought there was any reason to trust all politicians, all police and all the Big Names in information technology.
I responded elsewhere. But here you are...
(...) the only response that aligns with the state's duty to protect its citizens is for the German Federal Prosecutor to open a criminal investigation under § 129a of the Criminal Code (Formation of Terrorist Organisations). The investigation should target the architects of this proposal on the grounds that they are a group conspiring to inflict mass violence and coercion upon the population. Anything less - including a simple "no" vote - is a failure to recognise the threat and an abdication of the state's most fundamental responsibility.
Yeah, it's like the EU's planning to mass-Nagasaki privacy into oblivion to achieve what should be a surgical goal of rooting out CSA, best approached by scalpel ...
The iatrogenics on this "cure" are just ginoromous ... Hopefully more EU folks join the Germs on this one (and only this one!)!
Quote: "...break end-to-end encryption..."
So what? Anyone with any sense is using private encryption BEFORE a message enters the channel!!!
The snoops (using Chat Control or using the "backdoor" facilities) just get to read MORE ENCRYPTION.
In my own case, the private encryption uses multiple passes all with different keys.
Why, I can hear you ask? Well, the snoops MIGHT break my private encryption......
......but all they get is the second pass encryption.
..... so the snoops cannot tell that they have been successful the first time.....
Don't you love the idea of the STASI intercepting a message (say over Signal).....and only finding more encryption!!
Who the hell has time to copy/paste every single whatsapp or whatever message, to share public keys with those in the message chain, make sure they can decrypt etc. That's just daft.
I have done this in the past with fellow IT professionals working in the security field - so I do actually know how much work it is.
Not to mention - that 0.01% of folks who DO pre-encrypt their chat will be actively targeted since they clearly MUST be up to something suspicious, according to Big Brother.
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Thx for raising this. The campaign website is very good tbh, it highlighted which of my MEPs were undecided/in favour/unknown - my MEP (Sophie Wilmes, ex Belgian PM of all people) being an unknown.
Email will be going out to all of them.
Other than the idiocy of back-dooring all communications, I'm surprised the likes of Greenpeace aren't all over this. I wonder what the compute cost of having AI anaylse *every single communication* has been calculated at. As someone who had to justify IT projects ESG, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and/or Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (part of Paris Accord) - this surely must generate millions or hundreds of millions of tons of CO2.
How exactly would this be architected?
I don't believe all that ESG, Sustainability, Diversity stuff is genuine. It's yet another control mechanism shoved down from the institutional shareholders. What carbon cost Gaza & Ukraine for example even now let alone when rebuilding. You can blow up gas pipelines, even attempt to blow up nuclear reactors and none of the "environmental" groups say boo, or maybe they do but the supposedly concerned media don't publish it.
"As The Reg has mentioned previously, to pass the legislation, EU leaders need support from nations representing the majority of the member-state bloc's population – which is why Germany's is a key player."
I thought it needed to be unanimous. Anyway, if I'm wrong, I hope Germany succeeds. Otherwise, there will be no WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram in the EU (though a useful idiot in an Oval Office might have something to say about that).
Since when was there unanimity about anything. Our system, in theory at least, follows the majority decision, no matter if small. In this I hope they have the sense to stop especially as I don't see Brussels as a representative democracy, or any kind of democracy of the people. Perhaps there should be a referendum :)
I'm of course talking about the public's perspective not the bureaucrats.
For anyone that's been following the Chat Control debacle, this is surely how it looks:
A guy sees a neighbor's house of fire. He dithers on whether to help, not help, or make things worse, for the longest time. Finally, when a few good other neighbors have been helping to put the fire down, he gets off his couch, walks over to the stricken house, and pours half a glass of water over the last wisp of smoke.
And is then praised as a hero.
Fire icon, because this isn't over yet, unfortunately.
