MEPs get elected with proportional representation on closed lists in a nation-wide single district.
Emailing 60 of them from an array of different parties with no official stance on the issue and no more of a direct relationship with you than with millions of other people is less direct political action and more spam. Pretty sure collective action would have a better chance.
I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.
I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.
If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.
Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs
Well, the EU has a consultation period on new regulations, but I don’t know if that’s open for this specifically.
Generally, I would say organizations on each country are often the ones with the infrastructure in place to issue a recommendation on these things. Consumer support orgs, unions, privacy groups and so on. Political parties if your country has one with a definite stance on the issue. If you can get those involved and they can get the press involved now you have an avenue for mainstream awareness, which frankly is more likely to do something than a purely online-driven signature or email campaign.
The rest may differ per country and even per party. It depends on what participation mechanisms you can deploy for each.
To be clear, I’m not against also reaching out to MEPs, but given how in many places they act as a collective blob representing national partisan interests and how electorally they don’t have a particular incentive to engage with individual voters I don’t know that it’d work best in isolation. I’m not particularly against that, either. “Contact your representative” is a staple of small district, majoritarian, first-past-the-post nonsense and I have no particular desire to move in that direction. I’m way more comfortable with a party-heavy system than with that weirdness.
Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.
They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.
And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.
Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.
Perhaps an initiative should be started that introduces a law banning such laws?
Also I still think contacting your politicians directly (and telling friends and family to do the same) will have better result than change.org petition, but there’s nothing stopping people to do both.
It might be worth making a bid for legislation that requires that the public give up privacy to the government, those in government must make the same information public.
If they can read my messages, I should be able to read theirs.
I’m not sure if this is petition is actually helpful. It is 4 years old and hasn’t been updated to note the renewed focus on this legislation: https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/the-eu-could-be-scanning-your-chats-by-october-2025-heres-everything-we-know
Instead it might be more helpful to directly contact your representatives.
This website can help you figure out who they are, and help formulate an email send to them:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
(Obviously it is best to write your own response, or at least update the text to be your own, but it could be a good springboard)
MEPs get elected with proportional representation on closed lists in a nation-wide single district.
Emailing 60 of them from an array of different parties with no official stance on the issue and no more of a direct relationship with you than with millions of other people is less direct political action and more spam. Pretty sure collective action would have a better chance.
I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.
I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.
If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.
Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs
Well, the EU has a consultation period on new regulations, but I don’t know if that’s open for this specifically.
Generally, I would say organizations on each country are often the ones with the infrastructure in place to issue a recommendation on these things. Consumer support orgs, unions, privacy groups and so on. Political parties if your country has one with a definite stance on the issue. If you can get those involved and they can get the press involved now you have an avenue for mainstream awareness, which frankly is more likely to do something than a purely online-driven signature or email campaign.
The rest may differ per country and even per party. It depends on what participation mechanisms you can deploy for each.
To be clear, I’m not against also reaching out to MEPs, but given how in many places they act as a collective blob representing national partisan interests and how electorally they don’t have a particular incentive to engage with individual voters I don’t know that it’d work best in isolation. I’m not particularly against that, either. “Contact your representative” is a staple of small district, majoritarian, first-past-the-post nonsense and I have no particular desire to move in that direction. I’m way more comfortable with a party-heavy system than with that weirdness.
And it is on change.org, just some portal that no one has to take seriously
EU actually has a website to make real petitions, 8 think it was https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/_en
Though I think the proper action would be to contact your local politicians.
Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.
They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.
And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.
Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.
Perhaps an initiative should be started that introduces a law banning such laws?
Also I still think contacting your politicians directly (and telling friends and family to do the same) will have better result than change.org petition, but there’s nothing stopping people to do both.
It might be worth making a bid for legislation that requires that the public give up privacy to the government, those in government must make the same information public.
If they can read my messages, I should be able to read theirs.