I’m of two minds about this.

On the one hand, you have places like Hungary, where the government is blatantly abusing spyware like Pegasus against members of the media, civil activists, and members of the opposition. If you live in Hungary, and you are involved in any significant organizing, you will most likely notice your phone calls having a small lag as you talk to the other party. The mayor of Budapest had so many private conversations leaked (nothing earth-shattering, just stuff like politicking inside the opposition) that it’s a meme at this point.

On the other hand, we are in an information war with Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. Do we give up these tools, take the high road, and risk another fiasco like Brexit? Do we let German military intelligence tap Russian phones to help Ukrainians? Do we let the Bundespolizei or Europol do the same to suspected foreign drug or human traffickers? Do we let them do it to domestic ones? What if they are also politicians?

IMO it just needs to be transparent and auditable after the fact and have a very clear warrant process where dragnets and the like are explicitly disallowed, and all requests by the police to do this have to be public after the fact, while the military has to be explicitly disallowed from doing it to any EU citizen.

But I know what we’ll have is weird politicking around this, with VdL and her neolib ilk still trying to push that dragnet chat control nonsense over and over and over again.

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