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EU Lawmakers Back Exports Control on Spying Technology (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: EU lawmakers overwhelmingly backed plans on Thursday to control exports of devices to intercept mobile phone calls, hack computers or circumvent passwords that could be used by foreign states to suppress political opponents or activists. Members of the European Parliament's trade committee voted by 34 votes to one in favor of a planned update to export controls on "dual use" products or technologies. The EU has had export controls since 2009 on such dual use products including toxins, laser and technology for navigation or nuclear power, which can have a civilian or military applications but also be used to make weapons of mass destruction. The EU has felt that spyware or malware and telecom of Internet surveillance technologies are increasingly threatening security and human rights and proposed a modernization of its export control system to cover cyber-surveillance.
"Lawmakers" is pretty ambiguous here. Remember that in the EU, the Commission "proposes" (i.e. "makes"?) the law, whereas the Parliament votes on them. They tend to take pretty different stances, the Commission being much pro-industry and doing much dirty inter-nation bargaining (the members of the Commission are sent by the member states, thus being removed one layer more from democracy), the Parliament being more pro individual/human rights.
Lobby money flows traditionally towards the Commission, although "industry" is discovering Parliament as of late.
Me? I'd introduce Corporate Death Penalty whenever a corp is caught lobbying: Take the corp's assets (including their shareholders's, of course) and disband their three upper echelons. Force those to work pro bono in some NGO Ã la Doctors Without Borders or Amnesty International for three years.
I think this kind of shameless lobbying is quickly killing our civil society.
"The move is part of the EU’s strategy to take advantage of the trade vacuum left by more protectionist U.S. President Donald Trump both in terms of striking trade accords with other countries and setting values for global trade."
It appears the trade commission decided to increase trade by restricting trade, and creating regulations that make no sense. (Are they really going to stop the export of computers and SDR? Not that those are made in Europe anyway, but why let that stop a futile gesture?).
Hey, let's cheer them on, at least they aren't starting any wars or insulting other world leaders.
(PS I lied, looks like AMD has a fab in Europe. Careful, those are usable for hacking!)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"The EU has felt that spyware or malware and telecom of Internet surveillance technologies are increasingly threatening security and human rights"
greatest threats to individual security and human rights comes not technologies, used by random harmful people, but from modern states(or would be states) like eu, usa, china, russia, etc., all of which now seem to operate beyond democratic accountability and corrupt to the core, and monopolistic corps(especially technological conglomerates like amazon, google, facebook etc ) .
unless deep state apparatus and functionaries are made transparent, accountable to citizens, and criminally liable, and monopolistic corps are democratically and transparently regulated, human right and individual security has no chance.
Perhaps those regulations don't make sense to you. Likewise, you don't make sense to me.
A stunning analysis based in logic and pure sequitur. Applauded to be you are. Infallible well logic sense is done!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In the same ruling they are also encouraging the use of encryption and explicitly stating that EU states must not ban the use of encryption.
We barely have enough of it to keep our own citizens under control, if China wants to spy on their people they can bloody well do that themselves, too!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Like... say ... Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Germany, France...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nah, the US preference of locking their own people into high security prisons for just about anything they ever did is not shared by the EU. They would rather prefer him to go into early retirement.
You didn't ask any of them.
Those are basically the only countries in Europe that could possibly be considered "left", so what the hell is the GP talking about?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Their moral stance? Really? No, it's because they don't want competition. The EU is very happy with the member states criminalizing beliefs and cultural expressions.
Banning the export of "dual use" products? They obviously don't know that functionality for being able to listen in on phone calls is a standard feature of telecom backbone equipment and is commonly used for perfectly legal things like criminal investigations and (actual) anti-terrorism. What this means is that European makers of it (or rather the maker of it after Nokia's networks division first merged with Siemens' and then bought out Alcatel-Lucent) need to start making sabotaged versions of their equipment, thus giving non-European competitors a clear competitive edge, or stop exporting it outside of Europe altogether.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
is what we used to to call it.
A crime that is alread punished with the maximum sentence.
But nowadays, "lobbyism" is what n00bs do. The real pros do not manipulate politicians. They ARE the politicians. And after their term, get a nice job and a big bonus.
This literally publicly happened to German Chancellor Gerhard "gazprom" SchrÃder. But of you actuall check, nearly every politician nowadays is actually such a beast.
So the only reason there is still "lobbying", is to manipulate the " lobbyist" politicians of competing corporations!
well, if the EU companies cannot sell this crap, then they will ... backdoors. ..errr... copied the rest of the world their
go bankrupt and again another industry moves to china with forced
51% local ownership laws and
maybe not today, but once they have caught up with
manufacturing supremacy will be enforced with more dubious tactics.
if there's a demand for this ev1l tech, someone will provide it.