I keep bringing it up since people forget about it: in 2006 the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive that forced all ISPs to save the browsing history of everyone.
It was eventually declared invalid by the European court of human rights, but it was still in effect for many years. Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
The EU's attempts to spy on people go back decades. You'll also note that government gets exemptions from all the privacy stuff the EU pushes.
I hope the EU changes course on this, but as with their handling of other tech... I'm not holding my breath.
Is that directive the reason why website operators do not want to implement ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) which allows to encrypt server name in TLS connection? I tried googling this, but Cloudflare blog only says that they disabled ECH without disclosing the reasons: [1]
No, and other sites seem to not support it. This is a list of top 10 000 sites and it seems that virtually nobody supports this TLS extension: https://divested.dev/misc/ech.txt .
> Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
This is funny because the secret service abuses citizens' privacy in Romania all the time. But this turned against corrupt politicians which is probably why they sued. The secret service wiretapped them and gave the recordings to the anti-corruption directorate which was then led by the current EPPO chief prosecutor. Some high level politicians ended up in prison after much friction, but in the end a few heads had to roll in order to at least give the impression of fighting corruption, which the US Embassy and the EU asked for.
Romanian establishment parties would vote anything that comes out of the Comission. CSAM? They will vote for it. The opposition is basically Kremlin funded right wingers which were barred even from joining Viktor Orban's conservative group and two small parties like Macron's, one which didn't get any votes and the other has like three MEPs after making an alliance with two other small parties. If the right wingers vote against CSAM it's just to sabotage the EU decision process.
"Welp.. funding terrorists and then pretending like we're afraid of them didn't work, how about we fund child pornographers and then pretend like we just can't catch them if encryption exists."
Typical modern law enforcement incompetence. They don't care about you. They just want to protect their access to your data.
> Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.
> The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
> The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.
> The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.
Modern day EU, is a sharing of power structure over the EU between France and Germany. The institutional seats for the EU are in Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Poland and the UK wanted Turkey to join the union to provide voting balance against Germany and France. This didn't happen and France made it clear that they'll never agree to it. The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
One way to think about the current EU in medieval terms: A personal union between France and Germany; and a bunch of associated vassal states.
I don't think the CIA had much to do with it. I am pretty sure they tried to soft-power their way through some decisions though. Europe is too big for the CIA to control.
> The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
The UK had a very beneficial (for the UK populace) position. Disinformation campaigns fueled by oligarchs and Russian money got the population to score an own goal. Gains for the few, destruction for the others.
But as one of those wealthy politicians said, "at least the fish are now happy".
With its creation, by which I mean Lisbon Treaty. Before that EU was basically just a free trade zone, after Lisbon the eurocrats took over, trying to turn EU into socialist's version of heaven on Earth.
The censorship initiatives in the west largely originate from the US „Blob“, the amalgamation of the State Department, Pentagon, CIA and the soft-power NGOs.
Mike Benz, a former insider, spends his days explaining how this works.
This is not the best introduction that he has done, but it is the latest space he recorded on the Telegram affair:
„A turbo-charged 10 mins on Telegram as an instrument of US statecraft, why the US State Dept selectively promotes Telegram as a free speech tool in some countries but pressures gov'ts to censor Telegram in other countries, and Who Dunnit behind Pavel's arrest.“
