The institutions that write these proposals in the EU have no power to put them into law, though.
Also - I am still shocked how much surveillance there is in the UK compared to mainland Europe. In the UK it's a criminal offence to refuse to hand over passwords for your devices (and encryption keys).
That is not the case in the EU, so I find it quite funny that you cite a proposal that would have to go through the parliament first and could still be overruled by national laws, as a good reason for not being in the EU :D
While every EU member state has the right to veto important laws, there is no way to abolish a law unless all member states agree. So even if 90% of all Germans agree that a EU law should be abolished, they can't overrule tiny countries like Malta or Cyprus. This is a fundamental, undemocratic flaw that most politicians and supreme courts in Europe have yet to realize.
I think a lot of this depends on where your political position is, what is elected in your country and how the the EU is currently pointing. For instance for me as an Austrian citizen my country is significantly more leaning towards surveillance that I'm more worried about what we would be doing if we were not protected by the EU lawmaking process getting a lot more scrutiny and visibility.
I'm Austrian as well and I don't think lawmaking would go in the direction of surveillance without the EU. Austria's main ruling party has too many show politicians - I think they can do what they do now because they don't have to say in public what they do. In short: I don't think Sebastian Kurz would say in public that he wants all encryption (or chat app encryption) to be illegal.
These things come from EC. Your vote does not influence incoming legislation. Only way to achieve something is lobbying and you'd have to find huge sums to have EC members even consider talking to you. They can make a lot of money from controlling the communication of citizens and you cannot vote them out, so what's the alternative?
Legislation in most countries does not come from elected officials, it typically is drafted up by lawyers. That's not a good argument. With the commission a lot of what ends up on the proposals is lobbied by citizens and it's the MEP that vote on it before becoming law who are elected.
I vote liberal parties in my country and that has done jack shit to prevent shitty laws to be passed because the majority seems to be electing the types of people who absolutely adore surveillance.
The difference is that you can vote for people who choose lawyers and they can influence what lawyers write. You dont have this much control in the EU.
The governments of each country in the EU, elected democratically, are the people who choose the specific law-writers (council of ministers) who you are critical of for proposing this law in this story.
To the extent that conspiracies of “deep state” or “lobbyist” are involved, the only reason the EU is different to the member states themselves is that it’s a single big target instead of a lot of small ones.
And in this case lawyers role is to implement what EC proposed and MEPs voted in. Elected governments are like management of McDonalds franchise. People can choose chair layout or where napkins are located.
??? This is the Council of the European Union, which is the relevant cabinet members from the national governments. You vote out your representative in, say, the Environment Council, in exactly the same way you vote out the national Minister of Environment (or equivalent) in your EU country, because it's literally the same person.
Confusingly, there's also the European Council. You vote out your representative in there by voting out your your head of government (president, premier, taoiseach etc.), because again, it's literally the same person.
And if you're talking about the commission, which seems to have little to do with this, you vote them out by voting in different heads of government (again) to nominate different commissioners/a different president, and/or different members of the European parliament to not confirm them.
In the UK? Voting is a paper tiger for stuff like this. The bill was supported by both Tories and Labour, and I was living in a Tory safe seat. I mean, I could’ve moved to Scotland and supported the SNP bid for independence or Wales and Plaid Cymru (but not NI and Sinn Féin given their policy of not taking their seats), but realistically there was nothing I could do about it other than what I did do about it.
If you didn't have any luck with the House of Commons, you perhaps should have tried voting for a different member of the House of Lords, or different judges, or a different monarch. Now that the UK has left the EU, you don't have to worry about those institutions being overridden by unelected MEPs.
By the time the next UK general election is scheduled, I rather hope to have replaced my UK citizenship with a German one. (It’s not certain I could do it that fast, but I’m going to try).
