[HN Gopher] EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
___________________________________________________________________
EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
Author : skilled
Score : 891 points
Date : 2024-06-20 09:45 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackdiary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackdiary.com)
| Ambroos wrote:
| Yesterday and early this morning there has luckily been a massive
| push from Belgian media. The proposal this time around came from
| the Belgian presidency, so it was up to them to withdraw the
| vote.
|
| It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote was
| withdrawn, but it's probable that the situation became untenable
| for the political parties involved, one of which lost massively
| in the Belgian elections about two weeks ago.
|
| In an short interview in De Tijd [1] with one of the Belgian MEPs
| pushing this (Hilde Vautmans, OpenVLD, liberal, lost big), and
| another short line in De Morgen [2] from outgoing Belgian
| Minister of the Interior who was part of the talks for this new
| version (Annelies Verlinden, CD&V, Christian democrats), both of
| them made it appear like they mostly just care about getting it
| done (because nobody else has succeeded yet). There is a lot of
| "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
|
| This morning, after the press attention, high rank party
| officials across the spectrum (and from the parties mentioned
| above) publicly called the proposal dangerous, so it's likely the
| pressure worked this time.
|
| Next time this can come up for the vote will likely be from
| Hungary. They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks,
| and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering
| the current political climate there I would assume they are more
| likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less
| likely to succeed. Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal
| isn't dead.
|
| [1] https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/technologie/fel-
| privacyprotes...
|
| [2] https://www.demorgen.be/snelnieuws/verlinden-buigt-voor-
| luid...
| Bluestein wrote:
| Thanks for that very thorough look into this ...
|
| > Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
|
| I wanted to say. It _will_ return.-
|
| > There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero
| technical expertise.
|
| This is one of the things that irks me the most: The abusive,
| emotional "mislabeling". Children have _nothing_ to do with
| this, and it is an _abuse_ of public good faith to mislabel
| these sort of initiatives using "children" as leverage,
| preying upon a tech-lliterate public.-
|
| In fact, that is also an issue here: The public needs to be
| brought up to speed (technically) and/or we should at least
| _demand_ technical expertise from our politicians, when
| legislating or acting upon mainly technological issues.-
| raverbashing wrote:
| > The public needs to be brought up to speed (technically)
|
| Yeah this is the main thing
|
| I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
|
| After like 2 decades of screaming at clouds, I think it's
| more that most people don't care about the value of
| privacy.
| squigz wrote:
| I imagine it's easy to blame other citizens.
| Alternatively though, corporate interests are just far
| more influential than we realize.
| memen wrote:
| I never really understood this line of thought. Corporate
| interests _are_ citizen interests right? Those
| corporations are made up of (a lot) of people, and if
| those corporate systems thrive in a certain condition,
| then the people within these corporate systems will
| largely want to maintain or create those conditions.
| Those citizens do vote as well, and from personal
| experience, a lot of people vote in their own interest
| rather than national or moral interest. From research, I
| could not find conclusive numbers regarding altruistic
| [0] vs self-interested voting rates.
|
| The more people are working for these corporations, the
| more we create and sustain the conditions that hold these
| systems in place. Whether that is 'good' is another
| debate.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_theory_of_voting
| afiori wrote:
| On a sinking ship one way to get to higher ground is to
| go to one end and make sure that the opposite side gets
| more water faster.
| throwAGIway wrote:
| That's just a way to sink faster. Even in the parallel.
| afiori wrote:
| The ship sinks faster but for a bit you rise above the
| others.
| int_19h wrote:
| I don't think it's correct to treat the interest of the
| corporation as manifestation of the combined interest of
| all its employees. It would be true for shareholders,
| although even there I think there's a vast difference
| between those who hold massive amounts of voting shares
| and minor investors. But employees are effectively
| _trading_ with the corporation (their labor for wages),
| and are not meaningfully represented by it.
| dns_snek wrote:
| What's the difference? They "don't care" about it as long
| as they don't suffer any direct ill effects from their
| indifference.
|
| Once things get to the point where every facet of our
| lives is actively under surveillance, and authoritarians
| in power start abusing their power in ways that affect
| those who "don't care", they'll start caring really
| quickly but by then it's going to be too late.
|
| Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone why
| personal freedoms should be fought for instead of being
| taken for granted.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > Maybe we need a good fascism scare
|
| (And, sadly, it might serve to combat "semantic
| satiation" and reinvigorate now oft-bandied-about terms
| that are losing meaning)
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone
| why personal freedoms should be fought for instead of
| being taken for granted.
|
| Ironically since fascist (in the broader sense) parties
| and the likes don't seem to support Chat control (yet, I
| guess) the other parties have a harder time passing it to
| not lose votes to them.
|
| It is strange how such an anti-democratic law is pushed
| so hard but there is still tip toeing around actually
| passing it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Being a child from Portuguese revolution, and witness of
| how the Berlin wall went down, it is really bad that
| newer generations don't have any sense of what it meant
| to live during those days, and vote into such parties
| with protest votes nonsense.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >What's the difference?
|
| They Don't Know vs. They Don't Care.
|
| The axiom has always been that People Don't Know, Wake Up
| Sheeple(tm), but after so much time it's hard to believe
| that lack of awareness is the problem anymore.
| jorvi wrote:
| Privacy is a very ephemeral thing.
|
| The retail service price of Gmail, Maps, Facebook,
| Instagram, TikTok etc. together probably would exceed a
| couple hundred dollars a year. People would rather pocket
| that money, especially with how tight budgets are
| becoming.
| digging wrote:
| > After like 2 decades of screaming at clouds, I think
| it's more that most people don't care about the value of
| privacy.
|
| I think you've betrayed your own argument, because
| _talking with people_ would have been more effective than
| _screaming at clouds_ , to use your metaphor.
|
| Just because you're putting something out there doesn't
| mean anyone else is receiving it. And if they're not
| receiving it, you can't judge whether or not they care.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Talking with people and screaming at clouds are the same
| thing if they hear and go about their day anyway because
| they don't care.
|
| The axiom that the problem is a lack of awareness starts
| to defy logic because this has been going on for over 2
| decades now. You bet your ass people are aware, they just
| don't care regardless.
|
| Is this a good thing? Probably not. But the fact remains
| people don't care about privacy and specifically digital
| privacy. This isn't 2004 anymore, it's 2024.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
|
| Sadly, like much of everything, only once you _lose it_ ...
| barrenko wrote:
| As mentioned, the shittiest part of the EU is that we don't
| ever get any insight. I wish we could launch some civil legal
| probe into EU institutions themselves, but that would probably
| end up being like staring at floating points of a tensor.
| fredgrott wrote:
| makes a nice plot for a Dr. Who episode.
| justinclift wrote:
| Didn't they can Dr Who finally?
| swarnie wrote:
| No its still going on as "The most BBC show ever made by
| the BBC"
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Why would they end it?
| semanticist wrote:
| They did in the '80s, after a run longer than the current
| revival. Sometimes things come in and out of fashion.
| maleldil wrote:
| They did a soft reset, with Ncuti's new season being
| marked as the Season 1 of the 2023 version. It's still
| going strong, with this season being very strong, IMO.
| tpm wrote:
| That wouldn't help anyway because most important things
| happen between national governments and the people they
| nominate. The EU institutions would work very differently if
| they were directly formed and managed by the European
| parliament. Alas the national governments know very well why
| they won't ever allow that.
| Vinnl wrote:
| We don't get a lot of insight, but we do get some. For
| example, when it _does_ come up for a vote in the Council, we
| 'll know which countries voted in favour (something you can
| take into account in your next national elections).
|
| Then the Parliament will have to agree as well, and we can
| see which parties there voted in favour, which you can take
| into account in the next European elections.
|
| The Commission is toughest to hold accountable. The
| Commissioner pushing it (Ylva Johansson in this case) was
| nominated by a country's (Sweden, in this case) government,
| so Swedish voters could hold the parties in that government
| accountable in their next national election, I suppose, but
| that's a very weak signal.
| bux93 wrote:
| And you know, fund lobbyists. Shocking I know, but it's not
| just corporations who have lobbyists, NGOs too.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I've been donating forever to Signal, and at this point,
| I'm resigned that it won't reach WhatsApp parity. Just
| hire some lobbyists to keep encrypted communications
| legal as a human right.
| Renaud wrote:
| That wouldn't help. The proposal "got around" weakening
| encryption without outright removing it.
|
| They "just" wanted anything you sent to be scanned before
| it was sent encrypted.
|
| Stupid and dangerous, the even have sections in the
| proposal that talk about encryption being important, but
| somehow less important than thinking about the children
| and putting a cop looking over the shoulder of every
| single citizen.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's like saying only a good guy with a gun can stop a
| bad guy with a gun.
|
| The solution is to remove guns/lobbyists, not attempting
| to beat them at their own game because you will
| absolutely lose.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| With your solution bureaucrats only have access to
| registered lobbyist to be eliminated. Bribery remains.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's only a solution if you actually have the means to do
| so.
|
| If you do not, then the best you can do is to learn to
| play the game as best you can, so that at least you won't
| lose quite so badly.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| I wonder why NGO advice does not correlate with decision
| directions at all. Remember the CCC talks by NGO
| lobbists, usually culminating for everything they do in
| a"anyway that was what we advised, they however would
| vote/do/the thing we advised against". Had a huge
| speakerscorner going nowhere vibe and europes youth
| kicked that play pretend democracy in the nuts last
| election.
| throwAGIway wrote:
| What can I do about foreign politicians?
| toyg wrote:
| Push your own politicians to talk to them. Most serious
| EU Parliament groups are trans-national.
|
| It's like asking what can you do about parliamentarians
| elected in other districts.
| Vinnl wrote:
| That's always problematic. The best shot you have is
| pressure your own politicians (at whatever level) to try
| to strongarm them.
|
| For example, US policy has quite a lot of influence on
| me, but I can't vote for US politicians. Or Russian
| policy, for that matter.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Your MEPs are likely part of a parliamentary group with
| foreign politicians and coordinate with them on policy.
|
| If your commissioner and MEPs have been solidly opposed
| to a policy there might not be much you can do. But do
| you know that that's a case? Many governments tend to
| blame unpopular proposals on the EU while the
| commissioner that they themselves chose vote in favour.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Ylva Johansson was proposed by the previous Swedish
| government though (a Social Democratic one), which (sort
| of) lost the last election. No idea why the current (right
| wing) government is keeping her in place.
|
| In practise, that means she's supported by all except one
| of the relevant Swedish parties.
| toyg wrote:
| Commissioners are typically not replaced when a national
| government changes, which is a good thing from a
| stability perspective (countries can often have two or
| three different executives in a single year). In the end,
| a Commissioner is proposed by a country but is then meant
| to work in the interest of the entire Union, in what is
| largely an administrative role (Council and Parliament
| are the real political entities). They are supposed to be
| uncontroversial people, respected across the entire
| political spectrum, and typically will stay in post for
| the duration of their mandate unless embroiled in
| scandals.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The Commission is far more powerful than the Council and
| Parliament, since it is the only body that can actually
| propose legislation to be voted on by the other two. If
| the commission doesn't want something done, that thing
| doesn't get done - including changing older laws.
| toyg wrote:
| No, I disagree. The Commission cannot pass anything on
| its own, the agenda is set by the Council and directives
| are effectively drafted by Parliament bodies (since MEPs
| have the ultimate say). The Commission largely routes
| things back and forth between other bodies but has very
| little power in practice, and is technically required to
| be fundamentally apolitical.
|
| Until a few years ago, nominations for Commissioner jobs
| were mostly handed to long-serving but lower-level
| politicians. This has changed a bit in recent times, but
| not fundamentally so. One of the critiques of the current
| constitutional setup is precisely that the executive, in
| practice, can execute very little without constantly
| going back to the Council.
| sakjur wrote:
| The commissioner before her was Cecilia Malmstrom
| 2010-2019, a liberal party politician (right bloc) whose
| second term was wholly during a social democratic (left
| bloc) government because the nomination happened before
| the election.
|
| Unfortunately, both Sweden's most recent commissioners
| have been prominently advocating against encryption and
| for mass surveillance. I really hope our new commissioner
| for the 2024-2029 period ends up with a better track
| record on privacy advocacy.
| agilob wrote:
| >when it does come up for a vote in the Council, we'll know
| which countries voted in favour
|
| Isn't it kinda late to act?
| Vinnl wrote:
| That is something you could say about almost any
| legislation, and it's correct to some extent. That said,
| politicians do seem to try and predict what they'll be
| held accountable for, and pre-empt that. So it's not so
| much the voting afterwards that potentially influences
| the behaviour, but the _threat_ of doing so. I also
| assume that this is why contacting your representatives
| is important - that is, essentially, making the threat.
|
| I'll give you that it's not a terribly strong signal.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| We don't need this type of insight to act. For all its
| fualts, the EU does tend to have ample time between the
| time a law is drafted and made public, and the time it is
| voted on. And it's relatively clear who you need to try
| to influence in this period: your local government and/or
| president for EU Council proposals, your country's EU
| commissioner, and the government that proposed them for
| EU Commission proposals, and your MEPs for votes in
| Parliament, which is anyway the last line of defense.
|
| Why and how exactly this proposed law came to exist in
| its current form is much harder to figure out, but that's
| not necessary to fully understand in order to oppose it
| successfully.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > As mentioned, the shittiest part of the EU is that we don't
| ever get any insight.
|
| You can get quite a bit of data, what are you looking for?
| Vinnl wrote:
| One thing would be interesting was to know who pushed for
| it to be withdrawn for now, and why.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think this is what happens when you get an appointed
| council making decisions rather than a democratically elected
| one. It's a bad idea because it lets the appointees and
| appointers to point fingers and dilute blame, which is
| another weapon the 1% can use to get policies in their best
| interest (often the opposite of those for the 99%) passed.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> which is another weapon the 1% can use to get policies
| in their best interest
|
| Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1%
| generally align with the other 99%. Rich or poor, we all
| use the same communication infrastructure. Rich people
| don't want their chats monitored either. People don't want
| this. Intelligence agencies want this. But ask the people
| working at those agencies, ask them as individuals, and
| they won't want this on their phones either.
| chongli wrote:
| _Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1%
| generally align with the other 99%_
|
| Ideally, yes. In practice, the 1% have resources the 99%
| don't which allow them to minimize their exposure to mass
| surveillance. Whether this means carving out exemptions
| for their own communications or conducting their meetings
| in person, in private, in other jurisdictions.
| quonn wrote:
| Who do you imagine the 1% to be? Probably I'm the 1% in
| my country. I have no extraordinary power whatsoever.
| Maybe you mean the 0,1% or the 0,01%.
| chongli wrote:
| Yes, your family doctor is also likely part of the 1%.
| Unfortunately, the term 1% has shifted to basically mean
| "the people with most of the wealth and power in a
| country" which is a much smaller group of people, perhaps
| even less than 0.01%.
|
| Quibbling over the mathematical inaccuracy of the term is
| tilting at windmills. You'd have better luck getting
| people to stop using the word "literally" to mean its
| opposite.
| int_19h wrote:
| A better metric is "people who have N times the median
| wealth", since that accurately captures the power
| disparity that stems from access to more resources. The
| exact percentage will vary significantly depending on how
| unequal distribution of wealth is in any given society.
| ginko wrote:
| It's always the Council (i.e. the national governments) with
| the worst proposals and then the EU has to take the blame.
| deliciousturkey wrote:
| This is just not true. Only the Commission can propose new
| legislation. This very proposal also is quite aggressively
| pushed by the Commission (see for example the advertising
| campaign: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-
| commissio...).
| tpm wrote:
| And the Commission is formed by national governments.
| Vinnl wrote:
| The Commission is formed by commissioners, each of which
| has been nominated by a different nation's government.
| The Council consists of actual members of the national
| governments.
|
| The third party that can't propose legislation but has to
| approve it (and which strongly opposed this) is the
| Parliament, which is directly elected.
| tpm wrote:
| No. The Commission is formed _by_ the national
| governments and _of_ commissioners.
| Vinnl wrote:
| OK, this is probably some nuance of the English language
| that I'm missing as a non-native speaker, but I meant
| that the people that make up the Commission are not part
| of the national governments. The people that are part of
| national governments each get to nominate one
| commissioner though, in addition to being part of the
| Council.
| eigenket wrote:
| Specifically this is being pushed by Ylva Johansson [1]
| from Sweden, who has (reportedly) financial connections to
| the organisation Thorn which is hoping to sell this chat
| monitoring software.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson
| toyg wrote:
| The Commission agenda and mandate is set by the Council
| that nominates it, and periodically reviewed by the same
| Council. Items are set in meetings, the agenda of such
| meetings is typically public.
|
| If the Commission pushes, it's because the Council told it
| to push.
| munksbeer wrote:
| > Only the Commission can propose new legislation.
|
| That is a technicality relying on a shallow look at the
| word "propose". The commission frequently takes direction
| from the council when deciding what to focus on which leads
| to them "proposing" legislation. In this case the push for
| this has come from the Council and certain national
| governments combined with a particular commissioner.
| pohuing wrote:
| It's only them and the commission who can make proposals
| right
| arlort wrote:
| Only the commission
|
| But commission and council aren't acting in a void
| (parliament neither), if there's appetite for a legislation
| amongst national governments the commission will work on a
| proposal
|
| The same works to a lesser extent with the commission and
| parliament as well
| arlort wrote:
| The Council is as much part of the EU institution and as
| legitimate a part of them as the Parliament
|
| There's no avatar of the EU manifesting out of thin air in
| brussels so it makes sense for the EU as a whole to bear the
| blame for the actions it takes, regardless of where it
| originated
| avianlyric wrote:
| I think the point is that the EU hasn't actually taken any
| actions yet. This is just infighting between different arms
| of the EU governance structures, trying to figure out what
| actions should be taken.
|
| So it is unfair to label rubbish coming out of the
| commission or council as something the EU has decided, when
| it's only the first step of many for actually making a
| decision.
|
| It would be like taking any random bit of legislation
| proposed by a member of congress, and labelling it as the
| collective stance of the entire U.S. government, completely
| ignoring the fact there's a long road from proposal to
| enactment.
| morsch wrote:
| > It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote
| was withdrawn
|
| There may be more than one reason, but yesterday Germany said
| they'd vote against the proposal so it was DOA.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This kind of access to information still brings up Stasi
| memories in lots of us, or PIDE/DGS, in my case.
|
| But there are too many interests to make it in, sadly.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| How the hell is the stasi relevant in any way whatsoever?
| pjmlp wrote:
| The point that you have to ask that question, in the
| context of state surveillance, is quite telling.
| bjoli wrote:
| I am not German, but when I lived in Germany I got the
| impression they were very wary of political proposals
| that infringed on the privacy and liberties that the
| German people enjoyed.
|
| Not that they didn't pass any shitty laws, but that the
| question "how can this be misused?" always was present.
| ds_opseeker wrote:
| This is one of the traits I admire the most about German
| culture; awareness that government can abuse its power.
|
| In the US, by contrast, I see one political power eager
| to give powers to their candidates which they would hate
| to give to the rival party. It's like they've forgotten
| that they are giving power to the Government, not to a
| party, and if the other party gets power they get those
| powers.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "This is one of the traits I admire the most about German
| culture; awareness that government can abuse its power."
|
| This trait can be found all over the former Soviet Bloc,
| because we have had enough experience with either one or
| two homicidal authoritarian regimes (the Nazis and the
| Communists). That experience was paid in a lot of pain
| and blood.
|
| Places like Sweden, the UK, Canada, Australia or the US,
| where governments within living memory weren't as
| oppressive against their own population, have a lot of
| naive people, "well, they mean it well".
| sebastianz wrote:
| I agree but I fear this is now fading too. '89 was 35
| years ago, and for all generations younger than mine (i'm
| 40) this part of history will be much more abstract and
| 'out of living memory'.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, such is the nature of the world, that it buries
| horrors under layers of time.
|
| In some ways, such healing is necessary, even though it
| comes with risk of repeating the same mistakes.
|
| A week ago, I was in Zaragoza and there is a Goya Museum
| there. His prints of the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars
| are absolutely terrifying and ghastly. Today, the French
| and the Spanish people are on friendly terms. In a
| hypothetical world where the witnesses of such horrors
| still lived, those nations would probably be a lot less
| friendly and more resentful.
| deutschepost wrote:
| Thanks to the themes which are covered in German history
| lessons, it will never truly disappear.
|
| I can't remember a single lesson which didn't cover one
| of those themes.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet many students aren't paying attention, given current
| voting trends.
| anthk wrote:
| Yet they have laws even on personal web pages and even
| gopher holes, where you have to put your personal address
| on the public.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| You probably never lived in a communist (or any ultra
| authoritarian) state or never talked to somebody that
| did. The amount of horror that comes with it is beyond
| imagination, erosion of basic rights and threat of
| violent punishment for even the smallest infraction being
| on top of the list.
|
| Everyone could be snitching on you and everything could
| be used against you. Your phone scanning your images
| probably brings back memories to the older people that
| most of politicians are.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and
| have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering
| the current political climate there I would assume they are
| more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is
| less likely to succeed.
|
| Even if it does succeed, that would mean the Commission and the
| Council are in favour, but they'll still have to reach an
| agreement with Parliament as well. Parliament has already come
| out strongly against the proposal, but we just voted in a new,
| more conservative, Parliament, so I'm a bit anxious to see
| whether it'll stick to that stance.
| arlort wrote:
| This doesn't really fall across conservative / progressive
| lines, and those lines are already pretty blurred in the EP
|
| We'll see how it goes but it's hard to say what the result
| will be purely based on the elections results.
| Vinnl wrote:
| That is absolutely true, and the best thing to do is indeed
| to wait and see. And cross our fingers.
| cbeach wrote:
| I get the feeling most of those conservatives entering the
| parliament are of the libertarian and anti-establishment
| variety.
|
| Within the European Parliament, The ID Party represents many
| of the rising rightwing national parties, such as AfD, RN,
| Lega, PVV. Among other things, the ID Party stands for
| "Defense of individual freedoms and protection of freedom of
| expression, in particular digital freedoms"
|
| https://id-party.eu/program
|
| The concept of a centrally-managed surveillance apparatus in
| the EU runs contrary to the stated beliefs of the Euro-
| skeptic ID Party, which wants to reverse the centralisation
| of power within the EU.
| Fredkin wrote:
| There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and
| extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and
| dislike mass surveillance.
|
| Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way'
| corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly
| worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist
| parties that threaten their funding model and rock the
| boat.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I wonder if conservative/progressive and right/left were
| false dichotomies. At the extremes there are remarkably
| similar outcomes. Corruption is present at the extremes
| and the more moderate center. Some of the corruption is
| more explicit and illegal (pay me and I'll do this),
| other less so and legal (you did this while in office so
| now we hire you for big $ to do little.)
| int_19h wrote:
| They are not false dichotomies, they're just not the only
| ones that matter. There's a separate scale of
| liberal/authoritarian that, while not _entirely_
| orthogonal to progressive /conservative, allows for a lot
| of leeway in practice.
| orwin wrote:
| Authoritarian center is called 'extreme center' for a
| reason.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I'm not so much concerned about the rise of the ID party in
| this regard, but instead the growth of EPP and decline of
| the Greens. And possibly also Renew, though I'm not sure
| where they stood - if they were in favour then I guess
| their decline helps here.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's easy to talk about freedom of speech and expression in
| the abstract. Practice shows that many political forces
| that do so adopt much less liberal positions on specific
| issues when it comes to the kind of speech that they don't
| like, or that they see as beneficial to target from an
| appeal-to-the-voter perspective.
|
| So, given that this proposal is entirely framed as a way to
| combat child porn, and that "liberal pedophile elites" are
| part of the current far right zeitgeist, I wouldn't be so
| sure that they would be all that strongly opposed to it.
| Especially if they get to rewrite it in name (but not
| substance) to claim credit for it.
| qznc wrote:
| Germany publicly announced they will vote No. I don't know
| about others. Maybe it just became clear that it wouldn't pass?
|
| It was a sneaky try anyways, right after the election.
| generic92034 wrote:
| And during the UEFA Euro 2024.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Proposals should have an exponential backoff algorithm.
| Otherwise they'll keep proposing over and over until it passes.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Problem is that they can just keep rewording and repackaging
| it endlessly until the checksum doesn't match but the final
| effect is mostly the same.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I know a similar principle is successfully applied in
| judicial courts, in some cases.
|
| If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of
| problems gets much easier when an individual is
| designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these
| three seemingly different feelings are effectively the
| same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time
| dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.
| puzzledobserver wrote:
| The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have
| some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in
| the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves)
| blocked some bills from being voted on.
|
| I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it
| is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the
| British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government
| when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to
| be basically the same motion
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074
|
| > Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a
| defeated motion could not be brought back in the same
| form during the course of a parliamentary session.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Courts are a fundamental part of a Democracy.
|
| There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for
| proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to
| decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or
| whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Solution, perhaps, is equally persistent opposition.-
| kelnos wrote:
| But that's a problem. People get tired of having to fight
| against the same thing over and over and over.
|
| Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things
| like this every single time it comes up. But the people
| pushing it just have to win once.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for
| thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better.
| There are always new people, new generations, prepared to
| fight for the same thing their parents did and they are
| not tired.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Put that way, it sounds a lot like infosec ...
|
| (I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even
| if those promoting this were to win, it does not
| necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change
| is "irreversible" ...
|
| ... so contrarian persistence _might_ still be
| warranted).-
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Opposition needs public support.
|
| The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages.
|
| I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are
| higher than the public's resiliency.
| esafak wrote:
| The public is always changing; one generation will age
| out, while another joins the fray.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I
| suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They
| can saturate the current generation's resiliency
| threshold until the proposal is passed.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| I thought about letting people take the issue to court and
| making politicians face actual consequences if a judge
| decides that politicians brought up the same law over and
| over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when
| tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed
| laws.
| berkes wrote:
| In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to
| bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into
| action, would be voted out.
|
| And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And
| would not be elected in the first place when they operate
| on bad faith.
|
| Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and
| probably never will be. When marketing, spinning,
| populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in
| the best interest of the politicians rather than the
| civis themselves.
| kergonath wrote:
| There would be massive counter-productive effects the
| moment a significant enough fraction of the population is
| willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a
| political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.
| ljm wrote:
| This has been the strategy of every political party to hold
| office in the UK for as long as I've been alive.
|
| There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill
| going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked
| down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different
| wording.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| What do you mean by "to hold office"? How does this help a
| politician hold to power?
| ytwySXpMbS wrote:
| They mean any party that's had majority control of
| parliament, they don't mean it's been used as a strategy
| to get there but rather once they're ruling it's been
| introduced
| utensil4778 wrote:
| Parent is saying it has been the strategy of every party
| _which has held_ power. Not that the strategy helps them
| hold power.
| newdee wrote:
| I don't think that's what they mean. I just read it as
| all the political parties that have been in power or in
| office.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, this is the standard playbook worldwide for people
| in power, especially:
|
| 1. Politicians in power that want to do something that is
| unpopular.
|
| 2. Corporations that want to implement an unpopular policy.
|
| The evil genius part of it is that it not only allows them
| to test the temperature of the water, but also to:
|
| 1. Claim they are hearing the people and withdrew it, and
| even claim it as a victory.
|
| 2. Shift the Overton window so next time it comes up,
| people are desensitized.
|
| 3. Try again basically forever until they're able to get it
| passed.
|
| 4. Time it better around elections to avoid consequences.
| Voters have the memory of a goldfish, and are so
| party/identity-driven that it isn't hard to manipulate
| them.
| navane wrote:
| Can't we just pass a law that is incompatible with this
| proposal? Or can a new law always overrule existing laws?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| New laws always overrule older laws. Most legal systems,
| including the EU, have a constitution, that is harder to
| change and that governs what laws are allowed or not (the
| UK is rather unique in not really having such a law, so
| that in principle Parliament is free to pass any law they
| want).
|
| Enshrining a right to private communication and online
| anonimity into the EU constitution would probably prevent
| such laws from having any hope to go into effect, but
| that's a massive undertaking that I don't think would
| easily succeed.
| contravariant wrote:
| You mean something like a charter of fundamental rights?
| Perhaps containing the text
|
| > Everyone has the right to respect for his or her
| private and family life, home and communications.
|
| Admittedly that is part of a treaty rather than an actual
| constitution, though those amended treaties are the
| closest thing the EU has to a constitution.
| giobox wrote:
| _Generally_ speaking outside of constitutional questions,
| most legislatures cannot bind their successors. So yes, new
| laws can be written most of the time in most places.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Thank you for the background information.
| Oarch wrote:
| It feels like this has become an annual tradition...
| sva_ wrote:
| I think biannual by now
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _biannual by now_
|
| Makes sense given the Presidency of the Council of the EU
| "rotates among the member states of the EU every six months"
| [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_the_Council_o
| f_t...
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| The EU presidency doesn't have executionary powers like the
| US presidency. It can set up meetings and topics for
| discussion but can't enforce or shoot them down.
| eigenlicht wrote:
| While I still believe it's mainly about attention seeking and
| remaining the topic of discussions on the part of the EU, which
| is not an easy task yet as such mildly effective as we see
| again, one could get the feeling there's somehow more to it.
| Like a collusion, however tacit or pragmatic, that would in
| general work both ways but in this case so as to provide
| national governments an opportunity to make a few extra points
| from time to time, (mainly) on domestic ground, and to _look_
| prudent or generous, at least to certain groups of voters. In
| this case a benefaction to the unlikely German "critics" in
| particular. Its ruling coalition certainly is desperate for it.
| For anything really. I already had this feeling years ago when
| we were wearing ourselves out on the darned question of so-
| called "upload-filters" amid the entire EU copyright law issue.
| What even became of it? Well, due to ultimately national
| implementation and copious room for legal interpretation, at
| least in Germany not much. A kind of nothingburger in fact,
| certainly relative to to the racket that went before, or shall
| we say, was supposed to go before. Back at the time it made
| (then) Merkel's big-coalition government suddenly look a little
| sunnier. To be blunt, it feels rather artificial to me and I
| don't expect anything like it being supposed to actually
| transpire no matter what. That is even without considering how
| unclear matters of technical realization remain, even if you've
| seen all the polito-pseudotechnical BS bingo there is to see at
| the moment. Like, how to even enforce client-side scanning when
| applications (or OS) are free software? It's just rubbish, and
| supposedly can be as no one never seriously planned for
| anything like it. But why not just talk the big talk about it?
| Maybe it helps. A few very optimistic quarters may even hope
| for some sort of (shallow) deterrence effect. For a bit of
| ruffling and scaring up the evil agents. Good luck as for that
| one.
| sva_ wrote:
| > In July, the Council Presidency will transfer from Belgium to
| Hungary, which has stated its intention to advance negotiations
| on chat control as part of its work program.
|
| That does not make me very hopeful.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| "Make Europe Great Again". Seriously, that is the new slogan
| for the Hungarian EU presidency.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/18/europe/hungary-make-europ...
| Maken wrote:
| Orban never disappoints.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Connotations aside, using a well worn slogan 8 years later is
| uninspired. This makes it very ironic.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> well worn slogan 8 years later is uninspired_
|
| Ironic considering that "Let's Make America Great Again"
| was Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980.
| DougN7 wrote:
| And Hitler used it too.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > What's True
|
| > A prominent theme during the Nazi Party's ascendancy
| was restoring Germany to its former greatness, and Adolf
| Hitler used the phrase "make Germany great again" upon
| occasion.
|
| > What's False
|
| > "Make Germany Great Again" was not a (campaign) slogan
| employed by Hitler, and Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler are
| far from the only politicians who promised to make their
| countries "great again."
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-germany-great-
| again/
| michpoch wrote:
| Hitler wanted to make America Great Again?
|
| He kinda succeeded...
| UberFly wrote:
| Bill Clinton too I believe.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| Wasn't Thatcher the first?
|
| And Make Britain Great Again is so much better than
| America/Europe/literally anything that doesn't have great
| in its name
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It's true, as an acronym MBGA just slips off the tongue.
| defrost wrote:
| The rebuttal from _The Beat_ flowed I
| see no joy I see only sorrow I see no
| chance of your bright new tomorrow So stand
| down Margaret Stand down please
| toyg wrote:
| _It 's fun to stay at the EEEEEM BE GEE AY, It's fun to
| stay at the EEEEM BE GEE AY..._
| rainsil wrote:
| That's a good thing. Expanded slogans have object-level
| meanings. Acronyms just stand as identity markers, and
| are much easier to dismiss.
|
| It's harder to argue against "Make America Great Again"
| or "Black Lives Matter". Their object-level meanings are
| fairly anodyne and positive. It's much easier to argue
| against "MAGA" or "BLM", since the meaning is obscured by
| the acronym.
|
| Political movements with nice slogans should avoid
| turning them into acronyms.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's even more ironic when Trump uses it. Like, weren't you
| supposed to do that 8 years ago? What happened? You didn't
| do it? Why should we think you'll do it this time?
|
| I mean, I guess it's become like a brand name. But if you
| think about it for a minute, it's carrying a subtext that
| Trump failed last time.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's doublespeak. Orban is not interested in making Europe or
| the EU any stronger, just in extracting as much as he can
| from it. He only cares about Hungary.
|
| However, it is a signal (we cannot really talk of dog whistle
| here, it's rather obvious) to other far-right parties with
| similar nationalist agenda that he's on their side. So a
| better reading might be "make [individual countries in]
| Europe great again".
| rebolek wrote:
| He only cares about himself, not Hungary.
| cenamus wrote:
| Money, power and football, in no particular order, to be
| precise
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| I don't think there's that much thought involved, they're
| just aping their Republican heroes.
| dindobre wrote:
| I hope they don't use Hungary as the scapegoat to pass this
| kind of stuff, the fact that something like Chat Control is
| even discussed is gross already.
| vasco wrote:
| I think Hungary recently has had some spats with the EU so
| maybe they will use the approval of Chat Control as some sort
| of trade with something else they want to keep doing.
| p_l wrote:
| Orban would welcome the powers gained through Chat Control,
| so...
| nalekberov wrote:
| Sounds to me more like boiling the frog.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _does not make me very hopeful_
|
| Belgium proposed the damn thing.
| eigenket wrote:
| This time the proposal got canned because Germany said they
| would vote against it. Unless that changes it isn't going to
| make any progress.
|
| A lot of Germans still remember the Stazi, so its pretty
| unlikely that this shit is going to pass.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the proposal got canned because Germany said they would
| vote against it_
|
| Both the far left and right in Germany are against this,
| correct?
| eigenket wrote:
| I'm far from an expert in German politics, but there are
| obvious historical reasons why Germans like the idea of
| having a right to privacy.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there are obvious historical reasons why Germans like
| the idea of having a right to privacy_
|
| There are obvious historical reasons why they shouldn't
| try far-right, race-based politics, yet here we are [1].
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/rise-germanys-
| most-succ...
| flawn wrote:
| I don't even understand why people never look and
| understand the history that happened outside of their
| country. Just the sheer risk of having a society like in
| the DDR is reason enough to not do stuff like that.
|
| We never learn (long-term) from the past.
| soco wrote:
| A sizeable part of Germany is nostalgic after the good
| ole times, be it of 50 years ago or of 90 years ago. You
| can see them at the voting booths.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| See also: Ostalgie
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie)
| pkos98 wrote:
| two of the three coalition parties are against it - the
| greens and the FDP (the social democrats are in favour),
| thus the government doesnt support.
|
| they are neither far left/right
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they are neither far left /right_
|
| Are Linke and AfD are for chat control? They're by whom
| the coalition is being threatened.
| Tainnor wrote:
| The current government coalition is threatened by the CDU
| (centre-right), not by Linke (that has almost no voters
| left) or AfD (who no other party wants to form a
| coalition with).
|
| The most likely outcome after the next election at this
| point looks like a coalition between the CDU and the
| Green party.
|
| Unfortunately, CDU is probably in favour (they're pretty
| "law and order") and the Greens probably won't care
| enough to oppose strongly.
| DasIch wrote:
| Die Linke (far left), Greens (left), FDP (socially liberal-
| ish but economically further right than CDU) and AFD (far
| right) are against it. SPD (left) is internally conflicted
| about this topic. CDU (right) is in favour.
|
| So essentially everyone who isn't very into law and order
| type politics and cares about civil rights is against this,
| regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.
| This is typical for such issues in Germany.
| nebalee wrote:
| > So essentially everyone who isn't very into law and
| order type politics and cares about civil rights is
| against this, regardless of where they are on the
| political spectrum.
|
| That does not apply to the afd.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| German parties always are against something until they are
| in power, then they magically have changed their minds or
| agree "with stomach pain"...
| soco wrote:
| Just because somebody is called "president" doesn't mean they
| enjoy the same privileges as a US president. The presidency of
| the Council does nothing more than calling for discussions. No
| extra powers, no extra influence, so whoever is in charge
| matters way less than they'd like to claim (in this particular
| case to impress Putin, I would suppose).
| interactivecode wrote:
| What really gets me with these types of "safety" proposals is
| that we already have quite some ways to get someone's private
| information and communication if they are being investigated. Has
| everyone forgotten that? All that these wide reaching laws do is
| to allow for governments to investigate without substantiated
| reasons.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Yep, same thing in most countries. Their exists a legal method
| to do it if they can get a warrant.... Or a FISA court
| order.....or a National Security Letter....or they can get
| around the need for this via just paying some data company or
| the company to access your data....
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm fact even the German police force said that this law isn't
| necessary and they have all the tools they need to investigate.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Keen to read a source on this, as this would be valuable to
| bring up whenever new data harvesting measures are on the
| table.
| Zak wrote:
| Chat Control is explicitly a proposal for a new mass
| surveillance mechanism, not a mechanism for targeted
| surveillance of a person suspected of a crime.
| tzs wrote:
| > What really gets me with these types of "safety" proposals is
| that we already have quite some ways to get someone's private
| information and communication if they are being investigated
|
| How does that work if I'm using an E2E encrypted messaging app?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Same way it works if you're posting letters: the powers-that-
| be apply for a warrant to search for evidence.
| martijnvds wrote:
| Traffic analysis also exists.
|
| "Every time a message goes from X to Y, suddenly Y does
| (thing) a day later"
|
| And then investigate from there.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Until next time...
|
| We must win every time...
| ta1243 wrote:
| It's called democracy. It's better than the alternative.
| guizzy wrote:
| More "democracy", where you must win every time and the issue
| will keep coming up again and again, but if you lose once
| whoops the matter will never find its way back onto the
| docket and you will never get a chance to have it reversed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you lose once whoops the matter will never find its
| way back onto the docket and you will never get a chance to
| have it reversed_
|
| The same dynamics govern passage as reversal. You keep
| trying until they slip up.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Yeah but these people make laws for a living while
| ordinary people are usually busy trying to feed their
| families.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| And this is the main problem. Lawmakers and
| corporate/nonprofit/activist groups (who write bills for
| them) just repeatedly abuse the system in violation of
| unwritten democratic norms to get their way. I see this
| over and over where I've lived (blue states), for example
| with unconstitutional gun control laws that rely on
| exhausting opponents or waiting for them to not pay
| attention. The worst are when they submit bills with no
| text and substitute the text in at the last minute (so no
| one can oppose it earlier) with a late night weekend vote
| soon after. Or when they label everything an emergency
| measure (which makes it immune to reversal from voter
| initiatives in some states).
| haswell wrote:
| This is life. Most of the things humans value require
| constant effort and maintenance. And things are reversed
| all the time.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Can you think of literally any law in modern times that
| granted a government significant power, yet was
| proactively reversed (as opposed to the handful of laws
| that were made with time limitations and allowed to
| expire)?
| username332211 wrote:
| > but if you lose once whoops the matter will never find
| its way back onto the docket and you will never get a
| chance to have it reversed.
|
| Why? It's normal legislation, it can be repealed the same
| way it's passed.
|
| The EU doesn't pass legislation trough it's supreme court.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| There are certain protections against the government of the
| day taking away fundamental rights with a simple majority.
| In the EU, these constitutional principles are enshrined in
| the treaties that can only be changed unanimously.
|
| On that basis, the highest EU court (CJEU) has ruled
| several times that mass surveillance is unlawful.
| Governments are still trying to find a way around these
| protections, but it's not a certainty that whatever
| ultimately passes parliament will hold up in court.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| What you failed to mention was that the rulings against
| data retention for example which were indeed invalidated
| by the European court happened 8 years after the fact.
|
| So what do we do for 8 years while the courts decide
| which side is right?
| abecedarius wrote:
| Several replies say passing and repealing legislation (and
| regulation) is technically symmetrical. Who really thinks
| that's more than technically true?
| achenet wrote:
| Probably a bad counter example but:
|
| Abortion got reversed recently.
| samatman wrote:
| Which is why laws should be made through legislation, not
| judicial fiat. The majority in Dobbs v. Jackson made it
| very clear that a law requiring the same principle as Roe
| v. Wade would be legitimate.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Still, there should be a mechanism to avoid bringing up the
| same issue every year or two. Maybe 5 or 10 years.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This mechanism would be prone to abuse: a group that
| opposes a particular issue could effectively time that
| issue out to prevent a replacement group from pursuing it.
|
| The adage about "being the worst system except for all the
| other ones" applies well here: your (and my) participation
| in democracy is a _required_ component, not just a nice
| thing to have. Devising hacks around our participation will
| ultimately result in a system that doesn't allow our
| participation.
| 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote:
| That'd slow down decision making a lot. Imagine the effects
| this would have at the current pace climate changes are
| affecting the weather
| ta1243 wrote:
| It will only be brought up again if there's a chance that
| the representatives _you vote for_ will back it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The mechanism is for people to vote for representatives who
| don't bring up those issues every year or two. The problem
| is that people just vote along party lines, and then vote
| for incumbents within those party lines. Without the threat
| of losing their office, politicians have no incentive to
| change their behavior from year to year.
|
| Think about how your suggestion would work for other
| topics, like crime, immigration, social services, etc. It
| would undermine the government's ability to respond quickly
| to changes in the external world. It's not worth doing that
| over this one issue, when the real solution is to just vote
| for better candidates.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I think - with 5G warfare being what it is - that we need to
| go more granular. Democracy is a given when information is a
| weapon [1]. What _kind_ of democracy serves our interests
| best?
|
| I like the theory behind liquid direct myself, but it would
| need extensive field testing before it's the de facto
| governance model for, say, Mars.
|
| [1]I realize that's a strange statement - I elaborate on my
| reasoning here https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/an-
| optimistic-loo...
| alecco wrote:
| Have you talked with the average voter? Most don't even
| know (or care) who their representatives are. Direct
| democracy works for small countries with high education and
| social cohesion, like Switzerland. And even there it's only
| used for specific hot issues like pensions.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| direct liquid democracy still has vote delegation, it's
| just possible to reassign your vote in real time.
| Representatives vote on issues based on how many people
| assign them their vote, but people can reassign their
| vote any time.
|
| I actually favor something with a more Bayesian twist
| that I haven't heard a catchy name for, where I could
| delegate my vote to different people depending on the
| subject up for debate. Essentially fantasy sports but for
| cabinet ministers. That would also be good because
| someone I trust on most issues might delegate both our
| votes to someone they defer to in a particular field
| without me needing to study whose expertise I trust in
| that field. If someone's heard of a name for that system
| I'd be interested to hear it. Hard to research innovation
| in a field when you don't know the buzzwords.
| patates wrote:
| The tools that maintain democracy, such as media and
| communication, should not be vulnerable to undermining, even
| through democratic processes.
| ta1243 wrote:
| And who decides what undermines those tools?
| egeozcan wrote:
| The media should not be owned by the state, private
| communication should not be readable by the state.
|
| Simple.
| smeej wrote:
| It's still disappointing that after all this time, nobody's
| been able to implement a less bad option.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I'm wondering if at this point its more of an autocracy of
| systems. And whilst you can vote for the top layer that
| (nominally?) governs the system/institution, the system
| itself is permanent and continuous.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Your parent comment is alluding to how "we" have to win every
| time (the proposal is made) but "they" only have to win once
| (because once surveillance exists its extremely hard to
| undo).
|
| Thats not democracy. Democracy isn't one side wins - it's the
| means by which societies balance the needs and contributions
| of everyone. Valuing the "needs" of spy agencies and
| corporations over the rights of natural people is the
| opposite of democracy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not called democracy, democracy just means rule by
| commoners (the demos.) It's called _parliamentary democracy_.
| And there are not only many alternatives, but also multiple
| types of parliamentary democracies, of which the EU is just
| one.
| snowpid wrote:
| which systems do you think are better?
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think the names of systems is largely secondary to what's
| happening within those systems. James Madison has an
| excellent quote on this: "The accumulation of all powers,
| Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands,
| whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-
| appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very
| definition of tyranny."
|
| It's from Federalist Papers #47 [1].
|
| [1] - https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp
| sackfield wrote:
| Is there any reason this couldn't be made into a right to
| prevent the constant legislative onslaught? Is it a lack of
| organisation/will or is it something intrinsic to the way the
| system is setup?
| dsign wrote:
| The right to privacy is in quite a few constitutions. The
| reason nobody wants to stomp Chat Control for good is because
| of how it has been framed: it's to protect the children.
| Parents are fiercely protective, and I suspect that for a
| majority of them, mass surveillance and a police state is not
| too high a price to pay for the safety of their little ones.
| zero0529 wrote:
| Really important! However it seems that the battle will continue
| in July with Hungary instead..
| 533ghghh wrote:
| Orban is a true liberal - not a fake liberal. He opposes
| government control of private communications.
| notavalleyman wrote:
| I think you might be being sarcastic, but here is the truth
| on the topic.
|
| Orban and his government spent a huge amount of time and
| effort, making private communications LESS liberal and more
| difficult to speak freely.
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/02/13/i-cant-do-my-job-
| journ...
| SahAssar wrote:
| Orban is authoritarian. During his rule the freedom and
| democracy of Hungary have taken huge steps back and the
| country is no longer considered "free" by for example Freedom
| House.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| You created a new account just to spontaneously share your
| love of Orban? He must be a great and very convincing person.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| I am really fed up of governments constantly trying to pass stuff
| like this that is clearly a breach of the fundamental principles
| of human rights. Its also become almost impossible to get
| governments to adopt sensible positions that don't target certain
| sub groups to harm them.
| eigenket wrote:
| Its not really governments, its specifically Ylva Johansson,
| the commissioner from Sweden who keeps pushing this, every time
| she does the rest of the EU apparatus slaps her down because it
| fundamentally won't work.
| kriops wrote:
| I read her wiki page after seeing this comment, and it all
| makes sense now ...
| rightbyte wrote:
| Can one commissioner push the machinery by her self? I need
| to read up on the rules. Surely there is support in the
| commission?
| eigenket wrote:
| She can, but then she gets slapped down when the
| legislation makes it outside the commission.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Ylva Johansson?
|
| We're not sending our best!
|
| /Swede in the US
| eu_cc wrote:
| So I guess it might disappear with the new commission? Will
| she be nominated again?
| jeltz wrote:
| It is possible that the lobbyists will find a new
| commissioner to buy.
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| She was previously a member of a political party actually
| called "Left Party, The Communists". Her primary topics of
| interest are enabling as much migration by asylum seekers as
| possible, and deploying digital mass-surveillance on every
| European resident.
|
| In the most sarcastic way possible; what a great asset to our
| democratic institutions!
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| It's these kind of people who really enable the far right
| to exist as well. Once you get to this level of lunacy,
| whether it's left or right is irrelevant.
| eigenket wrote:
| I would argue she is behaving rationally. She has
| financial interests in organisations which sell chat
| monitoring software, they're going to make a shittone of
| money if her laws ever get passed.
|
| She's a standard corrupt slug, not a misinformed
| ideologist.
| jeltz wrote:
| No, she is just corrupt and she is not near as left-wing
| as that post tries to pretend. She just has financial
| interests in this.
| eigenket wrote:
| I mean in this case the problem isn't realy any of that,
| its that she has financial and personal links to American
| organisations (Thorn and Co.) who are in the business of
| selling this chat monitoring software.
| SahAssar wrote:
| The Left Party are one of the strongest opponents to Chat
| Control (and no longer include communism in their party
| platform). Ylvas actual career has been with the Social
| Democrats, who are basically the only party strongly for
| Chat Control.
| eesmith wrote:
| Is the Wikipedia entry wrong?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson says:
|
| "In the 1988 general elections Johansson was elected as a
| member of the Riksdag for the Left Party - Communists
| (VPK). She later left the party and joined the Social
| Democrats."
|
| Looks like she left the VPK in 1991.
| SahAssar wrote:
| No, that seems correct to me. What in that quote
| contradicts what I said?
| alexanderchr wrote:
| They are so against it that they voted for it yesterday.
| SahAssar wrote:
| What is your source that the swedish Left Party voted for
| chat control yesterday? I haven't read that. Or are you
| talking about the Social Democrats which is a completely
| different party?
| jyggen wrote:
| Every party except Centre Party and Sweden Democrats
| supported the proposal in the Committee on Justice [1],
| though Green Party and Left Party later said their
| support was a mistake [2].
|
| [1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/regeringen-gar-
| vidare-med...
|
| [2] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/mp-och-v-rostade-
| fel-om-k...
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Right, we need positive legislation that instead enshrines our
| rights.
|
| Secrecy of correspondence does not currently extend to phones.
| But more and more of our life is happening on phones, not on
| paper. If anything, we need secrecy of correspondence on our
| phones more!
| irusensei wrote:
| > The EU Council did not make a decision on chat control today,
| as the agenda item was removed due to the lack of a majority,
| confirmed by Council and member state spokespersons
|
| Wait so does it mean they will only propose when they have chance
| to pass? Is it just me or here is something really wrong with
| this? It has no chance to be rejected and gone for good?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _does it mean they will only propose when they have chance to
| pass?_
|
| This is typically how legislative bodies work--it's why vote
| counting is an essential component of whipping. (Sorry,
| American political terminology.)
|
| > _It has no chance to be rejected and gone for good?_
|
| I have never seen a way to do this proposed that doesn't have
| horrific side effects. (One, who decides which issues are too
| similar to previously-mooted ones. Two, how do you avoid one
| side deliberately "spoiling" an issue to prevent the other from
| taking action on it in the future.)
|
| The best you can do is require a total process re-start each
| time. That doesn't prevent reintroduction, but it adds
| significant cost and delay.
| arlort wrote:
| > I have never seen a way to do this proposed that doesn't
| have horrific side effects
|
| There's some sort of fetishism of systems and technology on
| the internet and especially in technical forums like HN where
| people have this idea that technical solutions can fix social
| issues
|
| Governance systems have mostly been unchanged at their core
| for the past 100-200 years and people are under the
| impression that makes them somewhat antiquated so we
| definitely can fix this with some good code and automated
| judging.
|
| It helps that that's much easier than having to accept the
| responsibility of being involved and proactively interested
| in the work of institutions which most people find boring and
| not worth the effort to learn about
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Governance systems have mostly been unchanged at their
| core for the past 100-200 years_
|
| I actually disagree with this notion. We had three big
| spurts of new-country formation in the last 100 years:
| after WWI, after WWII/decolonisation and after the collapse
| of the USSR. I'd argue we've been better each time around
| at creating a larger fraction of resilient governments.
|
| > _easier than having to accept the responsibility of being
| involved_
|
| Correct. Strongmen are convenient.
| arlort wrote:
| > new-country formation in the last 100 years
|
| Yes, but they didn't really introduce new ideas and
| philosophies of government, at most slightly different
| ways of implement old ideas
| toyg wrote:
| _> I 'd argue we've been better each time around at
| creating a larger fraction of resilient governments._
|
| Looking at the state of a lot of ex-USSR countries, I'd
| say this is not correct. Quite a few of them ended up as
| dictatorships. If anything, I would argue the immediate
| post-WWII was an apex of democratic creation that we are
| unlikely to match any time soon.
| rhetenor wrote:
| I'm definitely with you on your first statement, but
|
| > The best you can do is require a total process re-start
| each time. That doesn't prevent reintroduction, but it adds
| significant cost and delay.
|
| Democracy is not all about efficiency. In fact it is
| important that these costs are added, especially for passing
| new laws. As it is in IT Security, there is always DoS
| Potential if the defender has to do more work than the
| attacker. As such the one proposing a new law must be seen as
| the attacker and it is important that he must do a
| significant more amount of work than the defender.
|
| An example where this fails, also for the EU legislative, are
| the various Safe Harbor Agreements with the US and their
| corresponding Schrems judgements. They all passed more than
| easily and Schrems needed years to fight against their
| unjustice. As a result the EU had many years under an unsound
| law.
|
| I think there is much potential to improve the democratic
| institutions of the EU and not being able to withdraw a
| proposal (or maybe only in extraordinary circumstances) would
| be one of them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Democracy is not all about efficiency_
|
| In that context, I meant cost and delay as a benefit.
|
| > _not being able to withdraw a proposal_
|
| This empowers anyone who can introduce proposals with
| fillibustering the forum.
| rhetenor wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. Misread that it's something
| unwanted.
|
| In my opinion filibustering would only be a problem, if
| there are no speech limits. As far as I'm aware of the
| internal workings of the EU institutions there are tight
| schedules and every member has limited speech time and
| the vote is set on a fixed date.
|
| And as I stated, there should also be exceptions which
| allow for a withdrawal. It just shouldn't be as easy as:
| Let's withdraw until I got a stable majority.
|
| Stable and flexible legislative sure is an important
| thing in democracy, but there must also be some kind of
| disruptive process to correct and the MPs should only be
| bound to their own conscience at the end of the process.
|
| Could you maybe elaborate a bit further how this would
| enable filibustering?
| gpderetta wrote:
| The best way to do this is via constitutional protection that
| can't be overridden by ordinary law. The EU has a de-facto a
| constitution in the form of the ECHR and the various
| treaties, which do protect fundamental rights, but there are
| so many caveats on those rights that a carefully worded law
| always risks slipping through.
| gostsamo wrote:
| That's how EU politics works. There is no sense of officially
| voting on something if it is clear from previous negotiations
| that it will not pass. With only 27 members, the counting
| usually is done well in advance and the final vote is showing
| that agreement has been reached. If someone votes against, it
| is for pr purposes, because if they are really against it, they
| have a veto right.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how EU politics works_
|
| It's how any sovereign body _must_ work. Putting something to
| a vote and failing demonstrates weakness, so it 's avoided.
| And the body cannot be bound in deliberation. (Else it's not
| sovereign, but a vassal of whoever sets the agenda.)
| gostsamo wrote:
| Mostly agree, but often parliaments are a place to make a
| point to the observing voters and some things are proposed
| with the full knowledge that they will be rejected. The
| proposer though turns to the public and says: "I made a
| promise and I deliver, but the other side is stopping us
| from implementing it. So, please, vote for me next time in
| grater numbers to give me the ability to pass it the second
| time." Also, when you have a bigger assembly, last minute
| twists happen for unexpected reasons like a coalition
| partner deciding to screw their partners and ruin their
| agenda.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _some things are proposed with the full knowledge that
| they will be rejected_
|
| Sure, these are messaging bills [1]. If you're clearly
| out of power, they're an effective tactic.
|
| If you're in power, a good way to lose it is by embracing
| messaging bills.
|
| [1] https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-
| government/article2...
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| > There is no sense of officially voting on something if it
| is clear from previous negotiations that it will not pass.
|
| This means that it was implicitly voted upon and rejected by
| the people, therefore it should not be put up for a vote
| again.
| gostsamo wrote:
| No, it means that those who want it did not manage to trade
| enough compromises on other topics to those who don't want
| it or do not oppose it at least. If let's say a french
| economy sector benefits from policy A while a polish sector
| might lose from it, and Romania is neutral. In such a
| situation France might promise Poland their support for
| policy B which is beneficial for the pols, and they might
| promise a smaller favor to Romania to make them form the
| majority. If the pols are unhappy with the trade, they will
| bid for Romania's support against policy A. The show is
| funnier with 27 participants and fields that span through
| dozens of policies and over decades.
| toyg wrote:
| There is no veto right anymore. Most decisions are taken by
| simple majority. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-
| eu/voting-system/
|
| The veto right was effectively removed once certain countries
| started abusing it.
| dbttdft wrote:
| It's always funny to see how these simple things play out
| in the obvious way.
| kergonath wrote:
| > It has no chance to be rejected and gone for good?
|
| Not really. Besides, how would that work? Wouldn't a new law
| proposal be just that, a new proposal to be debated and voted
| on, even if its intent or wording is similar to a previous
| rejected proposal? Is there any country with the equivalent of
| dismissal with prejudice for new laws?
| account42 wrote:
| A constitution kinda is that - limits on what laws the
| country can make. Maybe there should be another softer but
| automatic mechanism though. For example you could increase
| the required consensus for passing laws with similar goals to
| those that that have failed recently.
| kergonath wrote:
| > A constitution kinda is that - limits on what laws the
| country can make.
|
| Right, but constitutional changes can be unmade or
| superseded. Even in a notoriously conservative country like
| the US, constitutional amendments are repealed on occasion.
| And a lot of other countries' constitutions get complete
| overhauls every now and then, at which point the details of
| the previous constitution cease to matter. So the fact that
| something gets to the constitution does not mean that
| nobody can discuss it, ever, it just changes the process of
| doing it.
|
| I don't know if any country where a draft law is rejected
| _because it was too similar to another failed proposal_.
| Although I wouldn't put past the English having something
| like that in a dusty corner of their constitutional
| hodgepodge.
| alvincodes wrote:
| More people should know about this so there's even more push back
| when it comes to a vote
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| This law is going to pass at some point. They started this crap 4
| years ago with Chat Control 1.0 and they won't stop trying.
|
| This is pure madness.
|
| I have decided I am not going to wait around to be spied upon by
| the EU so I am going set up my own server and move to FOSS
| IOS/Android clients since these ones are currently exempted from
| the draft.
|
| The hardest part will be to convince friends and family to move
| over though.
| jmull wrote:
| The wave of authoritarianism sweeping the world is pretty
| alarming.
|
| This bill (only temporarily sidelined) would treat every single
| person as a suspect of child porn crimes. Previously, you'd need
| substantial cause to put someone under heavy surveillance.
|
| People talked about how that was due to principles of civil
| liberty, human rights, and freedom. But apparently it was
| actually just because it wasn't feasible to watch everything
| everyone says and does all the time. Now that the technology is
| here to enable it, our "free democracies" can't rush fast enough
| to put the boot to everyone's neck all the time.
|
| Pretty obviously this is just the first step. CP is a tactical
| choice of the first step since practically everyone can agree on
| how horrible it is. (Come to think of it, this is low key
| exploiting the vulnerability of children -- nice one,
| government!) Once everything you say or do is sent to the
| government for review, you can bet it won't be for just that one
| thing only.
|
| BTW, I think the government policy makers blow past all the
| problems with false positives that will inevitably occur because,
| when your goal is control of the population not the prevention of
| child abuse, that's a feature not a bug. You want everyone
| nervous and afraid. You want the stories of the lives of innocent
| people ruined to circulate. That helps keeps everyone cowed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _our "free democracies" can't rush fast enough to put the
| boot to everyone's neck all the time_
|
| You're saying this in respect of a bill that has repeatedly
| failed. Yes, the authoritarian pressure is real. But it only
| wins if this attitude takes root.
| from-nibly wrote:
| > But it only wins if this attitude takes root.
|
| Or if someone slips up.
|
| Or if it gets bundled with something everyone is really
| afraid of just right (see also the patriot act)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Or if someone slips up_
|
| You're talking about a legislative process. In the EU. This
| would require months if not years of repeated slipping up.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If someone _opposing_ it slips up. The reason it _failed_
| is because the legislative process slipped up. The public
| were accidentally given a few days warning.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _public were accidentally given a few days warning_
|
| To the Commission passing it. More steps before it's law.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Most countries don't let you bundle legislation together
| like that. US problem with stuffing everything in giant
| uber-legislations to work around the congress's ability to
| do anything is fairly unique to US, and doesn't everywhere
| else.
|
| Heck, in the UK there are even rules around the naming of
| legislation which makes it illegal to give legislation
| marketing type titles like "The Patriot Act". The titles
| have to explicitly outline the purpose and objective of the
| legislation (which then results in some very long titles).
| digging wrote:
| I think it wins _unless_ this attitude takes root. We cannot
| trust our "democratic" institutions to survive without
| constant outward pressure to resist the press of
| authoritarianism. It is a never-ending fight, and
| authoritarianism is on the rise because our underfunded
| history classes tell us it was already won before we were
| born (among other reasons).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous given that parts of the EU has a
| living memory of living in a system like this. This isn't some
| imagined hypothetical scenario. The east bloc had this exact
| type of arbitrary mass surveillance 40 years ago. It wasn't
| great.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Why are EU citizens electing these types of politicians?
| bilvar wrote:
| Because if you don't want to vote for them you are
| immediately branded far-right and a racist, and Europe will
| fall into a slippery-slope of re-Nazifying itself.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Based on this Chat Control debacle, sounds like the people
| saying that have no idea what they're talking about and
| should be encouraged to shut up or to be more precise and
| rigorous in their arguments lol
| agile-gift0262 wrote:
| I'd prefer a society where when people say something
| stupid they are pointed out where they were wrong and
| why, instead of encouraging people to shut up
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Right, but the hall monitors don't grant that benefit of
| the doubt to others in the first place. Otherwise what
| parent pointed out wouldn't be the case.
| jerojero wrote:
| I don't think this is the right approach.
|
| In fact, I think this kind of effort alienates people and
| turns them precisely into a direction where they vent
| their frustration with the system on wrong avenues.
|
| In many ways, the people are voting for far-right
| politicians because there's been an intellectual elite
| that has told them again and again "your concerns don't
| matter, so just shut up for a moment". It turns out, they
| do matter. We ought to respect each other and listen to
| each other truthfully to be able to reach agreements.
|
| Overall, I'd say, large groups of people are more than
| capable of reaching reasonable outcomes. The problem is
| our system of politics are not really encouraging
| dialogue and change of mind. In fact, a politician
| changing their mind is seen as a bad thing and is usually
| punished. But that's just how the system is set up to be,
| of course, a politician is supposed to represent an
| electorate so the politician needs to be rigid in their
| views and the electorate is the one that needs to change.
| But this comes with the problem that electorate cycles
| are slow and "the people" have a much harder time
| accessing and parsing information than a politician might
| have.
|
| Ideally we'd ought to have a system where our
| representatives are capable and encouraged to come into
| an issue with an open mind, and upon deliberation
| decanting into a certain position. Regardless of
| political color.
|
| And I think that's kind of completely the opposite to
| "these people should shut up", no, they should speak up
| and be heard. But it should be done in a context that
| allows for a fair and reasonable debate.
| Fredkin wrote:
| You may also be branded far-left too. The authoritarians in
| the 'center' are also afraid of a strong leftist movement
| taking their power and money away, not just a rightist one.
|
| You can tell because different pro-surveillance arguments
| are concocted depending on the audience: for conservatives
| they say "think of the children, Islamic terrorism, drugs,
| etc." for leftists they say: "toxic content online,
| disinformation, right-wing-terror, hate crimes". And
| because everyone is terrified of the other side, and the
| Internet and mainstream media can be used to target these
| messages, we have what we have today.
| bilvar wrote:
| Nobody cares about being branded far-left. It's not a
| smear. Afterall, "Antifa is just an idea", said the
| centrist ;)
| jerojero wrote:
| This is probably a much more difficult question to answer
| than you might expect.
|
| If you asked me, I think liberal democracies all around the
| world are going through a legitimacy crisis. People have not
| been feeling, for a while now, properly represented by their
| politicians so they are always seeking to vote for someone
| that _seems_ like the outsider. Right now, that is
| represented by these sort of authoritarian, big demagogue
| politicians.
|
| I think a lot of the problems of the modern world require
| much more innovative ways of doing politics and our liberal
| democracies which are based on this concept of the "vote for
| your representative" are at the limits of what they can do.
| The systems we have are slow and inefficient in a world that
| changes rapidly and requires politics to adapt much more
| quickly than they can.
|
| For this reason, imo, people have grown dejected from
| politics and the response of the electorate is a sort of
| self-destruction where they will vote for anyone that can
| resonate with a message of "i can fix it". Whatever that
| character might be. It's easy for politicians to play certain
| cards; say, immigration is the problem and the fix is to stop
| it. That seems like a simple solution and it's a message that
| can be understood pretty easily.
|
| But what are the real problems of the 21st century, in
| Europe, in the USA, in the rest of the world? I think a lot
| of people might hyper-focus on certain problems and offer
| solutions just for those problems and act as if that could
| solve a much more systemic failure. Ultimately, it is my
| opinion that the problem is politicians/politics itself and
| so it is rather difficult for politicians to solve it.
| Politicians are quick to say "we've failed you" but they
| don't really mean it, it's true though.
|
| A couple books that have really changed my perspective on how
| politics should be and why our systems are failing are:
| Systemic Corruption by Camila Vergara and Open Democracy by
| Helene Landemore. If you wanna know more.
| toyg wrote:
| Part of the problem is just scale.
|
| National governments were formed to solve nation-sized
| issues (trains, taxation rates not changing every 50km,
| consistent languages and education systems, etc). Modern
| problems are bigger than that: globalized production
| chains, tax havens, climate change, migration flows, and
| superpower conflicts, simply cannot be fixed at the
| national level.
|
| I can guarantee that all the boats in the Mediterranean and
| the North Sea will be shot on sight by my navy, but people
| will still get into Europe from somewhere else. I can
| ensure all the manufacturers in the country respect
| stringent pollution laws, but people will still buy cheaper
| and more polluting Chinese goods. And so on and so forth.
|
| So we move to a super-national, continent-sized model, and
| we have a better chance to address these problems - but
| then we're adding more layers of indirection between
| citizenry and representatives, and we get an issue of
| legitimacy. It's a thorny subject.
| jerojero wrote:
| Personally I think we can make good use of sortition to
| inject legitimacy into the system. Kind of like what has
| been done in ireland, france, belgium...
|
| Sortition is very scalable and private citizens are
| actually much "cheaper" a resource than career
| politicians while imo being more legitimate and more
| interested in actually solving problems rather than
| furthering their careers.
|
| It's an underrated social technology. It's why I
| recommended Landemore's book previously.
| timeon wrote:
| This sounds like voters are not responsible for voting. But
| in the end they are.
| avianlyric wrote:
| EU citizens don't directly elect these politicians. They're
| made up of heads of state, so people are voting for whoever
| they think is their best state government, and those
| resulting heads of state go to the council.
|
| Also the EU isn't some homogeneous entity, it's made up of
| many different countries with many different views, that
| don't all align. Asking why EU citizens vote for these types
| of politicians, is equivalent to asking why some Americans
| vote for abortion banning republicans. The answer as always
| is complicated, and there are many different issues that
| might feed into someone's vote, and this specific issue might
| not have been the most important.
| krick wrote:
| > people are voting for whoever they think is their best
| state government
|
| It's even more complicated than that. For instance, "head
| of state" of Latvia in the Council which nominated current
| EU Commission president in 2019 was Karinsh, the prime
| minister of Latvia. Not being directly elected, the prime
| minister of Latvia gets nominated by president (not
| directly elected as well, BTW) and approved by coalition in
| the parliament. The punchline is that he was the leader of
| a party that got the least number of votes (and hence,
| number of seats in the parliament -- 8/100) in the
| corresponding election. The party that got the most votes
| (and most seats) was not included into the coalition at
| all.
| cbeach wrote:
| When the UK was in the EU we didn't care about the EU
| elections. Turnout peaked in 2004 at 38.9%, but could be as
| low as 24%.
|
| If you asked the average UK citizen who their MEPs were, they
| wouldn't be able to tell you. And if we didn't care enough to
| know their names, we certainly weren't paying attention to
| the policies they voted for.
|
| That makes MEPs very susceptible to lobbying, and the EU
| system very susceptible to corruption in general.
|
| I wrote to all the UK MEPs when the awful Copyright Directive
| was being proposed, with its completely impractical technical
| demands and chilling consequences. Most of the MEPs didn't
| have a clue what was going on, and they didn't seem to care,
| because they just parrotted the talking points that the
| Commission had put forward when it pushed the Directive
| through, and the MEPs planned to obediently vote for the
| Directive. The only ones that didn't plan to support the
| Copyright Directive were the Euro-skeptic MEPs, and thank
| goodness they were there in the mix.
| jmull wrote:
| The thing is, the kind of people who become politicians at
| all are predisposed to this -- they are the kind of people
| who want to be in charge, to control, to decide.
|
| (It's not just the EU, it's everywhere.)
|
| Without pushback, politicians will just naturally move toward
| increasing their own authority. The new technology has opened
| up a new opportunity, so of course they are making their
| push.
|
| Democracy, as messy, inefficient, and imperfect as it is, is
| the only form of government that gives all us non-politicians
| a reasonable chance to push back.
|
| Let's keep doing that.
| int_19h wrote:
| The fundamental problem with any representative democracy is
| that people want to vote on _issues_ , but they are instead
| only given the opportunity to vote for whoever will
| "represent" them on those issues. Worse yet, it comes as a
| package deal where you have to basically select the policy
| package that comes the closest to what you want - which in
| practice often means "the least bad".
| constantcrying wrote:
| >since practically everyone can agree on how horrible it is.
|
| I certainly do, but the German government does not. They
| recently lowered the sentences for it, is now roughly on par
| with theft.
|
| Which makes this whole thing even _more_ disingenuous. Either
| it is so bad that half a billion people need surveillance or it
| is a crime where you can get a couple of months in prison. The
| third option is, of course, that it is just a cynical argument.
| toyg wrote:
| Tbf, the German government also committed to a No vote on
| this proposal, so at least they are consistent.
| aktenlage wrote:
| The government not only lowered the sentence, but the
| "categorization" (lacking a better word) of it, downranking
| it from a felony.
|
| They did this, because with a felony it is not possible to
| stop prosecution for "possession of child porn" when common
| sense would suggest it, e.g. when minors send each other nude
| pictures of themselves. If you are 16, take a picture of your
| boobs, you are officially a criminal. According to this
| official page, those cases made up 41% of the cases: https://
| www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/DE/202...
|
| And if the possessor of the image is not a minor, as in case
| of a mother who reported nude pictures from her daughters
| WhatsApp group to the school principal, they had to be
| sentenced to at least a year of prison.
| dinglestepup wrote:
| I don't understand this argument. How does talking a
| picture of your own boobs make you a criminal?
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| Because according to these laws, it's criminal even if a
| child takes their own picture, even if they don't
| distribute it.
| aktenlage wrote:
| Yep. It's the possession of "CSAM" that is illegal.
| dinglestepup wrote:
| That's pretty absurd. Instead of lowering the
| classification of this crime they could have introduced
| reasonable exceptions, like excluding one's own photos.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >They did this, because with a felony it is not possible to
| stop prosecution for "possession of child porn" when common
| sense would suggest it
|
| This is obviously a nonsensical justification. The law
| should be written in a way, which excludes these cases from
| prosecution to begin with.
|
| It's completely insane to reduce a sentence for a pretty
| bad crime just because you can't be bothered to formulate
| the law properly. And even if you were to do that it still
| proves that you aren't particularly concerned over that
| crime.
|
| If the politicians can't write a law which distinguishes a
| minor sending pictures of him/her to another minors, from
| organized CSAM distribution, then what _can_ they do. It 's
| either malice or enormous incompetency.
| jonp888 wrote:
| A while ago they made a change to an existing law to
| increase the _minimum_ sentence from 6 months to 1 year,
| probably mostly for reasons of political posturing rather
| than any deep analysis. They were warned it would have
| absurd consequences, but did it anyway.
|
| Now it was changed back to how it was before, because of
| exactly what was predicted.
|
| It's doesn't reflect well on the German government, but
| it also doesn't deserve the amount of histronics it
| generated.
| josephcsible wrote:
| In the US, pardons and jury nullification would both be
| able to fix such obviously unjust outcomes. Does Germany
| not have anything like either of those things?
| aktenlage wrote:
| In some courts "Schoffen" are part of the judges.
| Schoffen are citizens that volunteer as "amateur judges".
| As far as I know in some trials they even outnumber the
| professional judge and their vote has the same weight.
| They could "bend the law" as far as I know, but it's not
| how it's supposed to be. Those verdicts, if appealed,
| would probably not hold in higher courts.
|
| There are pardons by the German president, but I'd guess
| they don't happen on that scale.
| kstrauser wrote:
| One enormous advantage of federated systems is that they can
| route around this idiocy. For example, I host a Mastodon server
| in California. There was zero chance I'd comply with EU's law,
| any more than I would PRC's. That's _their_ little policy, not
| mine.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| This is the advantage of being small enough to fly under the
| radar, more than the advantage of federation. It's also why
| Signal can get away with approaches that would have gotten any
| Big Tech player testifying in front of the Congress, with
| parents of kids killed by fentanyl or kidnapped by sex
| predators sitting right behind.
|
| If your service becomes big and important enough, and if
| politicians hear enough from law enforcement and intelligence
| agencies that you're a major problem, then all of sudden, your
| "zero chance" becomes a "non-zero chance" if you ever need to
| travel to or through the EU, do any business there, etc.
|
| Another case in point: cryptocurrencies. They were government-
| proof until they weren't, because ultimately, there are people
| running exchanges and mixers, as well as other counterparties,
| who can be threatened with prison and fines.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's true of any provincial law. I'm sure North Korea
| doesn't like the things I allow me people to say about their
| leadership. I'm not going to change what I'm doing here to
| appease their inapplicable laws though.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| North Korea seems like a flimsy example because it's an
| international pariah, and their reach in the West is
| essentially limited to hacking you. It's a fairly uncommon
| situation that's quite different from decisions made by the
| EU.
|
| (As an aside, the legislators in the US broadly believe the
| same things about online communications than their EU
| counterparts, so the noose will keep tightening either
| way.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| That is legally untrue, absent a treaty or a company's
| international presence subjecting them to it.
|
| At least I can contact my local legislators to campaign
| against it here.
| Dah00n wrote:
| "international presence" can be as simple as a localized
| site for your German users. Then you are under GDPR etc.
| Sure you can ignore it if you are irrelevant but that
| doesn't change the fact that this is how laws work.
| kstrauser wrote:
| You're under the GDPR _if you're subject to the GDPR's
| laws describing who is subject to the GDPR_.
|
| Does American law apply globally if it says it does,
| absent any treaty making it so?
| int_19h wrote:
| It depends on what exactly you mean by "apply".
|
| For practical purposes, what really matters is whether it
| can be _enforced_. So, for example, will your country
| extradite you if Americans demand it? Or, say, if you
| travel, will any of the countries that you pass through
| extradite you?
|
| The reason why DPRK is a particularly bad example is
| because neither is a concern just about anywhere in the
| world. But for large and powerful political entities such
| as US and EU, it is a very real concern.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The advantage of federation is you don't need to become big.
| XMPP works like email; you set up your DNS records and other
| servers can talk to yours when someone wants to chat with an
| address in your domain.
| toyg wrote:
| It's all fun and games until you get blocked at the DNS
| level and effectively shadowbanned by all mainstream ISPs.
| This already happens today in many, many European
| countries.
| anthk wrote:
| DNS it's trivial to override. Even better, the chat
| client can provide it's own resolver and IP's.
| michaelt wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Federation certainly helps, in that Americans can run
| American instances and not worry if the EU dislikes it.
|
| However, federation wouldn't help EU users much if the EU
| state decided to go for full-on Chinese style control,
| firewalling the foreign-hosted instances, banning the apps
| from the app stores, blocking access to payment
| infrastructure, jail for anyone found with the app
| sideloaded, PR campaign saying this app is used for child
| porn and encouraging people to turn in anyone they see
| using it to the cops, and so on.
| aloha2436 wrote:
| GDPR is also their little policy and I assure you plenty of
| non-European people are made to care about it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The businesses who care about taking money from Europeans
| care. I worked at an American healthtech company and we
| weren't GDPR-compliant because 1) we weren't targeting
| Europeans, and 2) GDPR and HIPAA are incompatible so we
| picked the relevant one.
|
| Since my server doesn't do business in EU, I couldn't care
| less about GDPR or other local laws, even the ones I think
| are good ideas.
|
| American law doesn't apply to someone running a server in
| Brussels. The converse is also true.
| mfru wrote:
| > American law doesn't apply to someone running a server in
| Brussels.
|
| Except when the one running and renting out the server is
| Microsoft, Amazon, or some other US entity and the Patriot
| Act exists.
| kstrauser wrote:
| True, regrettable, and irrelevant. Host it in a local
| data center and it's out America's control.
|
| I'd have a different opinion about my service if I were
| hosting my server on Hetzner in Helsinki. Since I'm not,
| I don't.
| mfru wrote:
| Sorry, but haven't you noticed how many companies and
| public bodies in Europe are using Azure, AWS and GCP?
|
| I'd say that is rather very relevant.
|
| The Patriot Act is the foremost frontier in the ongoing
| dispute about the so-called Privacy Shield.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > GDPR and HIPAA are incompatible so we picked the relevant
| one.
|
| The GDPR explicitly permits "processing [as] necessary for
| compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller
| is subject" in Article 6.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Which rules it out almost entirely for HIPAA covered
| entities. Quick example: right to be forgotten vs record
| retention laws. A European who receives healthcare in the
| US can't demand that the provider delete their medical
| record afterward because HIPAA says they must retain it.
| macguillicuddy wrote:
| The right to be forgotten has an explicit exception for
| circumstances where there's a legal obligation on
| retention, although it does reference Union and Member
| State law and not other international entites.
| https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| It doesn't prevent a HIPAA covered entity from needing to
| delete marketing data that they've collected about you.
|
| Right to be forgotten still applies, there is just some
| limited data that will still be kept.
| rswail wrote:
| And they couldn't demand that the provider deletes it in
| EU either, because maintaining medical records is a legal
| requirement, which overrides the right to be forgotten.
|
| But it does require you to document that requirement and
| make sure that the data isn't shared beyond that
| requirement without consent.
|
| HIPAA and GDPR aren't conflicting, they're orthogonal and
| cover different things.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Quick example: right to be forgotten vs record
| retention laws.
|
| Record retention laws win, as explicitly stated in the
| GDPR.
|
| Same reason a murderer can't (successfully) issue a
| right-to-be-forgotten request to the cops investigating
| them.
|
| (There's also "processing is necessary for the purposes
| of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller" as
| another exception, which allows, for example, your bank
| to retain the fact that you owe them $100k on your house
| still, even if you don't want them to.)
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Record retention laws are not the only exception. E.g.
| you can execute your Hausverbot right only if the person
| you refuse to serve cannot demand that you forget them.
| This position was already confirmed by German regulator
| at least once.
| belorn wrote:
| A European who receives healthcare in the EU can't demand
| that the provider delete their medical record if the
| provider has a legal allowed reason to keep the record.
|
| This is a fundamental aspect of GDPR and part of the
| central message in the regulation. Companies and
| organizations are only allowed to keep personal
| information if they have a legal allowed reason to do so,
| and must honor requests for deletions unless they have a
| legal reason not to do so.
|
| What is and what isn't a legit reason depend on
| circumstance. What companies generally object with GDPR
| is that generate revenue through personal advertisement
| is not an legit reason to keep personal data.
| cuu508 wrote:
| > GDPR and HIPAA are incompatible
|
| Out of curiosity, could you give a few examples of
| incompatibilities?
| atmosx wrote:
| Believing that legislative issues can be solved with technology
| is one of the most common fallacies among the IT crowd.
|
| If those in power decide to push forward by increasing the
| penalties, eventually running a Mastodon server will become as
| risky as getting caught for murder. At that point, it would be
| naive to run a Mastodon server locally, wouldn't it?
|
| P.S. Mind you, the average consumer/user doesn't care as long
| as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are up and running.
| Quotes like "they already know everything" and "do you have
| something to hide from the government?" will become ubiquitous
| in public discourse.
| kstrauser wrote:
| If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it
| applies to me. Until then, it doesn't. The penalty could be
| "shoot on sight" and it doesn't matter as long as I'm outside
| their jurisdiction.
|
| I'm kind of fascinated by the often simultaneously held
| beliefs of "America doesn't make the world's rules!" and
| "...EU does!" Countries can influence each other, sure, but
| if EU (US or Canada or Brazil) makes a law, it doesn't apply
| to people not under those jurisdictions.
| logifail wrote:
| > If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it
| applies to me. Until then, it doesn't. The penalty could be
| "shoot on sight" and it doesn't matter as long as I'm
| outside their jurisdiction.
|
| That's great if you never need to|want to travel.
|
| What about the time you happen to end up in transit through
| an airport in a country where they've put you on their
| watchlist, they grab you airside and hold you for hours
| while they look at your devices....?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-
| greenwal...
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'm not going to live my life worried about
| hypotheticals. What if my plane goes down, I get rescued
| by North Korea, and they get mad at something I said
| about Kim Jong Number Un? That'd suck, but the
| possibility isn't going to make me self-limit in the mean
| time. There are enough real concerns on my plate.
| MacrohardDoors wrote:
| Yes, there are a lot of people living their lives like
| that. Live fast, die young kind of mentality.
|
| Hypotheticals in tech pretty much always come true in the
| end. And especially fast these days.
|
| The world is gearing up for something, and personally I
| smell a global war and a reshuffling of world powers in
| my lifetime.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Do you comply with PRC law, or even know what it asks of
| you? If not, why?
|
| I don't know and don't care because I don't have to. I
| live in a sovereign nation and I'm not obligated to
| follow their rules, any more than their citizens are
| obligated to follow mine. That's how countries work.
|
| If my country signs a treaty with them, then I have to
| obey that specific law. Absent that, I don't.
| MacrohardDoors wrote:
| Hell no I don't abide by laws of the PRC.
|
| If they had all the things I'd ever said in my life time
| they'd probably execute me. I speak my mind all the time.
| That's what terrifies me though, because in 20 years time
| they could be running the show. So why would I want to
| make it so easy for them to know everything I have ever
| said, why would I want that data stored about me.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Theoretically a valid risk, and when the first person
| gets arrested over a cookie banner, I'll take it more
| seriously.
| toyg wrote:
| Let's not mix contexts. This legislation was (and is)
| pushed by European security services. If it passes, I
| guarantee that it will be (ab)used widely.
| eigenket wrote:
| It was mostly pushed by people (Ylva Johansson) linked to
| American organisations (Thorn) who are in the business of
| selling chat monitoring software.
| toyg wrote:
| And their customers are...?
| eigenket wrote:
| Currently random companies [1], if the shitty legislation
| gets passed then every EU government.
|
| [1] https://www.thorn.org/solutions/for-platforms/
|
| Their website lists oracle, slack, ancestry.com and
| others
| bee_rider wrote:
| If the EU is really coming down hard on people who do
| mundane stuff like host a Mastodon node and chat with
| their friends, then I'd avoid them just like I'd avoid
| North Korea or any other authoritarian country.
|
| As indicated in that article, the UK kinda sucks, so,
| like, don't go there. Whatever, they don't have any good
| beaches anyway.
| eigenket wrote:
| You can lay many faults at the UK's door, but they do
| have some very nice beaches.
|
| Sadly outside summer the weather is usually to bad for
| them to be worth enjoying, but in summer they're pretty
| nice.
| peterclary wrote:
| We used to have some very nice beaches, but unfortunately
| the Tory government thought it would be a great idea to
| allow water companies to discharge sewage into the
| waterways at will (because shareholders), so I personally
| wouldn't take the chance nowadays, although it doesn't
| seem to bother everyone.
| causi wrote:
| People need to stop treating other countries as if
| they're just the next town over. When you visit a place
| or do business with them you are in part endorsing how
| they behave and how they govern themselves. If you have a
| problem locking people up for blasphemy, don't spend
| money in a country that does it. If you have a problem
| with arresting people for illegal gestures, don't fly
| there to take instagram photos. Stop ignoring behavior
| you find abhorrent for the sake of personal convenience.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >doesn't apply to people not under those jurisdictions.
|
| Of course not but if an American company in the US caters
| to EU users with, for example, a localized site it does
| absolutely apply to them. Same the other way around. Just
| because you or your server are too small to matter doesn't
| mean it is irrelevant.
|
| America doesn't make the world rules is often said when
| they create one set of rules for them and another for
| everyone else (US can have warships near china but if it
| was reversed we would have a new Cuban crisis) and when
| they create rules in places they have the most power to
| create international laws that fit their world view but not
| their enemies. In a perfect world the US would have zero
| power and zero say a meter outside its borders.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Nobody is going to extradite you for not having a cookie
| banner. EU can't _actually_ make laws like that.
|
| The reason gambling/child porn/fincrime/etc are enforced
| across national boundaries is that everyone (at least, in
| the western world) respects those laws and absolutely
| will extradite. Cookie laws, anti-encryption laws,
| anti-(adult)-porn laws are not like this.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Did we actually complain about a Chinese freedom of
| navigation activity? I think the US vigorously supports
| the right of all countries to send a carrier fleet to
| hang out in international waters wherever...
| Onavo wrote:
| > _If /when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it
| applies to me. Until then, it doesn't. The penalty could be
| "shoot on sight" and it doesn't matter as long as I'm
| outside their jurisdiction._
|
| Try ignoring the GDPR, they will get upset at you really
| quickly.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What are they going to do, invade the US to arrest one
| guy?
| kstrauser wrote:
| And if they do?
|
| I like the GDPR. I comply with the local CCPA version.
| I'm not legally obligated to follow the GDPR though. I'm
| unaware of any agreement the US has with EU that puts me
| under its jurisdiction.
| benaadams wrote:
| EU-US Data Privacy Framework? https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/EU%E2%80%93US_Data_Privacy_Fra...
| kstrauser wrote:
| What regulations does that apply to me?
| inamorty wrote:
| Who is "they" and where is it being ignored? GDPR is
| quite clear on where it applies.
| chx wrote:
| The United States has arrested Marcus Hutchins for
| violating its laws while he was not inside the United
| States. This was not the first time, they also arrested
| Sklyarov for writing software they didn't like -- but the
| software was written in Russia. This is plain insanity and
| only the United States could get away with it. (The
| Sklyarov arrest together with the CFAA was one of the
| reasons I have chosen not to immigrate to the USA btw.)
|
| For example, imagine you being arrested at Frankfurt
| airport because you posted something a year ago that falls
| under Strafgesetzbuch section 86a. You would need to review
| your entire post history going back years and compare it to
| the laws of every country you touch during your travels.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it
| applies to me. Until then, it doesn't. The penalty could be
| "shoot on sight" and it doesn't matter as long as I'm
| outside their jurisdiction.
|
| Except the part where the CANZUK/US/EU blocs generally have
| reciprocal agreements and Interpol is perfectly empowered
| to enact international law inside of the US, as of 2009.
|
| Choosing to take this stance in one of the Western Nations
| is foolish to an almost ignorant degree. If one of them
| feels you broke a big enough law, it's trivial (at best) to
| execute upon it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This isn't international law. If it had passed, it would
| have been an EU law without a US counterpart.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Yes, but you can break EU law outside of the EU,
| especially digital crimes.
|
| Foreign national hackers are arrested all over the
| western world for offenses in other countries, for
| instance.
| talldayo wrote:
| This is defeatist and wrong. Technology can be used to cross
| political barriers and solve issues, that's what the
| government intends to stop. They _like_ the App Store and
| Google Play store, because if dissenting apps pop up they
| only have 2 companies to call to get it removed[0]. They like
| people perceiving an iMessage /RCS duopoly because that's
| only 2 secure channels to backdoor[1]. Threatening you with
| jail-time is all they can do for escaping their ire, but
| that's an unjust and disproportionate response from any
| state-level actor.
|
| The "average consumer" has been joking about their 'FBI guy'
| and freaking them out with weird porn or spurious Amazon
| carts for a decade now. We've hit the peaks of
| disillusionment, we've started down the road of exploitation
| and most of us are starting to worry that this trend of
| technological limitation is specifically intended to make
| _us_ politically weak.
|
| [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/17/navaln
| y-g...
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-india-sikh-activist-
| kil...
| Bluestein wrote:
| I like the quote attributed to Vitalik Buterin about how
| "whereas most technologies tend to automate on the
| periphery, blockchains automate away _the center_. "
|
| If you descentralize, you democratize.-
| Retr0id wrote:
| It's not defeatist. The point is that legislative decisions
| still matter, a lot.
|
| Take the Chinese Great Firewall, for example. Yes, you
| _can_ use technical means to circumvent it, but the effort
| required (and inevitably degraded performance) means that
| the median citizen does not.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Mind you, the average consumer/user doesn't care as long as
| Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are up and running.
|
| The enormous success of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and
| TikTok is because the average consumer/user can express
| themselves there and broadcast to the world. Normal people
| are actually participating in public discourse again, after
| most of a century of public discourse being one way with the
| government screaming into the citizens ear what to think and
| what to do, via radio and TV.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This isn't using technology (technology happens to be
| involved). This is a political challenge to Big Cloud (and
| it's systems being steered around by the many powers that be
| of the word).
|
| Federation is politics. Federation is about governance. It's
| about a place between centralized/authoritarian and
| distributed/anarchy.
|
| > If those in power decide to push forward by increasing the
| penalties, eventually running a Mastodon server will become
| as risky as getting caught for murder.*
|
| It's unlikely to be enforced globally. Every millimeter wrong
| that statement is, ever chance higher that connecting-with-
| one-another does try to get shut down on a broadscale, is
| another reason why we should be doing it, now, asap, and
| normalizing it.
| imiric wrote:
| Legislation is much easier to enforce on centralized services
| than decentralized ones.
|
| As long as encrypted peer-to-peer communication exists on an
| open internet, there will be no way for a 3rd party to
| intercept this traffic, or for any government to control it.
| They can ban the use of specific software, but new software
| will always be written.
| int_19h wrote:
| They can ban the use of any software that is "designed to
| circumvent" such laws, which would be any encrypted peer-
| to-peer communication software.
|
| And enforcement doesn't need to be 100% effective to make a
| difference. Fairly simple measures are sufficient to deter
| and/or block well over 90% of the populace and force them
| into controlled channels, as China demonstrates.
| jappgar wrote:
| all political issues can be solved with technology.
|
| it is called "war".
| digging wrote:
| Having such a narrow view of technology appears to be an even
| more common fallacy. Legislation _is_ technology. New systems
| can be invented which continue to work around it, and
| further, law can be extended to protect certain actions. I
| don 't have a specific answer to this specific problem, but
| "there's no technological solution" is categorically wrong in
| almost all cases because it assumes technology is limited to
| some arbitrary subset of technology that can't solve the
| problem.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Plus it's naive to think it's just legislature you need to
| worry about. In recent years VISA and MasterCard have been
| demonstrating their intent and ability to work as worldwide
| unelected morality police. And then there's the
| infrastructure platforms and associated deplatforming (and
| unfortunately you usually need to work with one of the "big
| guys" otherwise a cheap DDoS can destroy you)
|
| And the worst part is most of the internet have been cheering
| it on
| noirscape wrote:
| Most federated systems likely wouldn't be affected by the
| proposal as-is. Since most of them are non-commercial, they'd
| be exempt from chat control as I understand it due to a
| resolution vote done in the European Parliament.
| kstrauser wrote:
| None of them outside the EU, even the commercial ones, would
| be affected by it.
| Zak wrote:
| You would avoid it. The criminals it's ostensibly meant to
| target will avoid it.
|
| Who won't avoid it is the hundreds of millions of Europeans who
| use WhatsApp as their primary means of telecommunication, many
| of whom don't even know what "end to end encryption" means, but
| effortlessly gain resistance to mass surveillance.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's all true. It's also why we should have smaller
| networks that are resistant to a given jurisdiction's laws.
| WhatsApp has offices and business presences all over the
| world and now they're stuck complying with everyone's laws.
| That's a bad situation for us to be in.
| Zak wrote:
| I won't argue with that, and I would certainly like for
| Matrix to get good enough to use as a primary messaging
| system. Right now, I think if I tried to convince non-
| technical people to use it, they would find the experience
| unsatisfactory.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Very true. I like it. I wouldn't want to explain to my
| extended family how to contact me through it.
|
| I really really wish Mastodon had E2E messaging. Non-
| techies are using it today. I'd much rather get my
| sibling set up on that.
| acheong08 wrote:
| That's the opposite of my experience. I've gotten most of
| my (very non-technical) family to use matrix through my
| home server. It's a simple sign up and tell me your
| username type of thing and that's it. One major advantage
| is that it works perfectly fine even in China which means
| there is one platform that everyone can use (WeChat is
| invite only, WhatsApp is blocked).
| Zak wrote:
| I find the barrier isn't usually lack of technical skill,
| but lack of interest and patience. The average American
| can reach everyone they know by SMS and it's hard to
| convince them to use Signal or WhatsApp, which take under
| a minute to set up, are fast and reliable, and have
| almost no learning curve for people already used to SMS.
|
| You describe a situation where people can't reach
| everyone all of their family members in the popular ways,
| and Matrix offers a way to keep in touch you can guide
| them through and admin for them.
|
| I've had speed and reliability issues with Matrix myself,
| so I wouldn't try to talk people into using it.
| Arathorn wrote:
| historically matrix has had perf problems for sure; we
| are in the final stages of fixing that tho. to quote
| someone earlier today in one of the community rooms:
|
| > just downloaded element x from f-droid and wowza it
| just.. loads instantly? can't believe i now live in the
| age of element being faster than discord
| acheong08 wrote:
| I think federation is currently the biggest tax on
| performance. Joining even medium sized groups with only a
| hundred users takes a few minutes and eats up a ton of
| resources on the server. It got so bad that I had to turn
| federation off completely. That said, I only have ~1GB of
| RAM.
| int_19h wrote:
| I may be missing something, but why would you only have
| 1Gb of RAM _on a server_?
| Zak wrote:
| I'm imagining a budget VPS or a Raspberry Pi.
| int_19h wrote:
| Signal was much easier in that regard back when they had
| SMS support on Android - then it was just a "better
| texting app" that also gave you E2EE when both parties
| used it. Much easier to sell on.
|
| Anecdotally, ever since they dropped this feature, I have
| seen a significant reduction in Signal use among my own
| contacts.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The legislation was about the client, not the server side.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Mastodon ships with a web client that's enabled be default.
| chgs wrote:
| Of course some counties decide their laws are to be applied
| globally. Ask Dimitri Skylarov. Or Kim Dotcom.
| kstrauser wrote:
| We can and should protest those abuses, not use them as
| precedence to defend others doing the same thing.
| chgs wrote:
| I don't believe the eu has ever tried to enforce EU laws
| outside the EU.
|
| Only the US and some dictatorships seem to do that.
| kstrauser wrote:
| A big chunk of this conversation is an assertion that the
| GDPR applies to Americans.
| chgs wrote:
| Could you point to an example of the eu enforcing its
| laws on a non eu entity?
|
| If google don't want to be subject to the gdpr they don't
| have to do business in europe.
|
| Howver their business is abusing the data of eu citizens,
| while getting other eu citizens to pay them for it.
| izacus wrote:
| Thinking that potential CSAM hosting server (as defined by EU)
| isn't going to get persecuted in US is a new level of naivete.
| US and EU have broad spanning contracts of cooperation between
| their respective law enforcement offices when it comes to these
| cases.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It was never about CSAM. It's about power. From
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/19/24181214/eu-chat-
| control-...:
|
| > Each service required to install this "vetted" monitoring
| technology must also ask permission to scan your messages. If
| you don't agree, you won't be able to share images or URLs.
|
| > As if this doesn't seem wild enough, the proposed
| legislation appears to endorse and reject end-to-end
| encryption at the same time.
|
| I absolutely will not run someone's server-side malware to
| look at the contents of all the messages my people transmit.
|
| I have zero tolerance for CSAM. I can report, have reported,
| and will continue to report instances of it that I stumble
| across as part of my job moderating the server I host. Damned
| if I'm running EU's "vetted" software though. There's also
| approximately nil chance of American authorities attempting
| to force American entities to run EU software on their US-
| hosted servers. My doctor's office has an encrypted chat
| where I can ask my doctor questions. You think anyone's going
| to make them filter those HIPAA-covered messages through the
| EU?
| izacus wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're really going on about here -
| there's a massive amount of proven history of EU/US law
| enforcement using each other's surveillance technology and
| legal loopholes to exchange information. War on drugs,
| CSAM, human trafficking are oft cited reasons.
|
| There's pretty much zero chance that US would reject use
| and insight into private communication if EU puts it into
| law and forces upon messaging apps. We have literally pile
| of historical examples where FBI & co. were actively
| pushing for more of such data sharing programs. - So what
| exactly is your point? Where did you get an idea that
| you'll be running "EU software" and that US will defend you
| if you get into a CSAM suspected database list?
| 127 wrote:
| Being a constructive part of a democracy is not just standing in
| the way of every change without budging. It's also about solving
| problems and finding solutions. Most social and technological
| issues will not just magically go away if you wait and ignore
| them to the best of your ability.
| Zak wrote:
| I believe standing in the way of mass surveillance is always
| constructive for democracy. Spying on the private
| communications of nearly every person is fundamentally
| incompatible with a free and democratic society.
| btown wrote:
| And, notably, in any kind of government, a group with
| temporary political power will naturally want to optimize for
| the preservation of that power. A dampening function that
| resists rapid change, and specifically resists things like
| mass surveillance that can distort democratic processes, is a
| feature, not a bug.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Correct, but this is not a solution. Life imprisonment for
| pedos is. Execution would be better but that's never going to
| fly
| Dah00n wrote:
| You sound like an awful human being.
| agile-gift0262 wrote:
| child abuse is not a technological issue, but a societal one.
| Child abuse won't stop or even be reduced by running a hash
| lookup or an AI model prediction before every single time a
| picture is sent in a chat platform. It will just introduce a
| new layer of complexity that bad actors can abuse.
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| And easily bypass too.
| softg wrote:
| What's even worse would be enforcing the wrong solution that
| will cause more damage. The French have a saying, fuite en
| avant (lit. escape forwards) when someone insists on doing
| something knowing full well that it will not work but they do
| it anyways because it's better than inaction.
|
| Considering the rise of the far right in the last EU elections,
| anyone who's seriously considering weakening public encryption
| must be out of their minds.
| kmacdough wrote:
| The point is adding a centralized control structure in front of
| E2E encrypted traffic fundamentally undermines the principals
| that make E2E work. It creates a massive centralized point of
| failure, creating an obvious and fundamentally brittle target
| for hackers to exploit in what's otherwise our only effective
| privacy and security measures.
|
| There will always be tradeoffs between security/privacy and
| enforcement. There are ways to target harmful content without
| undermining E2E. There is no way to replace the privacy and
| security guarantees of E2E.
| atoav wrote:
| The problem you're hinting at being what? The fact that people
| use messengers to coordinate crimes?
|
| You might wanna consider that the people you critique here
| already weighed the pros and cons of the question. E.g. I am
| pretty convinced some crimes are also discussed in European
| bedrooms while people have sex. Yet for some reason I believe
| the police should not be allowed to spy and listen to things
| happening in every bedroom indiscriminately.
|
| In a world of AI you either have private communications or you
| don't. In the analog world of the past surveillance systems
| were still limited by the number of people you had to employ to
| listen in on your population. This is no longer the case. And
| that no longer being the case shifts the power dynamic between
| the state and its citizens in favour of the state. This can be
| a real problem if you you trust your state, but becomes a
| terrible problem once you have people in power who don't
| believe the people are entitled to choosing their leaders.
|
| I don't buy that police is suddenly unable to figure out crimes
| just because they are unable to read every conversation people
| have on messengers. If you want total safety and you're so
| frigthened of the world that you long for a all powerful leader
| that has insight into all our lives, I got bad news.
| Historically that kind of arrangment hasn't been particularily
| safe or stable, because such a leader doesn't care about people
| doing a good job, he cares about having loyal people around
| him. And that means all the lower ranking people will be left
| to fight among themselves, as police is no longer doing the job
| of keeping people safe, but the job of keeping governments
| safe.
|
| Our democratic systems are brittle and every power you give to
| the state or other actors needs to be considered in its
| consequences.
| nlakaq wrote:
| That is a general statement that does not apply here. This
| "solution" would have created tens of thousands of false
| positives, which means the victims, even if not prosecuted,
| would have been put on an observation list for life.
|
| The "solution" would have been abused for other surveillance or
| been used as a rationale for even more surveillance.
|
| It is a social issue that does not have technical solutions.
| The worst abuse cases (like the horrific Regensburg Dome boys
| choir case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/18/boys-
| abused-ge...) occurred before the Internet. If the EU is so
| interested in the issue, how about prosecuting known cases
| instead of a half apology. Chat Control could have done exactly
| nothing here.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| tens of thousands false positives only? I think you are
| severely underestimating the number of messages exchanged
| each and every day in the EU.
|
| I think the number of false positives would be in the
| millions after a few weeks if not a few days.
|
| That is why such a system is simply not workable.
| EasyMark wrote:
| There is nothing technologically that you can do to permanently
| stop CSAM on the internet technically or legally, they will
| find a way technically to put it out there. Certainly
| sacrificing all privacy for a half billion people isn't the way
| to go about it. It would seem that it's a societal moral/mental
| health problem that causes this, as long as that persists then
| CSAM will exist and they will always find a new underground
| network for it.
| cescott997 wrote:
| The fight is not over yet, if you live in the EU, please vote
| these people out of office. They do not represent you, nor the
| general public.
| avianlyric wrote:
| You can't vote Council Members out of office. The council is
| made up of the heads of state for each member country.
| Depending on the exact flavour of democracy your state
| operates, will determine if their role is directly elected or
| not. There are many countries where the head state isn't
| directly elected, and even where they are directly elected,
| there many more pressing national issues that make other
| candidates even more unsavoury.
| toyg wrote:
| _> You can't vote Council Members out of office._
|
| Well, technically you can, just not through EU institutions.
| Chances are the current French members, for example, will not
| be there for the next round of Council votes.
| margana wrote:
| This is not correct. At least in most (did not check every
| country) countries that do not directly elect the head of
| state, the head of government (who is directly elected) is
| the council member instead.
|
| Edit: of the 27 council members who are the representatives
| of their respective countries, only 4 are heads of state (all
| of them directly elected), the other 23 are heads of
| government, who are directly elected.
| dbttdft wrote:
| Ah, so I _won 't_ just have all of private conversations
| monitored for no reason at birth, oh wait, but what about those
| 40 cameras that are on every residential street owned by Amazon
| and Google?
| zdragnar wrote:
| The chat applications in question are private spaces (with
| terms based on the owner / host of the space).
|
| Streets are public spaces, with all the possibility of
| observation by an observer that entails.
|
| The two are not at all similar, at least under US law. It seems
| the EU is taking a similar stance.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I'd rather have a public camera in my bedroom than a recording
| of every conversation I've ever had with anyone stored and
| searchable by governments, police, and the inevitable dark
| scammer for all eternity.
|
| That is not to say that cameras everywhere aren't dystopian.
| But their existence doesn't undermine the added danger of chat
| control.
| nemo44x wrote:
| They'll probably just rejigger it in the name of fighting the
| "far right" and it will pass through with celebrity and pomp.
| dinglestepup wrote:
| Off-topic, but the current trend to label anything the
| government disagrees with or feels threatened by as "far right"
| is very worrisome.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Did you miss the election? The parliament is more conservative
| than before. Why would they be happier with that packaging?
| meepmorp wrote:
| Because they're not really complaining about the specific law
| or circumstances around it so much as expressing their
| personal sense of grievance?
| Havoc wrote:
| So I guess see you in three months for another round?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I'd bet good money that the bulk of European intelligence people
| use Signal, both personally and for non-classified work stuff. So
| the announcement that Signal would pull out of Europe was
| probably more influential than anyone will acknowledge.
| lawn wrote:
| Politicians themselves tend to use Signal too...
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Reading the "...European Commission proposed monitoring all chat
| messages and other forms of digital communication..." astonishes
| me every time.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| . . . for now.
|
| "... The proposal will return to the drawing board, as the
| European Commission and the European Parliament continue to
| deliberate on the best way forward."
|
| I am always fascinated by the hubris bureaucrats have.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| They have to justify their jobs. I mean there are 30000
| lobbyist working everyday in Brussels... They are not there to
| look at the architecture.
| meindnoch wrote:
| They will try again.
| ls612 wrote:
| It didn't even get to the point this time where messenger apps
| threatened to leave. That was what ended up sinking the UK
| effort last year.
| jacooper wrote:
| It didn't change anything, the law passed. OFCOM just has to
| activate the clause in the law to backdoor e2ee apps.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| UEFA finals should be a great day!
| owisd wrote:
| It's going to keep coming back for as long as social media
| makes it easy for adults to find kids' they don't know's
| accounts.
| llm_trw wrote:
| It's going to come back as long as politicians want to
| control what you can think. The children are a trojan horse.
| owisd wrote:
| It's a classic lazy narrative that if you don't understand
| someone's reasoning behind a position it must be because
| they're just bad people.
| daemin wrote:
| This will never happen in reality, but one way to make sure a
| bill like this doesn't get through is to not allow for any
| exceptions to being surveiled. So politicians and security people
| will be treated just like the population at large and have their
| communications monitored. I mean, think of the children, how bad
| would it be if a trusted member of society ended up peddling the
| bad images. So in that respect they need to be surveiled as
| anyone else.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > The discussions will resume after the summer, once the new
| Parliament is seated and Hungary assumes the Council presidency
| from Belgium in July. Hungary has already committed to developing
| a comprehensive legislative framework to prevent and combat
| online child sexual abuse and revising the directive against the
| sexual exploitation of children.
|
| Such as? Does it have anything to do with what "Chat Control" is
| about? What does Hungary have anything to do with it?
| thririrn wrote:
| Hungary is set to fight child grooming and exploitation, that
| is centralised in a few organisations. Very opposite from
| global dragnet surveillance to "protect children".
|
| And as post soviet country, they are very strict about privacy
| laws, and protecting civil rights!
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Hungary currently seems pro-Russian and pro-
| authoritarian/strongman. Will they really be strict about
| protecting civil and privacy rights?
| redeeman wrote:
| wouldnt trust ANY government, but nothing to indicate they
| are in any way worse than the current ones, which did after
| all come up with the abomination that is chat control
| CAP_NET_ADMIN wrote:
| I think it lacks /s at the end.
| skilled wrote:
| Chat Control is the main proposal, the following paragraph
| clearly says that they have until 2026 to agree on what that
| proposal is going to look like. Hungary has already said that
| it has plans to continue negotiations.
|
| This _outrage_ is about forceful E2EE monitoring and not
| letting EU users to view links or images unless they agree to
| the said monitoring. What happened today puts an end to that
| for the time being, but it is unlikely to come back.
|
| Check out this:
|
| https://chatcontrol.eu/
| etiam wrote:
| I think you may have meant to say 'overwhelmingly likely to
| come back' or maybe 'extremely unlikely to stay ended'.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > What does Hungary have anything to do with it?
|
| Presidency over the EU council rotates every half year. The
| presidency sets the agenda. In July Hungary will take over.
|
| Hungary, with a less democratic government is interested in
| control infrastructure, thus likely to push such an initiative.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Coincidentally, a "leak" was reported yesterday suggesting EU
| MP's intend to exempt "confidential" govt info, as well as
| police, intelligence, and military personnel from Chat Control:
|
| https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-da...
| thomasdeleeuw wrote:
| Ahh, we are against violence, except when it is applied to
| people we don't agree with. We are against surveillance, it is
| only to be applied to people not in our group. We are for
| freedom of speech, but only if you agree with us. The list goes
| on.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| I keep wanting to hand out copies of 1984.
|
| In reading your comment, it suddenly dawned on me that 1984
| has turned into a how to manual for modern governments, much
| the way The Prince is misinterpreted today.
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