Spyware in Europe: EU to allow intrusive surveillance of journalists | Hacker News Reader

Spyware in Europe: EU to allow intrusive surveillance of journalists

brusselstimes.com

77 pointsmsla27 comments

Another link:

https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-...

> The Council reached an agreement on 21 June 2023 on the much-needed European Media Freedom Act, a legislation proposed by the European Commission on 16 September 2022 with the intention to introduce safeguards against political interference, media concentration, and to protect journalists and their sources against surveillance. Since then, the IFJ and EFJ have been advocating for strong and effective regulation to respond to the numerous threats posed to media freedom in the EU.

> However, earlier this month, France introduced a new exception to the general ban on deploying spyware against journalists. It reads that the provisions on effective protection of journalistic sources “is without prejudice to the Member States’ responsibility for safeguarding national security”.

If the West is so hellbent on cracking down on everything we allegedly stand for (democracy, free press, free speech, etc) all that other fun illusionary stuff) why not skip the war with China and Russia and just settle with what we have and shake hands with them ?

Realpolitik.

China and Russia that supply us with gas and cheap plastic and do as they're told are fine.

A china or Russia that don't do as they're told must be dealt with. No amount of democracy or freedom or lawful behavior changes that. That's why we did nothing to make Russia open and democratic and part of a global future, when they literally begged us to.

Multi-polarity is already happening, there's not a lot the West can do to change that.

I don't know, it isn't going great for Russia. The US has pretty successfully isolated them and they're stuck in a pointless meat grinder war-for-nothing in Ukraine.

We will see what happens with China, personally I don't fancy their chances either. They're boxed in pretty effectively in most directions and reliant on US trade (and debt).

We will see...

The intelligence agencies and military need to stay busy and gain practical experience, if there is some sort of real conflict. Civilian life doesn't really afford them that opportunity. There are many anecdotes throughout history of comfortable empires falling from lack of experience in the field. Proxy wars and espionage campaigns are good practice, probably the best you'll get in the 21st century (so far).

Sure, they're basically building up their own enemies only to then either suffer the blowback or fight and disarm them.

You might want to actually go and read a few things about how they differ before making such uninformed statements.

Uninformed statements aren't necessarily idiotic, and even if they were, we don't need to call it as such to express disagreement.

This is very much civility for the sake of civility which is not without problems but is the culture here. Editing the post to remove the word idiotic and replace with uninformed.

There are people who know them from reality, not from some book sponsored by the CIA.

What are you even talking about? Be specific rather than tossing around vague insinuations.

It's almost as though these "Democratic" countries don't want their rich and powerful held accountable for crimes. /s

The EU is progressively turning into a totalitarian construct.

Especially when it comes to digital laws and spying on its citizens.

But when the base is faulty (Lisboa treaty) you can't expect the construct not to be faulty.

Their actions give wind to right wing extremist parties throughout Europe.

It's not like the new law says governments must spy on journalists; it just doesn't try hard enough to protect them. That's like saying that because the US is utterly failing to ensure privacy of communications over the internet, it's a "totalitarian construct".

The truth is that, sometimes, in a democracy there just isn't enough political capital out there to pass a law that looks "obviously" right.

The two most prominent EU member states amended the law specifically to remove the prohibitions on states spying on journalists. So this is still newsworthy.

Absolutely. But it's ludicrous for people to say this means the EU is becoming "totalitarian". This is how we cheapen words, like we used to do with "Nazi" before Godwin's Law saved us from the worst of it.

Arguably this faux democracy is even worse than the authoritarian rulership that peeps through the cracks.

What's the problem with the Lisbon Treaty?

The whole purpose of EU is to be able to blindingly push all such totalitarian, anti European, pro capital and pro US decisions that would have almost no chance to pass in most of the national parliaments.

There was a recent case in the Netherlands were a lawyer used his client privilege to help a drug dealer run his empire. edit: From a maximum security prison. It was hilarious.

If you want to do spying you don't exclude anyone or it's pointless. Journalist is a great cover for spies- ask the CIA.

Sometimes, you just need to allow those holes to be there, even though it means putting in extra effort to catch the bad actors in a different way.

Otherwise, what's the point of having journalists around that try to uncover corruption of government / military / security services?

Those holes will be exploited by our American and Chinese enemies. Naivety will get the EU killed.

Heh Heh Heh

I guess you're not really considering that allowing or encouraging corruption internally can also kill a government?

Note that China has been through multiple "purges" of corrupt officials. (Strangely, it seems to happen whenever they have a new leader who needs to remove competitors. ;)) So the corruption potential seems to be present everywhere.

It's just that in the west we've (thus far) recognised the problem, and journalists are part of that solution.

Removing that solution due to fear seems to be a bad direction for long term survival as well.

There's no way to prosecute the drug war and maintain civil liberties. I choose civil liberties and the drug war can go to hell.

As far as I knew they have a long standing policy to specifically not use journalists, peace corps or religious figures for non official cover specifically because it was considered pissing in the pool for everyone else.

I’m pretty open to being wrong on this one but do you have any case studies to point to that say otherwise?

Yeah and government agencies do the same all the time to avoid information release through public record laws. Don't want a pesky journalist poking in your emails? Just CC the staff lawyer and all those emails need to be redacted. It gets weirder when the FOIA officer is that lawyer.

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