Astroberto

Democracy is the cornerstone of the EU, but it cannot be taken for granted. We must protect elections, media freedom & citizens from threats like disinformation & FIMI. Citizens & their freedoms must stay at the heart of the EU. ℹ️link.europa.eu/C7TDFT

On Thursday, the European Parliament “adopted” the extension of Chat Control 1.0. This is the temporary suspension of the EU’s ePrivacy rules that allows tech platforms to mass-scan citizens’ private communications, ostensibly to detect child sexual abuse material. “Adopted” is placed in quotation marks here because the word implies something that conspicuously failed to happen: a majority of MEPs voting in favour. In fact, 314 MEPs voted to reject the text, against 276 in favour. And yet it passed anyway. This was made possible through a procedural sleight of hand worthy of Brussels at its most cynical. The file was rammed through under an “urgency procedure”: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola unilaterally reopened a dossier that MEPs had already rejected in March, and the Council conveniently bounced it back at the start of the summer recess, when securing attendance is hardest. Rejecting it a second time would have required not a simple majority but an absolute one: 360 votes. The law was therefore approved despite a majority of MEPs voting against it. The regulation will now remain in force until April 2028, buying time for negotiations on its even more ambitious successor, Chat Control 2.0. As German MEP @FabioDeMasi noted following the vote, Chat Control is a “legislative zombie” — a measure the European Parliament has rejected multiple times, revived again and again until the desired outcome emerges. This episode should give pause to those who insist that the EU’s democratic deficit could be cured by handing more power to the European Parliament. Here is that very institution’s president working with the Council to resurrect a file the Parliament itself had buried. If this is how the Parliament operates, empowering it further would only deepen this democratic deficit, lending a thicker veneer of legitimacy to what remains, at bottom, an executive-bureaucratic machine that treats votes as obstacles to be engineered around. Continue reading here: unherd.com/newsroom/eu-ch…

YouTube has just taken down the political discussion clip about the EU's Chat Control, and the video is no longer viewable in the EU. This has been confirmed by several parties. The video is still available outside the EU. @puheenaihefi podcast is a Finnish current affairs program with 60k subscribers. In this episode, Peter Sund, CEO of the Finnish Information Security Cluster (Kyberala ry) offered pointed criticism of the EU's new Chat Control directive, which was enacted under questionable circumstances. Because the media is in Finnish, it is highly likely the censorship request came from a Finnish government official or a related party. This makes it troublesome. Because the Finnish constitution §12 guarantees freedom of expression. Preventing political publications is a criminal offence: Abuse of Official Position, punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to two years. You can listen to this episode on Apple Music and Spotify. Spotify link open.spotify.com/episode/51Etz1… Dysfunctional YouTube link youtube.com/watch?v=dGaQCc…

YouTube has just taken down the political discussion clip about the EU's Chat Control, and the video is no longer viewable in the EU. This has been confirmed by several parties. The video is still available outside the EU. @puheenaihefi podcast is a Finnish current affairs program with 60k subscribers. In this episode, Peter Sund, CEO of the Finnish Information Security Cluster (Kyberala ry) offered pointed criticism of the EU's new Chat Control directive, which was enacted under questionable circumstances. Because the media is in Finnish, it is highly likely the censorship request came from a Finnish government official or a related party. This makes it troublesome. Because the Finnish constitution §12 guarantees freedom of expression. Preventing political publications is a criminal offence: Abuse of Official Position, punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to two years. You can listen to this episode on Apple Music and Spotify. Spotify link open.spotify.com/episode/51Etz1… Dysfunctional YouTube link youtube.com/watch?v=dGaQCc…