The assessments of the 27 EU states’ budgets and economies will be published by the European Commission on Wednesday, with France, Italy and Belgium among the member states to be reprimanded over their accumulated excessive new debt.

The Commission said it was satisfied that “the opening of a deficit-based excessive deficit procedure is warranted” in the case of seven countries. The group also included Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.

The EU suspended debt and deficit regulations to help countries cope with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rules are now back in place and now any EU country going over debt and deficit limits run the risk of legal action.

EU’s Golden Rules

According to the reformed rules, an EU member state’s debt may not exceed 60% of gross domestic product (GDP).

Highly indebted EU countries with debt levels over 90% of GDP have to reduce their debt ratio by one percentage point annually, countries

Additionally, the general government deficit — the shortfall between government revenue and spending — must be kept below 3%.

According to the commission’s economic forecast, France is at -5.5%, Italy is at -4.4% and Belgium is at -4.4% and will breach this deficit limit in 2024.

Austria, Finland, Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia also have deficits that are too high according to the rules. Spain is at exactly -3.0%.

Snap Elections

French President Emmanuel Macron was hammered in the European Parliamentary elections as expected in this corner, and generally elsewhere.

Winners: The Far Right

Losers: Renew Europe (Macron), and the Greens.

The response by Macron caught everyone off guard. He dissolved parliament and called for snap elections.

…click on the above to read the rest of the article…

EU’s Mass Surveillance Faces Fierce Resistance

June 21, 2024

EU’s Mass Surveillance Faces Fierce Resistance

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

The European Union (EU) has managed to unite politicians, app makers, privacy advocates, and whistleblowers in opposition to the bloc’s proposed encryption-breaking new rules, known as “chat control” (officially, CSAM (child sexual abuse material) Regulation).

Thursday was slated as the day for member countries’ governments, via their EU Council ambassadors, to vote on the bill that mandates automated searches of private communications on the part of platforms, and “forced opt-ins” from users.

However, reports on Thursday afternoon quoted unnamed EU officials as saying that “the required qualified majority would just not be met” – and that the vote was therefore canceled.

This comes after several countries, including Germany, signaled they would either oppose or abstain during the vote. The gist of the opposition to the bill long in the making is that it seeks to undermine end-to-end encryption to allow the EU to carry out indiscriminate mass surveillance of all users.

The justification here is that such drastic new measures are necessary to detect and remove CSAM from the internet – but this argument is rejected by opponents as a smokescreen for finally breaking encryption, and exposing citizens in the EU to unprecedented surveillance while stripping them of the vital technology guaranteeing online safety.

Some squarely security and privacy-focused apps like Signal and Threema said ahead of the vote that was expected today they would withdraw from the EU market if they had to include client-side scanning, i.e., automated monitoring.

WhatsApp hasn’t gone quite so far (yet) but Will Cathcart, who heads the app over at Meta, didn’t mince his words in a post on X when he wrote that what the EU is proposing – breaks encryption.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Plans Major Expansion of Mass Surveillance, MEP Claims

June 9, 2024

EU Plans Major Expansion of Mass Surveillance, MEP Claims

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

The European Union (EU) is planning to implement a new set of draconian mass surveillance rules shortly after Sunday’s EU Parliament election, a member of the EP has warned after the plans surfaced on the internet.

The conclusion that radical surveillance measures are in the works proceeds from documents detailing the meetings of working groups, dubbed “high level group(s) on access to data for effective law enforcement.”

The documents originate from the EU Commission, and contain a number of recommendations, including reintroducing indiscriminate retention of communications data in the bloc, creation of encryption backdoors, as well as forcing hardware manufacturers to give access to anything from phones to cars to law enforcement through what is known as “access by design.”

MEP Patrick Breyer announced that the plan contains 42 points produced by the EU Commission and governments of member-countries. The purpose of being able to access phones, IoT (such as “smart home”) devices, and cars is to make sure they can be monitored around the clock.

Meanwhile, the return of controversial data retention is planned despite a previous ruling of the EU Court of Justice, and could even be extended to include over-the-top services such as messengers (this is defined as retaining IP information data “at the very least”). That, Breyer explains, means that all internet activities will become trackable.

A favorite target of authorities actively undermining their image as democracies has for a while been end-to-end encryption. Here, the EU intends to ban secure encryption of metadata and subscriber data, as well as force messaging services who implement encryption to allow interception.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Commission VP: “We Believe Our Fact-Checking Is Already Influencing User Behavior”

May 22, 2024

EU Commission VP: “We Believe Our Fact-Checking Is Already Influencing User Behavior”

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

The European Parliament (EP) elections are taking place next month and, considering that the president of the European Commission (effectively, “the EU government”) and all its commissioners are confirmed by the EP, no wonder many of them are currently on a campaign trail.

One is European Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova, and she is toeing the line the EU has taken ahead of this election: fear mongering about misinformation, AI, and Russia.

This is then used to make sure current, contested, and controversial policies remain at a minimum unchanged, and best-case scenario, from the EU bureaucrats’ point of view – ramped up.

What those policies amount to is succinctly demonstrated in just one recent statement by Jourova: not only is the bloc embracing “fact-checking”, and not only is this supposed to take car2 of “misinformation” – the intent seems far more profound, and threatening to democracy : fact-checking is already influencing user behavior, bragged Jourova.

“We believe our fact-checking is already influencing user behavior. We see that when people realize something is wrong with the material, they often refrain from sharing it with friends on social media,” she said.

She chose to take her “Democracy Tour” to a number of EU countries that are likely believed to be the most susceptible to her message of an impending “misinformation” doom around the election (the message framed around by and large unproven allegations of misinformation campaigns).

To promote current EU leadership policies, Jourova talks up all those things that have put the EU and its understanding of democracy and freedom of expression under so much scrutiny over the last years: various new regulations that allow for mass censorship and/or surveillance, and continued reliance on “fact-checkers.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Shock II Is Coming, the EU Will Be Hit Hard, Then the US

May 22, 2024

China Shock II Is Coming, the EU Will Be Hit Hard, Then the US

China Shock

Eurointelligence discusses China shock in its article Technology Is Why We Are Losing.

We are not sure that the effect of high tariffs on Chinese electric cars will work quite as intended. We are also skeptical of hydraulic theories of global trade flows – of Chinese goods suddenly starting to swamp European markets.

The much bigger problem at least for German industry has nothing to do with trade policy, but with China crowding in on previously monopolistic and oligopolistic markets dominated by German firms.

Handelsblatt alerts to research just published by the economics team of Allianz that in our view comes much closer to explaining the current dynamics. Previously, the partnership between Germany and China was complementary. The Germans built the factories and the Chinese made the consumer products. Or the Germans specialized in fuel-driven cars, and the Chinese in electric cars. China is now challenging Germany in areas Germany dominated previously. These are the largest parts of the German industrial economy: machines, chemical and electrical engineering. The study says that in many segments of the market, the Chinese are more successful than the Germans. Ludovic Subran, the Allianz chief economist, predicts that the China boom will be followed by a China shock.

We see this similarly. In our own research on the shifting nature of German competitiveness, we find that the most important issue is not trade, but technology. Digital technologies are encroaching on classic engineering. Apple’s latest commercial of a large steel press crushing a whole bunch of analogue devices caused a lot of criticism. Apple apologized, but the commercial is a good visualization of what is currently happening to parts of the German economy…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Belgium and Hungary Launch Controversial Digital IDs, Vaccine Passport, Ahead of EU Regulations

May 18, 2024

Belgium and Hungary Launch Controversial Digital IDs, Vaccine Passport, Ahead of EU Regulations

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

Belgium and Hungary are leading the way in launching digital ID wallets ahead of EU’s eIDAS (“electronic identification and trust services”) 2.0 regulation and EUDI Wallet coming into force later this month.

In Belgium, the MyGov.be app, covering all of the country’s federal public services, was launched on Tuesday, with the government promoting the digital identity as “simplifying” the use of its services, and “making life easier.”

In other words, the authorities there are playing the convenience card – while downplaying the risks that come with this type of centralization of people’s identities.

The wallet, via “eBox” mailbox, gives access to government-issued documents, as well as 683 services, identity data, Covid vaccination records, and more.

However, the success of the scheme is by no means guaranteed – on the one hand it is not mandatory, so people are free to decide not to use it.

Judging by an opinion poll Deloitte carried out last year, “71 percent of Belgians do not want a digital ID on their phone,” reports say, adding that the same survey showed that 79 percent “do not want a mobile driver’s license, while half refuse to fully digitize their IDs.”

“Ease of use” is also how digital ID is pushed in Hungary, where the appropriate app will be made available for download as soon as this week, while the service will be fully operational from September.

Enthusiastic reports about this development describe the digital ID program as “innovative,” “handy” and “saving costs.”

At the same time, putting all of a person’s data in one place and storing it in the cloud is advertised as something positive, instead of what opponents consider as scary – from the security standpoint alone.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

YouTube Removes 35,000 EU Videos for “Misinformation,” Enhances Content Censorship Ahead of 2024 Elections

May 17, 2024

YouTube Removes 35,000 EU Videos for “Misinformation,” Enhances Content Censorship Ahead of 2024 Elections

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

YouTube has (“voluntarily” or otherwise) assumed the role of a private business entity that “supports elections.”

Google’s video platform detailed in a blog post how this is supposed to play out, in this instance, in the EU.

With the European Parliament (EP) election just around the corner, YouTube set out to present “an overview of our efforts to help people across Europe and beyond find helpful and authoritative election news and information.”

The overview is the usual hodgepodge of reasonable concepts, such as promoting information on how to vote or register for voting, learning about election results, etc., that quickly morph into yet another battle in the “war on disinformation.”

And what better way to “support” an election (and by extension, democracy) – than to engage in another round of mass censorship? /s

But YouTube was happy to share that in 2023 alone, it removed 35,000 videos uploaded in the EU, having decided that this content violated the platform’s policies, including around what the blog post calls “certain types of elections misinformation” (raising the logical question if some types of “election misinformation” might be allowed).

As for who is doing this work, YouTube suggests it is a well-oiled machine hard at it around the clock, and “at scale” – made up of “global teams of reviewers” and machine learning algorithms.

The blog post first states that one of the goals of YouTube’s efforts is to help users “learn about the issues shaping the debate.” But then in the part of the article that goes into how the platform is “dealing with harmful content,” it at one point starts to look like the giant might be trying to shape that debate itself.

“Our Intelligence Desk has also been working for months to get ahead of emerging issues and trends that could affect the EU elections, both on and off YouTube,” reads the post.

In case somebody missed the point, YouTube reiterates it: “This helps our enforcement teams to address these potential trends before they become larger issues.”

And while machine learning (aka, AI) is mentioned as a positive when it comes to powering YouTube’s ability to censor at scale, later on in the post the obligatory mention is made of AI as a tool potentially dangerous to elections and democracy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The All-Important Doorman

May 14, 2024

The All-Important Doorman

Picture this: A tribal leader from a distant country visits the US. He’s brought to a large apartment building in New York City. When he gets out of the car, he looks up at the great building and is quite impressed. A uniformed doorman exits the foyer and comes out on the sidewalk. The tribesman sees the gold braiding and brass buttons of his coat and immediately decides that this is a very important person. Again he looks up at the building and says to the doorman, “This is a very great home you have. You must be very important indeed.”

Of course, if we were present, we might chuckle at the tribesman’s naiveté. The owners of such a great building would never greet people at the entrance. They leave such trivial tasks to hired servants, whilst they run the real business without ever needing any direct contact with visitors as they enter the building. And, in addition, doormen come and go – they are, after all, disposable. The owners – those who control what happens in the building – retain their positions over the long term… and may remain anonymous, if they so choose.

We find this simple concept easy enough to understand, and yet we chronically have difficulty in understanding that, in most countries, the president, or prime minister, is not by any means the man who makes the big decisions in the running of the country.

We assume that, because we were allowed to vote for our leader, he must actually be our leader. But, as Mark Twain has at times been credited as saying, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Prepares to Tighten Screws on Russian LNG Imports

April 26, 2024

EU Prepares to Tighten Screws on Russian LNG Imports

In a move that could reshape Europe’s energy landscape, the European Commission is poised to propose new sanctions targeting Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports. According to Reuters sources close to the matter, the proposed measures will include a ban on shipments within the EU and sanctions on three Russian LNG projects.

The European Commission’s decision comes amid growing concerns over Europe’s reliance on Russian energy, particularly in the wake of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. While the EU imposed a ban on Russian seaborne oil imports earlier this year, it has thus far refrained from taking similar action against LNG imports. However, with imports of Russian LNG surging since the start of the war, accounting for around 15% of EU gas supply, pressure has been mounting on Brussels to act.

The proposed ban on trans-shipments within the EU is aimed at preventing the diversion of Russian LNG cargoes to other destinations. Currently, Belgium, France, and Spain are the largest importers of Russian LNG, with many of these imports being re-exported to other countries, including China. By imposing restrictions on trans-shipments, the EU hopes to ensure that Russian LNG does not find its way to markets outside of Europe.

In addition to the ban on trans-shipments, the European Commission is also considering sanctions on three Russian LNG projects – Arctic LNG 2, Ust Luga, and Murmansk. While the details of these sanctions are still being discussed, they are expected to target projects that are not yet operational, further complicating Russia’s efforts to expand its LNG exports.

The move by the European Commission reflects growing unease within the EU over its dependence on Russian energy. With tensions between Russia and the West showing no signs of abating…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Officials Dodge Their Own Surveillance Law

April 18, 2024

EU Officials Dodge Their Own Surveillance Law

Leaked documents suggest EU officials seek immunity from their own controversial online surveillance laws, raising accusations of hypocrisy.

Do as I say – not as I do. That’s the essence of a leak that claims to expose high-ranked EU officials as more than simply politicking hypocrites when it comes to implementing the extremely controversial legislation affecting online privacy and encryption.

Namely, interior ministers from EU member countries reportedly want to exempt themselves – but not only – from the looming Child Sexual Abuse (CSAM) Regulation (aka, “chat control“), expected to be adopted as early as in June.

Pushed by supporters as being exactly what it says on the tin – the proposed new rules are at the same time criticized as a vehicle for indiscriminate mass surveillance of everyone’s online communications, and a way to weaken true encryption deployed by platforms – a vital component of internet security, once again, affecting everyone who goes online, children included.

German member of European Parliament (MEP), Pirate Party member, and lawyer Patrick Breyer, who has been investing a lot of time and energy in drawing EU public’s attention to the dangers that come with the regulation, is now quoting leaked documents published by the French site Contexte, which may or may not prove the context of the already troubled proposed rules, just got even worse.

That’s because, according to Contexte, “EU interior ministers want to exempt professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military from the envisaged scanning of chats and messages.”

In addition to ministers, police, and spies, anything that’s labeled as “professional secret” is also supposed to be exempt from this highly invasive (when it comes to everybody else in the EU) type of content scanning.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Head of Controversial Global Engagement Center Admits Europe’s Regulatory Power Over Social Media Censorship Enforcement

April 3, 2024

Head of Controversial Global Engagement Center Admits Europe’s Regulatory Power Over Social Media Censorship Enforcement

James Rubin also laments that Big Tech doesn’t enforce its terms of service more aggressively.

The head of the US State Department’s highly controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC), James Rubin, appears to be on a “press tour” to promote more stringent regulation around social media, and more censorship.

Rubin is doing this seemingly oblivious of the “elephant in the room” – that GEC is at the center of scandals involving government/Big Tech collusion (this bureau engaged in flagging posts on social media) and even lawsuits stemming from these accusations.

Many of Rubin’s comments made on a recent Politico podcast episode compare and contrast the degree to which the EU and the US are able to regulate social media (and stifle speech).

He also seeks to reinforce the perception of GEC not as a government workaround for carrying out censorship on privately-owned platforms (which would be illegal in the US), but as an entity that is vital in combating “disinformation.”

In this case, AI is considered as a “force for good,” as Rubin revealed GEC would start using it to counter what it decides to consider as “disinformation,” and the policy is also to make sure as many other countries as possible fall in line with the US on this issue.

Regarding what the US could learn from others, Rubin singled out the EU where regulatory frameworks allow the authorities to carry out control and censorship of online information more aggressively, but also praised the work his country, the UK, and Canada are doing together to impose the use of AI watermarks.

Asked to what degree GEC “engages directly” with social platforms, Rubin first deflected by lamenting about how much better equipped the EU is to combat “misinformation” thanks to greater regulatory powers, and then claimed that GEC “does not work with them (platforms) – we meet with them.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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