If by “we” you mean “the UK”, I’d like to point you in the direction of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, which is much worse than “we don’t like encrypted chat”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...

That is true, but you will be able to vote for a party in power to reverse it. Not possible in case of EU.

The institutions that write these proposals in the EU have no power to put them into law, though.

Also - I am still shocked how much surveillance there is in the UK compared to mainland Europe. In the UK it's a criminal offence to refuse to hand over passwords for your devices (and encryption keys).

That is not the case in the EU, so I find it quite funny that you cite a proposal that would have to go through the parliament first and could still be overruled by national laws, as a good reason for not being in the EU :D

> That is true, but you will be able to vote for a party in power to reverse it. Not possible in case of EU.

Explain this logic to me please.

While every EU member state has the right to veto important laws, there is no way to abolish a law unless all member states agree. So even if 90% of all Germans agree that a EU law should be abolished, they can't overrule tiny countries like Malta or Cyprus. This is a fundamental, undemocratic flaw that most politicians and supreme courts in Europe have yet to realize.

I think a lot of this depends on where your political position is, what is elected in your country and how the the EU is currently pointing. For instance for me as an Austrian citizen my country is significantly more leaning towards surveillance that I'm more worried about what we would be doing if we were not protected by the EU lawmaking process getting a lot more scrutiny and visibility.

I'm Austrian as well and I don't think lawmaking would go in the direction of surveillance without the EU. Austria's main ruling party has too many show politicians - I think they can do what they do now because they don't have to say in public what they do. In short: I don't think Sebastian Kurz would say in public that he wants all encryption (or chat app encryption) to be illegal.

I can only say that I disagree. Bluemel even wanted to require real name registration for all online services before Ibiza.

These things come from EC. Your vote does not influence incoming legislation. Only way to achieve something is lobbying and you'd have to find huge sums to have EC members even consider talking to you. They can make a lot of money from controlling the communication of citizens and you cannot vote them out, so what's the alternative?

Legislation in most countries does not come from elected officials, it typically is drafted up by lawyers. That's not a good argument. With the commission a lot of what ends up on the proposals is lobbied by citizens and it's the MEP that vote on it before becoming law who are elected.

I vote liberal parties in my country and that has done jack shit to prevent shitty laws to be passed because the majority seems to be electing the types of people who absolutely adore surveillance.

The difference is that you can vote for people who choose lawyers and they can influence what lawyers write. You dont have this much control in the EU.

The governments of each country in the EU, elected democratically, are the people who choose the specific law-writers (council of ministers) who you are critical of for proposing this law in this story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Organs_of_the_European_Un...

To the extent that conspiracies of “deep state” or “lobbyist” are involved, the only reason the EU is different to the member states themselves is that it’s a single big target instead of a lot of small ones.

And in this case lawyers role is to implement what EC proposed and MEPs voted in. Elected governments are like management of McDonalds franchise. People can choose chair layout or where napkins are located.

That contradicts what you yourself wrote one level up. I’m sure that’s accidental, would you care to rephrase?

??? This is the Council of the European Union, which is the relevant cabinet members from the national governments. You vote out your representative in, say, the Environment Council, in exactly the same way you vote out the national Minister of Environment (or equivalent) in your EU country, because it's literally the same person.

Confusingly, there's also the European Council. You vote out your representative in there by voting out your your head of government (president, premier, taoiseach etc.), because again, it's literally the same person.

And if you're talking about the commission, which seems to have little to do with this, you vote them out by voting in different heads of government (again) to nominate different commissioners/a different president, and/or different members of the European parliament to not confirm them.

In the UK? Voting is a paper tiger for stuff like this. The bill was supported by both Tories and Labour, and I was living in a Tory safe seat. I mean, I could’ve moved to Scotland and supported the SNP bid for independence or Wales and Plaid Cymru (but not NI and Sinn Féin given their policy of not taking their seats), but realistically there was nothing I could do about it other than what I did do about it.

https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/80

If you didn't have any luck with the House of Commons, you perhaps should have tried voting for a different member of the House of Lords, or different judges, or a different monarch. Now that the UK has left the EU, you don't have to worry about those institutions being overridden by unelected MEPs.

By the time the next UK general election is scheduled, I rather hope to have replaced my UK citizenship with a German one. (It’s not certain I could do it that fast, but I’m going to try).

Which party is that?

I agree save for the attack on the EU at the start. I'm assuming you're English (or an Irish Unionist), and will point out that the UK has been entirely onboard with the EU's most egregious abuses of power. Hell, some of them were the UK's idea. (EUCD Article 17 comes to mind.) In this particular case the UK already has local laws which establish a legal duty to decrypt data on command of the government. As far as I'm concerned the UK's hands are just as dirty as any other EU member state, and the problems with the EU are not the institution itself but the member states that make it up using it as a policy laundering device.

You're distracting away from the main issue that the EP has no rights to overrule the EC.

It's not a distraction. The EC needs urgent reform and the UK was one of it's corrupting influences.

> We probably have left at the last minute.

If that means you’re British: the GCHQ initiated this. Nobody is more under video surveillance than you guys. Enjoy your chat loicense.

Fun fact, almost all of that surveillance is operated by private players - pubs, shops, small stores, etc. The UK never had a Big Brother set up unlike some mainland cities. People keep bringing up this bullshit statistic without going deeper.

And it's not like the police can barge in and demand video.

> UK never had a Big Brother set up

I don't even know where to start.

I mean sure there is the GCHQ and all of its shenanigans, but none closely resembling a system where the police track your movements every single second via video feed.

Well then there is nothing to worry about haha, you sure seem like a splendid lad and the coppers won't ever knock on your door for wrong-think will they, because that has never happened right, that simply isn't a thing in the UK, couldn't be me I surely have only officially approved opinions haha I love this new law

Funnily when I was in London, coppers knocked on my door at least twice a year on average. It was a running gag towards the end.

Considering that I come from a third world nation where the cops often pull members of my community aside for searches and special checks, the British police force for all their faults are a breath of fresh air. I've been exactly in that spot, with police using surveillance data and national ID data to arrest protestors and put them under false charges. I've personally almost been arrested for no reason except for 1.) walking in the night alone and 2.) walking at night in suspicious clothing (i.e. T-shirt and shorts).

We can now vote for a party who can try to fix this. It wouldn't be possible if that was EU wide.

Brexit was founded on the misunderstanding that it was "faceless unelected bureaucrats" that run the EU. I'd argue Britons wielded more power than most others in the EU, and that the EU parliament is quite a lot more democratic than the British one. The british are now stuck with the UK parliament without adult supervision.

Can you explain how average Brit had more power?

Because they still had exactly the same power in their own government, and a sizable chunk of power in the European one. Now they'll follow a huge part of European regulations to be able to trade, but have no seat at the table.

Government had to implement whatever EC proposed and MEPs voted in. Now they don't have to.

The EU certainly did not put a gun to your head and ask you to be one of the most surveilled countries in the world.

I note that here I am in the UK, and the current home secretary appears to be Priti Patel. Who is far more hardline on this than the EU, and not in the good direction.

If we left at the last minute, it's so that we can go faster. One of the things we are deliberately jettisoning is the protections afforded us by being in the EU.

We now have more control and we can vote for a party that could fix this.

Could you please name a party who's against this? The Pirate Party UK recently disbanded. There is no one to vote for and practically starting a party won't achieve much. Seriously, give me a party to vote for to reduce the state of surveillance in the UK.

It does not exist because there is no public awareness. One of the parties could start looking into it and make noise. But if it won't catch up with the public it won't happen, however without EU at least we have a chance.

The Czech pirat party is dping rather well on both local and european level - it meeds a lot of work, but it can be done!

It's much less work to convince one country than dozens.

Which is why we can now watch our protections and human rights and other such vanish into the distance. Without the need to convince dozens of other countries to join in, the UK can fuck itself over. The greatest threat to the liberties of the British people remains its own government and ruling classes.

We could. We won't.

People who cared about this in the UK; our best bet was to stay in the EU which is not nearly so extreme about it as the UK is. The current UK government is looking forwards to jettisoning the protections and human rights that were afforded us by being in the EU.

That said, the current UK government is fantastically inept. Everything they touch turns to shit, and any time BoJo says he absolutely won't do something - he'll crumble in a fortnight (see e.g. every EU negotiation, Lockdown 2.0, the feeding children fiasco, etc etc).

There are current UK ministers whose names have become bywords for incompetency and government fuckup. If the UK decided to ban encryption tomorrow, and the government put their best people on it, we'd be looking at a decade or so before they got anywhere. The EU are heading to a more moderate place, but they will get there faster by virtue of not being British; by not having to do it via the dream team of Johnson, Cummings, and whoever is in charge of screwing up everything they touch this week (Chris Grayling, the man who paid millions to a ferry company that had never owned, chartered, leased or in any other way been involved with a ferry or single ferry route, historically takes this role).

There won't be a party who has a chance of being elected that could 'fix' this.

> the current home secretary appears to be Priti Patel.

Ah, Priti Patel, the minister that was forced to resign by the May government for having had several secret meetings with Israeli officials during her tenure. Enjoy the UK!

Oh go on, it's worse than that.

She wanted to fund Israeli Army hospitals in the Golan Heights out of the UK foreign aid budget. Off her own back, without telling anyone.