The EU isn’t just one simple entity, it’s doing good things and bad things at the same time. Considering the recent election of the parliament, ‘security’-focused rethoric seems to resonate with the people.

To be fair, conservatives have been wanting this for a long time and this isn’t something entirely new.

The rightwing is in the majority in Europe, both as governments and in the EU Parliament - in the last EU elections the only countries that took a turn to the Left were the Scandinavians and Finland (which has a similar culture to them) and those tend to be a decade or two ahead of the rest of Europe.

Also it’s not only the US that has slided towards Authoritarianism after 9/11 - the same also happenned in many European countries (even if you don’t consider Britain which has never had quite the same level of Democractic principles as the rest and might actually be less Democratic than the US). Even Germany which one would expect to have the most abhorrence to things like State surveillance because of their past went that way (more than most, even): for example, if you want to buy a Prepaid (i.e. without a contract) SIM card for your mobile phone you have to provide identification and it all gets registered, which is quite rare in Western nations in general.

Last but not least, lets not forget we’re living in the end-game of Neoliberalism, an ideology which weakens the power of the entity which is controlled by the elected representatives of citizens - the State - by promoting what they call “non-interventionism”, “low regulation” and privatisation of everything to leave the power of Money to do whatever it wants, de facto a higher power than the power controlled by the vote (in other words, replace Democracy with Oligarchy) something which has now advanced to such a point that as the Money has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and massive companies in the markets deregulated by Neoliberalism leverage dominant positions to extract ever higher rents from normal consumers, even the Middle-class are feeling empoverished and angry. In this environment increasing surveillance facilitates the early detection and supression of movements for changing things that aren’t just content with a few meaningless and easilly ignored demonstrations or can’t be controlled by the money-men (as most of the Far-Right is).

The balance between projecting to voters the impression that they have Democracy whilst reducing real choices for them and installing more and more control mechanisms of Authoritarianism, might not lean quite as hard to Autoritarianism yet in most of Europe as it does in the US, but the same kind of slow abandonment of Democratic values (in practice, of Democracy) by the mainstream politicians has also happenned in Europe over the last couple of decades.

Both the pushing of surveillance in hard-to-eavesdrop communications channels and even the way in which these ideas are sold to people (i.e. “for the children”) are absolutelly consistent with Late-Stage Neoliberalism, the former being meant to facilitaty the control the populus by suppressing at the embrionic stage people organising to change things and the latter being quite a typical Neoliberal kind of argument to sell people things which are bad for the general citizens but are useful for those who have Power.

Britain provides interesting examples of the directon that things seem to be taking in the rest because they’ve been more Authoritarian than the rest of Europe for decades so you can say they’re ahead of the rest of us in this trend: for example they have Ecologist organisations under surveillance (some years ago it was well known that an EU Parliament Member for the Green Party had been under surveillance) and use Anti-terrorism legislation to arrest Ecologists organising demonstrations.

Isn’t this the exact opposite of what they were trying to achieve with GDPR?

Not really. I’m sure many people would like that to be the case and fervently believe it to be so, but it’s really not.

The GDPR gives people certain rights over data relating to them. It’s a bit similar to copyright in that regard. It’s different rights and different data but still. For example, you have the right to erasure of that data. Part of the justification for “chat control” is, ostensibly, suppressing the non-consensual sharing of images of minors. That is enforcing the GDPR.

3rd time’s the charm! And also according to this map they didn’t even have to split it with Russia this time.

Is your government opposing? → Great, but take a closer look at the reasoning: Some governments like Germany e.g. only object to the scanning of encrypted communications, but are fine with the indiscriminate scanning of other private and public communication, with the end of anonymous communication by requiring age verification, or with introducing a minimum age for “risky” communication apps.

I think that this is a very two dimensional way to look at the issue. Sure, big social media companies don’t want to be responsible for what happens on their plattforms, but that doesn’t and shouldn’t mean that it is sensible to compromise encryption like this. Also, it’s not like the already existing unencrypted, public parts of big social media platforms tend to be well moderated.

The argument that I often hear brought up is that this new surveillance capability would only be used when there is a court order, but even assuming that those are always fair and valid, and the police never circumvent due process, it being a possibility would inherently necessitate breaking end to end encryption, making communication less secure.

I don’t think that the government should be allowed to secretly listen in on communication in this way, but even if one thinks they should be allowed to, breaking secure communication for everyone doesn’t seem like a price that is justified.

Germany has bad experience with total surveillance and state power that misuses this information. Once through the Nazi-Regime and then the GDR (Stasi). We know how dangerous surveillance is, what desires it arouses and how easy it is to abuse. We’ve been through all this shit several times. Not going to happen again.

Germans are generally very concerned about their privacy and prefer that the state (or anyone) has little information about them. Hence, for example, the continued wide spread use of cash instead of cards. And the data protection laws, which are very strict by international standards.