Let me guess, you too are tired of GPDR popups? I love them, being able to opt out of tracking is absolutely worth the interruption.

The EU doesn't have a patriot act; the whole body of decades of EU legislation on tech is still less intrusive than that one single act the US has in place and continues to use extensively. Not to mention that US agencies have a long history of acting outside the law, which has no real equivalent in Europe except maybe Russia. There is a reason why police agencies in Europe want more rights, currently they are very curtailed an unable to handle much of digital crime.

More generally, the EU has some stupid laws but also plenty of important ones that either bring greater good (safe products in the supermarkets, trade standards, common procurement rules, accountability of what national governments do on economic policy and debt levels, ...) or good for a specific sector (strong data protection and rights for instance, tech standards like usb c, etc). Here the discussion is not even about a law but about a proposal for a law where different people and bodies express different views. EU lawmaking is lengthy and quite transparent so you have these discussions often and at various points in the process, which is unusual compared to many national contexts. And it lends itself to viewing and overstating different views. It doesn't help that there are many lobby groups that sound like semi-EU bodies when they are in reality just industry groups of various kinds that make broad demands which are then echoed in the press as some kind of EU positon.

I'm sorry you've been led to have such a negative emotional reaction to the EU, but it just doesn't mirror the actual facts.

Governments need to realise that really stupid laws don’t need amendments. They needs to be thrown out.