Security is just the scapegoat excuse.

There is a certain group of politicians who are pushing for this very hard. In this case, the main thrust seems to be coming from Denmark, but from what I understand there are groups (eg. europol) pushing this from behind the scenes. They need the politicians to get it done.

  Oh Harry, don't worry! Everyone can happen to have bloated his aunt by an accident! 

  I like Ludo. He was the one who got us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favour: His brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with unnatural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over."

Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.

One might be tempted to blame a lack of media attention, but I don't think that's it. For example in the US, the Snowden revelations attracted tons and tons of media attention, yet it never became a major topic in elections, as far as I'm aware. No politician's career was ended over it, and neither did new politicians rise based on a platform of privacy-awareness. No one talks about mass surveillance today. No one cares. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in Europe.

Politicians are basically whores that only use their mouths. They'll say whatever gets them in office and keeps them there. Whether that's simping for extremists, special interests, the teacher's union, etc, etc.

The state(s) wants this and the state itself is an interest that politicians can get ahead by pandering to, no different than any other interest (from their perspective as politicians and more equal animals generally, not our perspective as less equal animals under the boot). When you're talking about elections like the EU's big interest groups, like the state, tend to dominate.

The sanctions politicians should face for bringing up unpopular topics should be that they don't get voted for.

> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

Yes. Vote them out. Keep raising it.

How is it undemocratic? Arresting terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers, etc have no impact on democracy. And it's legal for the government to intercept your communications and has been for decades and in fact your communications have been mass monitored for decades and we still have democracy.

> allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany)

Germany is one of the leaders in data requests in the world. They're right on it.

> keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

That's because we have a democracy and people vote on who they want. And if they do what people want they get another few more yeears. So these politicans just following the will of the people.

> Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good.

Those people we can just ignore, they were always going to be on the fringe.

> These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.

They are not. You've just been blissfully unaware of the world you've been living in, and think this is something new. Nah, the only thing new is that everyone's messages are encrypted. That's the only new thing.

Especially in a time where controlling public opinion is just a matter of running targeted ad campaigns on social medias and buying newspapers and tv stations.

If we like freedom we need to get rid of power centralisation, as much as possible, and give back the power to the individual by removing as many laws as possible and relying on privatisation and decentralisation.

But there is no one left to fight in the western world, everybody is glued to their smartphone and we're doomed to become the next China.

The problem is that this is not a party issue. This is a leadership issue. Power corrupts. The only way out of his is a massive overhaul of the political system that makes 'professional politicians' a thing of the past.

It looks like German population actually enjoys these things. Third time lucky?

edit: how would you explain lack of protests or that the authors of proposal don't face criminal investigation? After all this is authoritarian regime refresh, just without the labels.

I would say the UK has worse privacy than any other country on earth. I'm really hoping for plausible deniability to become more common to help protect against the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...

What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.

Datenschutz - Schmatenschutz.

"Datenschutz" is something that politicians talk about in their "Sonntagsreden" [Sunday sermons; a term hard to translate into English]. During the rest of the week, the politicians pass laws to gouge out civil liberties (because of "think of the children", "terrorists", "child abusers", "right-wing movements" - whatever is opportune in the current political climate).

Law and order, tuff-on-crime political parties (PVV, VVD, CDA¹) just love the idea of control over citizen's chat messages.

This is not 'because of the EU'. We are part of the EU and influence its policies.

1: https://chatcontrole.nl/stemwijzer2023/

If something does happen later it comes out that the suspects were known already but they just didn't act on the suspicion.

Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.

But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.

Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.