"the EU wants to scan your messages" implies its every member state and not one freak from Denmark putting this forward where it will die.
The EU has always been 90 days from passing mass surveliance for the last decade. Until member states start actually backing this these articles are nothing but click bait.
In previous EU presidencies it's only been defeated by a slim margin, in part thanks to grassroots pressure. The attitude of the governments in favor of it has been: "whatever, we'll keep trying and we'll get it eventually".
So getting upset that people talk about it when it gets tabled once again is illogical and unjustifiable.
That's why people need to always pay attention to this stuff. They only have to win once to make it "precedent" and "the way it should be, obviously". THe people in power want to remain in power forever. This is one of the main ways they can stay there, by monitoring every single moment of our lives, even the most private of messages. Of course they will always have private back channels to collude, but the rest of us are cattle to them.
I'm confused now: is now the EU the baddie or the governments? Because these are two different entities - and not at least, also "the EU" is a group of government representatives. So folks if you're in the EU and don't like something the EU does - you do have levers, go vote, campaign, do something to move your own folks to do something on the EU level. And if you're in the US maybe better check your own backyard, I think it's on fire.
Not quite, the people making these decisions are all in EU commission and they are there because they were submitted by their national parties. Also there is the EU parliament that contains people that also belong to national parties.
If they look like they support a very unpopular decision a big public backlash can definitely make them reconsider. Depending on how secure they are in the national politics.
For example why do you think Denmark is submitting this now? Because the somewhat right wing gov in Poland that vetoed it last time is no longer in power. Instead Mr Europe (Tusk) is the prime minister. If EU beurocracy was embodied in a person it would be him. He was the president of the commission. He was the vice-leader of the EU People's Party - the biggest party in the EU parliament. He had his first political party funded by German SPD in cash... He also lost last parliamentary election in Poland, but still came out on top by making a coalition with three smaller parties (some say one was made exactly for that purpose few years ago). He will for sure do everything in his power to have this passed.
But his government is a minority one, and at least two of these three coalition parties are mainly supported by young people from large cities. And those were the people that undermined it last time by demonstrating (believe it or not the previous mildly right wing gov was not entirely opposed to having more control over people, but they had to quickly change their mind and veto it after mass demonstrations). So I'm hoping there is no chance in hell it'll pass.
Also, if it did, there is no chance it will be signed into the law by the current president or not be deemed unconstitutional by the constitutional Court... The EU and Tusk have claimed the court is "illegitimate" for years, but that is a long story. So in short, pushing this issue despite strong opposition definitely has a potential to blow up Polish politics. No PM leading a minority gov would do something like this intentionally while his party is loosing popular support every month.
EU commission and they are there because they were submitted by their national parties.
Members of EU commission are nominated by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament. Principle of subsidiary is absolutely abolished and far from direct democracy.
Let's not move the goalposts - nobody talked about direct democracy. There's no direct democracy anywhere in the world (even in the Swiss is quite limited) so there's no reason to hold the EU to such imaginary standards. Both the Council and the Parliament are resulted from national elections so they are elected to do exactly that: nominate people in European jobs. It works as designed, and we can either sit in the defeatist pit or act in the action points.
Both things can be true. They can try and prevent -corporate- surveillance through things like GPDR and various consumer protections that are superior to say the USA. All the while they can be trying to "slip into your DMs, all your DMs, peasant!" They are not mutually exclusive.
It's not clickbait. Many member states do support this. Much of the disagreement is on just how rights-violating the scanning should be.
The situation here in Denmark is dire: nobody in the Danish media reports on it, so everybody just shrugs. I've gone out of my way to educate my coworkers and most are unaware many members of our parliament want this. The number of parties that support it outnumber those who don't. Writing to our representatives is met with silence.
Everyone looking to Denmark as a model state should beware what happens when you have a population with such high trust in its government: the roots of autocracy are allowed to grow unfettered.
Denmark is very liberal in some ways but very much not in others. MitID -- digital id-- is a gateway to everything and is very much gated in terms of access; it took me months to sort out. It's a crime to not tell the state where you live, or to have too many people living in your house (I'd love to know what happens if you give birth on a "full" house -- is there a grace period, or do you have to move?). The work laptop I have been issued with is filled with invasive spyware that no British university employee would tolerate, and it is run (very well) as a benign dictatorship. You can't get a phone SIM card without personal registration. The tax agency know exactly to the øre how much money you received and what you spent it on in a given year as basically every transaction is recorded.
I'm not complaining that much about it -- you have a fantastic social security system, low inequality, high pay and high taxes, leading to a happy and well educated population and great food (no upf!) -- but it is a vision of the 1960s nanny state that really does think it knowd best.
You forget to exclude it from the law that legalize pornography. Denmark was the first country to legalize pornography, so obviously there where a bunch of, should we say "edge cases" that the lawmakers forgot to think about.
The Danish national television made a documentary, there's also a short article: https://www.dr.dk/om-dr/programmer-og-koncerter/candy-film-d... you can probably just run it through Google translate. The worst part is that it took like 10 - 11 years to fix.
So that's exactly how it is in Switzerland and people still say it's the best place in the world. Maybe sometimes the trust in the authorities is also warranted, right? Just keep them in check all the time, it's the only way to keep that trust - or you have this happening.
I mean Singapore is a pretty nice place to stay in too, but it's still not super free and pretty authoritarian. There are tons of factors that make a place "nice" to be in. In my experience though, at least Danemark is a bit of an odd place. It looks nice for Danes but it's a very monocultural place. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that was a bit apparent to me from an outsider's pov.
Not sure about the laptop with spyware, that's mostly illegal, though some security software could easily be used to spy on users if the company ignores the rules.
A lot of the stuff the government registeres about an individual is required to ensure that things runs as smoothly and efficiently as they do, even if Danes will frequently complain that the government is anything but smooth and efficient. There was always an understanding and laws protecting that data from being misused. Those rules have slowly been eroding over the past 20 years or so, by increasingly zealots politicians seeking to be "tough on crime and misuse of government services (i.e. brown people not working and living on social welfare)".
Illegal access to information about citizens are pretty frequent, yet our politicians don't seem to ever wanting to back down from collection and analysing data. They are either not smart enough to see the dangers or they are deliberately attempting to create a surveillance state.
The way article is formulated little bit as clickbait.
Title tries to scare while content says it's just a topic being reintroduced.
If anybody knows EU laws and is aware that to introduce such change all states need to agree... then I just wish DK good luck until it's anyhow confirmed at _all_ not many states do support this.
I come from different EU state and I first time hear this is big topic, seems then it's not such a big topic outside Denmark maybe?
> Everyone looking to Denmark as a model state should beware what happens when you have a population with such high trust in its government: the roots of autocracy are allowed to grow unfettered.
Denmark is currently one of the nicest places you can find in the world. If that’s what happens when you trust the government then sign me up!
PS. I know the situation can quickly deteriorate if you’re not constantly monitoring what the government does and agree with OP on that. Just thought it was incredibly naive to try to make the point that this can lead to an autocracy while showing one of the most well functioning democracies in the world. The USA seems like a much better example, and even then compared to most countries in the world, as you can see by the amount of people trying to move there, it’s still a pretty damn nice place to go.
Yes, if you are an ethnic Dane in the majority, that's probably true. But that's almost always true. Governments, even autocratic ones, usually don't go against the majority. But for everyone else, yes it's absolutely worrying. Just a small example, Danemark is the only country that has force deported almost every Syrian refugee, children included back, in 2021. I'd get it now that the war is over, but it wasn't then. Even Trump didn't do that.
They haven't passed this yet, because every time people make noise and write their representatives. It's "clickbait" like this that makes any sort of privacy still possible.
Sure, but this is the same thing as saying "America is going to paint all birds orange" just because one person in the Iowa General House Assembly said we should do it.
Awareness is good but there is a fine line between awareness of specific politicians that suck and just misrepresenting the facts.
There isnt. Its a crazy example of what is happening here.
To use a real world example take this "EU deal" that Trump did. Everyone is talking like its already taken effect. But the reality is the EU just handshake agreed to this, but at the end of the day all of the member states have to rattify it. And if states dont or if there are arguements made the whole thing gets tossed.
I just wish people would say that they dont understand how the EU works. At some point some Dutch mayor is going to say that the inernet should be free, and "tech journalists" are going to write articles talking about how all EU citizens will have Fibre cables connected to them at all times.
You picked a really bad time to defend a "politicians will eventually do what is best for us" position, given that such a law just came into effect in UK. And I think it's you who don't understand how the EU works. It's the biggest countries that must agree to something. Then they coerce/convince the rest. At best, the smaller countries can put on some kind of resistance until they extract some minor exception. This isn't "some Dutch mayor proposes free Internet". This is a relentless onslaught on encryption and privacy. And it's already in effect in other countries where someone at sometime also said "nah, don't worry, they just messing with us, it's not gonna pass".
Sometimes I think the HN contingent just willfully buries its head in the sand on issues of the EU, because they prefer to think of the EU as some idealist version of whatever they've lost as leftists in the US.
What this person is writing is correct. The reality of EU politics is anything but democratic. The EU is crowned by an unelected commission that does not serve the interests of the governed.
It seems reasonable to theorise it is actually a timezone-dependent effect and there is probably a slightly weird sample of English-speaking tech-focused Europeans who spend a lot of their day checking social media. When the US is up and about the tone shifts.
The EU is quite good at cultivating a benign, environment-friendly, happy family image. I think it is a deliberate contrast to the "gung-ho" American world presence.
The background is pretty machiavellistic, though. There is a lot of money and influence to be managed. It is no secret that Ursula von der Leyen got her first mandate basically from Merkel, a reward for being her loyal subordinate for years.
The commission is appointed in back-room deals by "elected" governments which are in turn often only indirectly appointed by parliaments. From your nickname I do infer you are from Germany, where ministers are not elected and the chancellor is not elected by the voters. Instead the chancellor is elected by the Bundestag, which was elected by the voters, but only after the usual back-room deals of forming a coalition. So there is no actual voter control on who becomes chancellor, as evidenced by several "grand" coalitions that always had Merkel as chancellor. Ministers are then not even elected by parliament, they are simply appointed by the chancellor. So not elected in any sense of the word, not even indirectly.
The only elected body in the EU is the EU parliament which has practically no powers when compared to the commission. It can only vote on what the commission proposes, it cannot make its own proposals. It cannot overrule the commission. And the commission can make rules and regulations of its own, without involving the parliament. The most the parliament can do is hold up the process a little.
The EU is not democratic by any sensible measure. "But there is an election somewhere in the process" doesn't make a democracy. Many dictatorships, communist regimes and even monarchies do have an election somewhere in the process. The emperor has no clothes, and the EU isn't democratic. Any timid initiative to make it so has died ages ago. The last straw was the trumped up non-election of von-der-Leyen. Actually, the parliament should have filled her job with its candidate, as was promised before the election. After election day, that promise which was intended to introduce at least a whiff of democratic accountability, was instantly forgotten. von der Leyen was instated instead of the parliaments candidate by a back-room deal.
Everything you say here is correct. Democracy is not a binary where if you have an election no matter how indirect then it's a "democracy™".
The EU is governed by backroom deals and is extremely opaque. Adding to everything you said: there is no accountability, there is little presence of EU matters in newspapers, EU leaders hardly even attempt to communicate with their people (practically only von der Leyen or António Costa make public speeches).
Just compare: you surely know the names of all or almost all ministers of your country. Do you know the names of even 2 out of the 27 commissioners? Scrutiny of their doings and the laws that are proposed appear in news regularly. Does such scrutiny exist of EU institutions?
If you don't know about EU commissioners or EU matters, then that is purely up to you.
Matter of fact, you're commenting on a news article about EU happenings right now.
If one is only the slightest bit informed, one has probably heard of Kaja Kallas, the foreign affairs commissioner or Maroš Šefčovič, the trade comissioner.
These are not some big secret names, but public figures with well-articulated positions that regularly hold press conferences.
While there have been a tiny numbers of faithless electors in the past, they have never influenced the outcome of a presidential election. Furthermore, about 80% of electors are from states that have laws that require their electors to vote for the candidate who wins the state's popular vote.
That's just ridiculous. The US president is directly elected by the people, modulo the weirdness of state-level FPTP. Flawed as the electoral college is, there's no comparison whatsoever.
The electoral college is a rubber stamp of the popular vote (per state). The commission is selected by the member-states governments with no electoral input. You cannot be making this argument in good faith...
The member-states governments are elected by popular vote, per state, just as electors are. It is the same level of indirection, whichever way you try to reframe it.
There's no way you're seriously making this argument. I don't know what else to say except repeat myself.
The US electoral college is an historical artifact that simply rubber stamps the votes of the States. The member states' heads of government make the decision themselves! The equivalent would be the electoral college simply voting for the president themselves.
The electoral college delegates choose the president of their own free will? There is no presidential election? You literally have to be trawling at this point.
The electoral college is elected. It then chooses the president, who is not elected by the people. The electoral college is not necessarily reflective of the popular vote, as famously demonstrated by the 2016 election.
All of this is simple fact. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.
The term presidential election is a euphemizing misnomer, more accurately it would be called presidential electoral college election.
If you don't mind me asking, are you autistic? You are conflating the de jure (winning the popular vote wins you the state's electors) with the de facto (the electors are a pro forma/rubber stamp).
The comparison does NOT make sense. One is a body pledged, often legally, to vote for the state's winning candidate, with only extremely rare deviations by faithless electors (which never once came even close to putting the popular electoral results in question). The other is a body who is explicitly tasked with making the decision from scratch. Is it possible that you acknowledge that these are not in the slightest the same?
Switzerland is certainly democratic, because voters can directly vote for laws. Some countries and states do have provisions to that effect, but with more restrictions and less often used.
The US is actually more democratic than e.g. Germany, because the president is elected by the people (though indirectly), not by parliament. Therefore a political oligarchy could be prevented, because the majority in parliament and the president can check on each other, and the president is more accountable to the voters than to parliament.
Generally there is a sliding scale of course, but the less directly officials are elected, the less democratic a country is. A common example would be a soviet (engl. "council") republic, which isn't considered democratic at all, even though it has tons of elections: Each factory/town/village elects a local workers's council, which in turn elects a county council, which elects a regional council, which elects a state council, which elects a national council, which elects the council of ministers, which elects the chairman. Tons of filters that make absolutely certain that the will of the party and state always supercedes the will of the people.
> The US is actually more democratic than e.g. Germany, because the president is elected by the people
The German president is mainly a figurehead with limited power. The office was stripped down after WWII.
The real power lies with the ministers, who can issue absolute orders that have to be obeyed without question. One of many results is that German prosecutors cannot be trusted with issuing EU wide arrest warrants and had the ability stripped from them the moment it was challenged in court.
I was comparing the USian president to the German chancellor. Both head up the government made up of ministers they appoint. It's only the name that is different, and the order in protocol. The USian president is first and head of state in protocol order, the German chancellor is third after the German federal president and the president of the Bundestag (one chamber of parliament).
Sorry for my being imprecise here, Germans tend to skip their own president(s) because, as you correctly state, they are mostly unimportant figureheads.
It is not disinformation. The Commission is unelected by the people. I specifically called out that the Commission does not serve the interests of the governed. That is a correct statement.
What's more the Commission is more than one person, unlike the US presidency.
Again, the commission is appointed by elected officials.
Do you call ministers in your country unelected? Would you call the US president unelected?
I agree the Comission doesn't serve the interests of the governed, but that's because the people keep voting against their own interests and vote in right-wing governments, which in turn appoints a right-wing commission, which then does the right-wing thing of selling out its people.
It is not a structural EU fault, it is the electorate that's to blame.
> Do you call ministers in your country unelected?
Don't know about emptysongglass's country, but in France, ministers are absolutely unelected. The president is directly elected, who then appoints the prime minister, who then "proposes" the other ministers of his government. There is no strict rule by which the prime minister is chosen, only a "habit" to choose from the "winning camp", which was not respected by Macron these last two times. There's also no rule for how the ministers are picked. As you can imagine, this is largely backroom deals.
The last two prime ministers have all been deemed unsatisfactory by the parties with the most votes in the last legislative elections and by those who voted for them (people voted directly for their representatives in the lower chamber of parliament). These prime ministers were from parties that scored lower in the elections.
You are spreading some serious disinformation about how the EU works.
Once such EU-wide regulations are fully passed (incl. the EP), the countries have to implement them in their law. Sure, they can drag their feet, or there actually might be a real showdown, for example, if the German Constitutional Court says that this is against the Grundgesetz and that it does not recognize supremacy of EU law over itself / the German Constitution. If the same happens in Poland, there will be extra drama added.
But at the same time, at least half of the EU, countries with negligible tech sector, will happily pass that legislation without any significant friction, because a) think of the children, b) monitoring opposition and dissent, yay!, c) we have to, because Brussels said so, d) the lawmakers know shit about encryption and tech and they will be exempt from monitoring anyway, so encryption is something that is only used by criminals and terrorists and if you have nothing to hide etc. etc.
At which point you have the surveillance infrastructure installed and in operation across half the continent, and with elections changing governments, it will spread.
Our main protection used to be that small countries like Slovenia or Malta don't have the weight to push Apple or Google to introduce deliberate holes in their software.
If the European Commission joins the push, that is a completely different pressure.
It is a bit like asking a girl to show you her private parts for years until she has a moment of weakness. That would make you a real creep.
The EU parliament is fake, and the unelected commission has become a pathetic clown show.
Their latest VP addition, Antonio Costa, had to be removed from office in Portugal because he was too corrupt. But good enough for leadership of the EU commission.
They had a violent rhetoric, prolonged artificially to this day the Ukraine war and watched the population being slaughtered without sending any troops.
So instead of loosing a few territory, the Ukrainian population is now dead demographically. If you prolong enough a war and the population is wreaked, the war is lost. This is what happened in WWI.
Just in the last few days they managed to be humiliated by both the US and China. China went so far to park them in a bus, arrive with no welcoming and have a walk of shame with in silence on a faded carpet.
The EU was about democracy, peace and prosperity. Today it is is pursuing the opposite objectives.
Downvote me if you want, I care more about staying alive than any internet karma points.
People said the same thing about the UKs Online Safety Act when it was proposed. If these articles do not warn us to take action and spread more awareness on what's going on, we would just be stepping closer to the dystopian future faster.
There are constant attempts to undermine our rights. Every state has their political figures that try to push things like that and they would have succeeded (more) if there wasn't so much public backlash. They continue to try though. What you are describing is a good example of the preparedness paradox.
And it's a slippery slope. The UK already damned itself with the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 that allowed for Technical Capability Notices to be served in secret to any organization they desired to backdoor.
Normalizing it and saying it is a mundane topic 30 years is actually helping these powers to install it, like getting tired over time and ending just accepting it. The reaction should be much stronger from the tech companies but the tech companies are actually supporters of it, just so they can continue hoarding money while violating other laws.
-> Discord/Google/Meta/etc are already scanning the private chats for pictures, and they didn't wait for a law.
To fix pedophiles, supporters of terrorism and gang members, there is a more radical solution: fund justice and police so dangerous people can be put in jail (or kill them if that's something you think is right).
Once this is done, there is no need anymore to monitor conversations outside of current scope.
Though, justice is not fair in practice, so there will be collateral innocent victims (like with privacy invasion) :/
they never really needed it because their allies already got all the data but with UK out of the EU and US proving less reliable / more volatile ally its more important for them to have their own source of intel.
though, because lawful intercept is also a thing in EU, its stupid to assume they do not already have access if they want it.
despite not having 'dragnet' surveillance , they have effective and deep targeted surveillance and laws that allow them to do that fairly freely.... (most countries are more strict with their own citizens, but then its handy to have allies to do it for u -_-... wonderful world!)
same logic as "fixing the clocks wasn't that big of a problem, the world didn't set on fire", well yeah because we warned you and fixed it. This is also the logic behind the no-win scenario of IT/security budgets:
things are working: why do we pay so much for IT/security or XYZ tool, we don't need it.
things are on fire: we pay so much money for IT/security or XYZ tool and it didn't help us
Exactly. The European """Parliament""" does not have the power to propose new laws, so if it passes once, it cannot repeal it of its own initiative. So much for democracy.
Ironic that this was said by the IRA to the Conservatives in the UK, after they narrowly missed bombing Thatcher. Maybe they learned from it, since that strategy is how they eventually got the OSA pushed through.
"not one freak from Denmark putting this forward where it will die"
Not true. The truth is that Chat Control has returned several times already and the majority of the EU states were actually always for, but a blocking minority has been reached each time - barely so.
Worryingly, one of the blocking minority countries used to be Germany, where privacy-minded smaller parties (Greens, FDP) are no longer in government. The new government hasn't declared its position yet. If it switches to yes, then the remnants of our privacy are kaput just like that, and the only hope will be in the ECHR, or possibly (sigh) in Trump's tech bros angrily vetoing it from abroad.
So, no one freak from Denmark, but a concerted, repeated effort.
There is an even worse set of measures in the phase of preparation, ProtectEU, which would mandate backdoors in everything under the pain of prison for vendors, introduce mandatory data retention and ban non-logging VPNs.
Fuck, I don't want to live in a China with a blue flag instead of red. This is absolutely dystopian.
Don't downplay the danger. Don't spread disinformation. This isn't a random shot from a random weirdo in Denmark. This is a seriously driven EU-wide attempt to destroy meaningful encryption with a lot of proponents and backers. And the current EC chair, Ursula von der Leyen, has a history of promoting such measures, that is why Germans call her Zensursula.
As a Dane, we're sorry - democracy is imperfect and it seems that being a politician requires technological incompetence and immunity to silly things like numbers and facts. :(
> Fuck, I don't want to live in a China with a blue flag instead of red. This is absolutely dystopian.
I think it's too late. People already showed they'd loudly support this if propagandized enough like during COVID times where the most draconian and anti constitutional of policies were enacted, literally following and lobbied by China.
Unless people recognize that they did a terrible thing in supporting covid policies instead of burying their head under the sand or persisting in the ridiculous propaganda about anti-vaxxers and disinformation, they're always going to be easily manipulated. The same goes for the "let's invade new country because 'dictator/terrorism/grave threat to our western way of life'".
Are we the baddies is a rethorical question at this point.
Hahahahah. The new Normal was always meant to be temporal? You know some of us absolutely paid attention, right? You know many things absolutely remained, right?
Also, anti constitutional and anti human rights is wrong no matter if it's temporal or not.
But hey, you supported it, now deal with the fallout. Temporary like the war on terror. Give me a break.
I don't think this kind of discourse helps and I don't agree with the point. I am vehemently against chat control, but at least in my country (Netherlands) I saw nothing beyond the pale re: covid measures given the situation. I also don't see how those measures, regardless of whether you agree with them, reflect on chat control, as I'm not aware of any covid measures targeting encryption, nor of any EU-level measures you might be referring to here. Maybe you care to elucidate? Regardless by equating the two I think you alienate people, because as far as I can tell most people are still broadly understanding of COVID measures taken and the core demographic that's not is also generally in favor of Chat Control.
> I don't think this kind of discourse helps and I don't agree with the point.
Helps who? It absolutely helps to call out the hypocrisy and consequences. This is what you wanted. Enjoy it.
> I am vehemently against chat control, but at least in my country (Netherlands) I saw nothing beyond the pale re: covid measures given the situation. I also don't see how those measures, regardless of whether you agree with them, reflect on chat control, as I'm not aware of any covid measures targeting encryption, nor of any EU-level measures you might be referring to here.
You're willfully ignorant of the authoritarianism perpetrated, then.
- They imprisoned you in your home.
- They disallowed movement beyond certain ranges.
- They censored free speech and sometimes even legally punished or imprisoned people for speech. You would refer to it as "dangerous misinformation" but that is what every authoritarian government says when they're oppressing their populace.
- they blamed different political or ethnic groups of the "spread of the disease".
- they destroyed the concept of informed consent from the Nuremberg trials and coerced people under threat of job loss/house loss/family separation to get new vaccines (extremely questionable ones, to add insult to injury).
- Questioning the vaccines in any way was censored and equated with the worst of offenses.
- invasion of privacy and constitutional rights of all kinds were justified in the name of "stopping the crisis".
- there was no perceived end and many legal frameworks stayed.
> you care to elucidate?
Hope you hace fun with the above. I could go for ages.
> Regardless by equating the two I think you alienate people
Oh my sweet summer child. You think I care about alienating people who wanted to send the "evil spreaders of disease" and "fredumb" lovers to camps?
I'm absolutely over you and the likes of you. You either come to the side of anti authoritarianism fully and do a full mea culpa or I'll just laugh while loudly saying "this is what you wanted".
> because as far as I can tell most people are still brodly understanding of COVID measures taken and the core demographic that's not is also generally in favor of Chat Control
I don't quite parse the last part but I can assure you that people who were manipulated to give away their rights during COVID can be coerced or manipulated to give whatever next right they're asked. You'll scream about terrorism, the evil right, the evil foreign country, the evil criminal or whatever and that's that.
Get shocked and push for freedom for all or just take it because it's what you asked for. Nanny government. No dissent.
This seems to be done in a completely different way. Instead of a loud propaganda push, the proponents seem to want to avoid drawing attention to the proposals. Most of the big media is either completely silent about that, or only mentions those proposals shortly on the bottom of the page. Which indicates that they haven't received any instructions to push it visibly.
And I think this is partially caused by fear of possible backlash.
>Until member states start actually backing this these articles are nothing but click bait.
As the article states "According to the former MEP for the German Pirate Party, Patrick Breyer, Denmark crucially needs to manage to convince Germany of its proposed text. The new government has not yet taken a position at the time of writing."
And since the current German government is bound to take the most idiotic and destructive path it is basically assured.
The EU has always been 90 days from passing mass surveliance for the last decade. Until member states start actually backing this these articles are nothing but click bait.