How does this differ from the status quo? I would assume targeted surveillance, without requiring 3rd parties sabotage the security of their products, is already a legal law enforcement procedure?
The EU standardizes a lot of laws that a lot of countries should have had already. I'm sure there must be bad examples but I've really only seen improvements in action. Countries have to part with their idiotic version or give up on their idiotic proposals. NL for example had some issues wanting forced labor for unemployed people with social support but that would be called a job and require minimum wage.
Doesn't have to be different from the status quo. EU law acts upon member countries like the US federal constitution acts upon member states: it prevent individual members from ever changing their own laws to take more extreme positions than the recognized consensus position.
To my knowledge EU Regulations are simply laws that overrule local EU countries' laws, so whether it's possible or not for local laws to be more extreme only depends on such laws being at odds with what the Regulation prescribes (but I'm not a lawyer and only looked into that years ago).
From what I've been told how it actually works is that eu law doesn't apply directly to member states, but member states are required to amend their laws to be at least as strict as eu laws on all matters.
There's not a single type of EU laws, there are "regulations" and "directives".
Regulations are complete laws applicable immediately across the EU as they stand, the states are required to amend any conflicting law but the regulations already automatically prevail on any conflicting local law.
Directives instead need to be transposed into local law by each state individually, and can leave many details to the individual implementations.
Correct. But the chatcontrol proposal would have changed that. The proposed law mandates untargeted surveillance and bypassing of encryption through client-side scanning.
The status quo now is that each country does as it sees fit. This will unify legislation across the whole of EU and basically forbid countries to have laws that contravene to this.
Not really. This was expected. The commision tends to align with big business friendly proposals. The parliament tends to align with inhabitants, but has less power. Proposals go back and forth.
What makes this story special is how blatantly bribable the commission must be to make them spit out this proposal.
Here's an article in German about the sketchy dealings of the commissioner in question. Apparently, Ashton Kutcher (who's the main lobbying force behind this - how did that happen???), got a meeting with her confirmed 37 minutes after requesting it, while emails from privacy advocates continue being ignored.
Is Ashton Kutcher the actual "main lobbying force" or the hired face of the main lobbying force?
It's relatively common for lobby groups to hire known public faces to front for their interests .. a celebrity face can open a door to a meeting that might not otherwise happen.
It works both ways, celebrities will often hit a point in their careers where they start to look for a good noble cause to front for in order to keep their name and face in the public eye and aligned with <insert feel good values>.
For the historians that like to trace the roots of things the test would be whether this is a lobby and cause that was bought into being by its star face, or did it kick around for a few years before being bought to the attention of a star by their PR people and agents.
