They make it really difficult to fight any of this.<p>You have to, individually
- find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.<p>This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.<p>This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.<p>I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
Same for any legislation piece.<p>A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.<p>Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.<p>And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.<p>It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.<p>"In vain do we fly to the many"...
This is the case for so many things… it is why every attempt to make filling out your taxes in the United States fails completely.
Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?
Roughly, this is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and comparable lobbying orgs in other countries.) However, an org like this doesn't have much power to compel individuals to give them $1.
Check out the Chaos Computer Club. They're actively fighting this.<p><a href="https://www.ccc.de" rel="nofollow">https://www.ccc.de</a>
Because whether the government gets it or this collective organization gets it, you’re still out a $1. Besides, very few people will actually care enough about $1 to partake in literally any amount of effort to regain it.
I'm pretty sure any law that costs you 1 dollar will cost you 1 dollar per year, or 1 dollar some other shorter amount of time.<p>And anyway the actual law under discussion is bad not because it costs you 1 dollar per year, but because it costs you other things.<p>Also this how people do fight against this kind of thing, they join non-profits or other organizations, give them 1 dollar per year and use the combined might of the organization.<p>But yes at that point you are paying 1 dollar per year that way too, but then, as already noted this is not really a 1 dollar per year law.<p>And then we see that in fact people often do care about 1 dollar per year, because they are not joining the organizations, even to protect things worth more than 1 dollar per year.
Should we call the organization “government” and the fee “tax”? </s><p>It’s not a bad idea but it’s funny we need a funded people’s organisation to represent us to the democratic government!<p>I wonder if we need direct voting rights (for legislation etc) - now that we live in the internet age it may be feasible. Not sure how else to have the many overwhelming the few.
The European Commission (EC) is particularly sinister in so many ways and not like any previously known modern democratic entity. The EC has been constantly pushing for less democracy, less transparency, more censorship for decades. All the while the horrible president von der Leyen makes billion dollar deals with Big Pharma in complete secrecy without any repercussions or oversight.
Europe is doomed if we don't destroy the EU in its current form, but how?
“Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”.
A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...
No, this cannot be a countermeasure.<p>Such laws are adopted precisely so that society cannot influence politicians and their decisions.<p>That is, if society does not have the ability to do something about it now, then they will be even less able to do something about it later.
But you don't know who voted for them. In Europe, laws are also formulated by a group called "The high level group" I believe, and the members of this group are anonymous.
Which is costly to do...
Assuming "the people" are on your side on this is first and foremost your biggest folly.<p>I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to <i>us</i> (and we obviously represent everyone).<p>It leads to extremely unconstructive messaging ideas, where you assume no one can ever change their minds and if they do they are to be forever considered "lesser" for not being "right" the first time.
What does that mean, precisely?
Other than shooting them? But they hire security… it's quite hard to hit them without hitting anyone else.
How do you get to them to force them into submission? Did Americans get the child rapists off the Epstein list yet? And the unelected EU leader Ursula VDL has had private security since she was a child.<p>They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.
Tbf, a Jan 6 situation is very possible in the EUC and EUP, because the security for them is just like these constituent bodies - a joke.<p>I for one would like to see a bunch of French and Dutch farmers drive by and fling shit on them, at the very least.
Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.<p>Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.<p>Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.<p>It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources.<p>Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything.<p>If you ask people "do you want A, B, C, or D" a majority may well say to do each. If you only have budget for one, getting them to come to consensus is impossible at the scale of direct democracy.
People don't bother looking into stuff because they know their opinion, and their vote, doesn't really matter. Treat people like children and they start acting like children.<p>For some contrast Switzerland has a sort of defacto direct democracy in that citizens that obtain a relatively small number of votes can bring any issue they desire up for vote. And they have indeed brought issues like Basic Income with the suggested proposal of every single Swiss adult getting around $1700/month. That's something that would likely destroy any country that passed it, but it would likely pass by an overwhelming margin in <i>the current state of</i> the United States. But in Switzerland where people actually do have real power, and responsibility, to determine the future of their country, it was rejected by 77%.<p>Instead, back in the states we can look forward to our true political power of getting to choose between Dumbo and Dingbat for our completely unrepresentative representatives.
Representative systems vest political power into concentrated points of influence. The reps are often as uninformed as the citizens. The US just had some infamous legislation pass that representatives didn't even read, and publicly stated so.<p>The system also makes reps uniquely vulnerable to targeted lobbying, corruption, regulatory capture, and threats. I find much to be faulty with opaque dealings with a few key individuals.<p>Direct democracy mitigates these issues. Influence must be exerted through broad, public persuasion. This forces special interests to operate in the open, creating a higher and more transparent barrier to subverting the public will.
>Direct democracy mitigates these issues. Influence must be exerted through broad, public persuasion. This forces special interests to operate in the open, creating a higher and more transparent barrier to subverting the public will.<p>Have you paid attention to any US or global election since 2016? The special interests stay hidden and their influence works wonders.<p>If direct democracy could have ever worked, that opportunity died the moment social media became popular.
How does direct democracy mitigate the issue that the representative is uninformed and not even reading what they voted for?
> Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work.<p>We have those now.
The average person (and more if younger) is illiterate these days and unfit to hold any position of significant power. Source: I work with them.
If you think the republic is one of the worst books in human history I would ask what makes a good book? When there are plenty of implementation issues for direct democracy it feels strange to blame Plato... Particularly when the world has benefited from the republic in so many ways.
Have you ever read the (full) text of any bill that has been passed during the last couple of decades? How about reading all of them?<p>So are you proposing people vote on them without reading them? Or that we write very short bills aimed at a non-lawyer audience, effectively leaving most decisions up to the interpretation by courts? Or something else?
I completely agree about the excellence of Direct Democracy (DD). One of the most common arguments against DD is that: "people aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to make important decisions". My reply to this is: and current politicians are?
Politicians obviously aren't smarter or more knowledgeable than the average citizen, they are more inclined to act in their own best interest rather than the public's best interest though. We get rid of the middlemen and we get rid of: corruption and the abuse of power. The Swiss are doing excellent with DD!
>advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.<p>I really like this position from an ethical point of view.<p>But in reality you will be conquered by a neighboring country with different principles in about 3 days.
I say only the patriarchal heads of households should get votes. Isn't that pretty much how Athens did it? No votes for slaves, women, anybody with mixed non-Athenian ancestry, no poors allowed to hold a political office...<p>Anyway, I'm all for putting the sons of politicians on the front line, but don't think that will stop wars. The British Empire was infamous for putting nobleborn men directly in harms way, they would proudly stand up right in the thick of combat making themselves tempting targets and were routinely cut down. In a society with a strong martial tradition this doesn't turn people into peaceniks, if anything it gets people even more excited for wars.
On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.<p>Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.<p>From wiki:<p>> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"<p>Campaign donations, per this website:<p><a href="https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/contribution-limits/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...</a><p>It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.<p>Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.<p>It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
>Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help<p>I doubt it. The cure is way worse than the disease and is a direct path to totalitarianism. The influence of capital will not go to the people, it will go to the government, and the government will use it to depend even less on the will of the people.
> Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help.<p>Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?<p>Or do you mean outlawing <i>paid</i> lobbying on behalf of third parties?<p>The first would obviously be deeply problematic even if it was possible to police, the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it.
> Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?<p>Of course not. Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying I guess (at least as far as I understand it). Lobbying as far as I understand (or rather, object) is when special interest groups (usually funded by large corporations) fund people to talk to legislators for them, including buying fancy dinners, "conferences" and stuff. Basically, the opposite of grassroots.<p>See here: <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/22/lobbyists-flout-ethics-rules-free-trips-00176749" rel="nofollow">https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/22/lobbyists-flout-eth...</a><p>Calling/emailing your chosen congresspeople of course is totally fine by me, it's actually very healthy to do so if you have a legitimate concern.<p>> the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it<p>How would it be ineffective? I suppose it depends on oversight, but it should be fairly easy to prevent it seems.
> Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying<p>It basically is.<p>You may be thinking of who is considered a <i>lobbyist</i> or <i>lobbying firm</i>, which is (roughly, different laws on the matter have different specific definitions) someone (or some firm) who (or which) is paid to lobby on behalf of one or more other persons or entities.<p>> How would it be ineffective?<p>Because even if you are able to police it effectively, then the people that have money will instead lobby personally rather than hiring lobbyists, while hiring staff to do all the legislative drafting and organizational support work for their personal lobbying (but not actually doing the lobbying itself) as well as continuing to use the unlimited campaign financing channels opened by Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United to get people who they don't need to lobby once in office to convince them to vote in line with their interests elected.
> It's just the power structure of any representative legislature...<p>... Under capitalism.
One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.
The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.
Is this really true, though? Couldn't you pass a law specifically banning the thing you don't want to happen, so any future law that contradicts it needs a supermajority to pass or something?
Depends on the system, but usually no, a parliament cannot restrict future parliaments.<p>e.g. the law to make changing thing X require a supermajority could itself be repealed with a simple majority here, unless it was approved as an amendment to our constitution. Which _does_ happen more often than it does for the US here, but usually just for large nationally popular things.
Privacy is a fundamental right. Politicians have passed all kinds of surveillance laws which then got declared illegal by the courts. The problem is that courts are not fast enough and the bad laws linger around for a while until they are repealed.
It's analogous to information security.-<p>PS. Maybe there's something there ...
Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress proposed a bicameral legislature, where one half needs a 66% majority to pass a law. The other half’s only job is to repeal laws, which they can do with a 50% majority.
This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.
There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on <i>everyone</i>" should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 <i>minority</i> should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.
This doesn't work in practice. Look at how Senate Republicans have weaponized the filibuster in the last 20 years. A 40% veto is conceptually similar to your repeal process and it results in gridlock and nothing getting done.<p>It is harder to build than to destroy. If laws can be trivially repealed no one will be willing to commit to long term things. We're seeing that right now with the destruction of US soft power, economic power, and global leadership.
I don't think the assumption that "law = things the government is doing" is a good one.<p>I could imagine a law that specifically <i>restricts</i> the government's ability to do things. For example, maybe the federal government passes a law that makes it easier to sue its agents when those agents violate individual citizens constitutional rights.<p>Perhaps 65% of the population feels they are harmed if this law doesn't exist, and 35% of the population feels they are harmed if the law doesn't exist. Should that law be repealed?
It's an interesting thought, but as presented that sounds fairly dysfunctional. If it takes 2/3 to pass and 1/3 to repeal, you may as well just say it takes 2/3+1 to pass, as otherwise anything passed can be, and likely will be, just immediately repealed.
At the end of that book, the protagonist explains that all the high minded Luna libertarian values broke down and were more or less abandoned in the years following their revolution, and they returned to more normal political processes.
A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.
Look at SOPA/PIPA. They simultaneously pushed the same bill through both chambers to try and guarantee it would pass. Grassroots efforts led to it being overwhelmingly blocked in both cases. And then they just slowly slipped most of it's provisions through other legislation over the years.
I think we should be at least several decades past looking at the USA as a particularly functional democratic system...<p>The US constitution, despite its biblical status in their culture, manages to be more of a distracting throw-word ("LOOK at how this bill helping provide healthcare OBSTRUCTS your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to NOT CARE ABOUT THE POOR!" (Ok, not a great example)) than a functional constitution that limits institutional overreach.
Except for a few types of bills that customarily originate in the house, most bills are introduced roughly simultaneously in both houses so that the information for debating the bill doesn't have to be brought twice. This obviously doesn't guarantee a bill will pass because it is required to pass both houses.
The same game theory that could make a modern constitution so robust could also be used by the bad guys to thoroughly corrupt the drafting of any modern constitution you could get enacted.
I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points.<p>As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things collapse into a greasy turd.<p>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to. I would argue that the root cause of the sad state of democracies is the fact that we were coaxed into a snafu by virtue of accepting the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy: the first does not warrant the other; in fact they are most times at odds.<p>I am also reminded of the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episodes on Adolf Eichmann's careerist pursuit enabling the Holocaust... leading me to wonder how many people are burning the world down as part of a KPI... Or, in other words, are our economic systems and forms of government vulnerable to the paperclip problem?<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In_emulsions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...</a>
>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy<p>I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k.<p>The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even things that make it a democracy. The one (and only) criterion of democracy is "can you vote". And there are better ways to get all the other things than voting... voting/people do not scale. It is the undoing of democracy, people get what they deserve from it. Good and hard.<p>>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to.<p>It does not scale. You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger, true "the beatings will continue until morale improves" style. If I can figure out how to strike out on my own and be a million miles away from you when you rally for your most ambitious attempt yet, that's what I will do.
> It does not scale.
It scales pretty well; but we have let our guard down and naïvely thought the problems would sort themselves out by virtue of voting. We "live in a society", that means casting a vote on a paper ballot won't make the farmer understand the downstream effects of fertilizer runoff, nor the impact to communities of a CEO outsourcing away jobs. We can't go about living our lives without trying to meet each other halfway. And we won't survive without finding a way to make being nice to each other mandatory.<p>> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]<p>On the contrary, I'm trying to prevent it from getting smaller. And, even better, to improve on it (we're a community of hackers and tinkerers after all, right?)!<p>We are all much more vulnerable to autocratic regimes nowadays due to the erosion of privacy rights and deregulation (again, the threat of instrumental convergence — the paperclip problem — threatens the fabric of society: censorship in the name of advertising-friendly content, spying in the name of targeted advertisement, and the weaponization of targeted ads and "the algorithm" propping up foreign-state-funded populists/autocrats).
Defining something in the negative is always tricky. What are some better designs, or design principles?
Sortition. If no one can vote, then there can't be any of the chicanery that comes from that. Political parties couldn't exist, because a party can't help someone get elected. We no longer have the problem of the only people in office being those who <i>wanted</i> to be in office enough to go to the trouble. No need for term limits (people are unlikely to win office twice, let alone more often).<p>And yet it preserves everything you like about democracy.
I get the impression myself that no singular approach is perfect. They've all been tried and all have flaws. That and different functions of government might actually benefit from different methods.<p>This is why most practical real world systems tend to be a hybrid of several different designs.<p>Eg... the US constitution gives us Direct elections (congress) , indirect elections (president via electors, though that has been somewhat undermined), Sortition (juries), lifetime appointment (judges), appointment based on merit (civil service), and probably a few more that I've missed. One can even argue -if one would like to try- that separation of powers counts as anarchistic (certainly it is anti-archon).
Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.
This system would make a lot more sense if the number of people you had to get to agree to a bill with a bunch of riders was more than 50%.
That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)
It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.
> This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.<p>That's gighting against an organized crime syndicate. It requires coordination, resources and aim.<p>1984 is coming in its worst scenarious.<p>There will be no win for the people, no hope. Freedom is gone.
The only way to stop it is to have positive rights written in law, like right to online privacy and privacy of communications.
Yes, like the Soviet Union.<p>Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights.<p><a href="https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on_human_rights_the_ussr_and_russia_part_one" rel="nofollow">https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on...</a><p>Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: <a href="https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....</a><p>Women and men have equal rights in the USSR.<p>Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.<p>Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society.<p>Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.<p>Now, that isn't to say the USSR was blameless. We know it wasn't. However, we can take their successes and failures in what we propose and build next. Negative and positive rights both are needed. But the West is allergic to those.
While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. Yes they had a "right for leisure", unless the State decided that you were a slave and sent you in Siberia to knock hard rocks for the rest of your life. Or your "rest days" were in fact forced, unpaid labor (subbotnik), no different than their previous feudal serf system.<p>Same for a "right to a house", where the State provided you with a filthy, overcrowded slum and call it a day.
>While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept.<p>I am sure Soviet Union is THE BEST example to demonstrate the concept.<p>It shows perfectly that you can have anything, anywhere and as much as you want - but it won't mean anything if you take away people's economic freedom.
It depends if you discuss about practical things - right for housing or things that are more abstract - right for privacy from the government's prying eyes, banking secrecy or in the US, freedom of speech. In the later case, I don't think that it affects the economic life.
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Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!
<i>Article 35: Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.</i><p><a href="https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20/content_WS5ed8856ec6d0b3f0e9499913.html" rel="nofollow">https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20...</a><p>Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.
I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.<p>In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.<p>Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.<p>So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:<p>- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum<p>- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N<p>- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)<p>- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.<p>- Get some useful skills.<p>We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.<p>I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.
This is the relevant petition: <a href="https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903" rel="nofollow">https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903</a>. The government's response so far is "lol no"
And just because they respond, it doesn't actually mean anything will result from it.<p>"No more something!"
"We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.
The proposing side can be centralised and organised; the opposition diffuse and disorganised. Hence the continual growth of all forms of legislation.
Why would the politician in question give a shit what you think? They get into office mostly by funding which comes from… guess who?
I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.
On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.<p>So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.<p>The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.<p>There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.<p>The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work.<p>Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor understanding of the candidates' position on various topics (strongly correlated with not having a stable policy position themselves). Candidates themselves have influence on people's view of subjects. People tend to take some of their views from the candidate they've decided to support, and project their own views onto the candidate in other cases making them seem more aligned/preferable.<p>The entire model is basically set up assuming that:<p>1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.<p>2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.<p>3. If an elected representative does not follow through on their positions and views, the people will hold them accountable by voting them out of office.<p>4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.<p>For the vast majority of issues in the vast majority of cases... one and two do not hold true to a level that's meaningful or significant.<p>That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.<p>Which means the fourth falls apart.<p>Given the elected officials aren't really beholden to the electorate, what else would guide their position? On an individual basis, there are a lot of opportunities for wealth and power. Unless it's anything particularly egregious, the only real impediment to them taking advantage is their own personal ethics and morals. The kinds of people that want to put their life on hold to run a campaign so they can maybe take a shit job with mediocre pay where a bunch of people will be pissed at them no matter what they do... are unfortunately often not in for the mediocre pay and anger.<p>And here we are. It's not whether there are enough people that support being continually monitored, it's about whether there's enough people and enough money _against_ it to stir up enough people to care to stop them. There's almost definitely not.<p>And just to make it entirely hopeless--even if you are a well-informed voter with considered and consistent views on policy... Many countries have very little in the way of options for who else to vote for. Is this important enough to enough people to make them a single issue voter? Would they vote for the hypothetical "We Support Murdering Kittens" party if they were against the spying? Probably not--they'll probably hold their nose and vote for the "We Love Kittens" party as the lesser evil.
This paints a depressing picture, which also has some support in empirical evidence.<p>However, democracy is not as feeble as this analysis would suggest. After all, we can see that major shifts in political support for policy positions are possible, and these do require public support (democracy) to occur.<p>For example, in the US the civil rights movements of the 1960's and 1970's. Or more recently the Brexit referendum in the UK or populist anti-immigrant positions that have arisen in recent years and acquired major political support. Whether you agree with these or not, they are politically impactful, and democratically supported.<p>Issues surrounding civil liberties have often attracted strong political and popular support. So the question here is how such support can be generated for privacy, which itself a right under numerous legal regimens including the US constitution and the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
I don’t think people are particularly against this. The kids are imploding and people dont care about a completely open internet as much.
There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: <a href="https://digitalcourage.de/en" rel="nofollow">https://digitalcourage.de/en</a><p>You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: <a href="https://edri.org/" rel="nofollow">https://edri.org/</a><p>All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space<p>(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)
There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.<p>One has to admit the system is fundamentally broken. Once this is accepted, and people stop investing themselves further in the political system, then we will see change.<p>Sadly, the change is already planned for and will likely be a jump to some sort of communistic, ai-managed technocracy. However, it is also an opportunity to make the point that force should be no part of a future system. People should be able to opt-in or opt-out. That's freedom.
It's equally difficult to support it, no?
This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.
'ChatControl' = proposed EU-wide framework for detecting and reporting text keywords, images, and videos in all digital private communications, nominally to prevent CSAM.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Combat_Child_Sexual_Abuse" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...</a>
Leaked record of a meeting on 11/07/2025:<p>Original:<p><a href="https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-kritisieren-daenischen-vorschlag-zur-chatkontrolle/" rel="nofollow">https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...</a><p>Translated to English:<p><a href="https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-kritisieren-daenischen-vorschlag-zur-chatkontrolle/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp" rel="nofollow">https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...</a>
I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and any other data collected via surveillance. This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.<p>Peter Hummelgaard basically says yes to every new tool that the police asks for. He also is a staunch advocate of increasing punishment for every type of crime that happens to catch his attention, even in a time where our prison system is in shambles and has way too many inmates. A true authoritarian.
What is the motivation behind this? Do you have some issue that in Denmark its deemed solvable only through that? Can you provide some context maybe? Is it like cultural thing?
Funnily enough. Those in power will commit crimes and get away with it because the same police won't point their surveillance to their bosses or influential people, because it would negatively affect their careers.<p>Judges will be lenient and prosecutors find ways to give them, if at all community service and an inconsequential fine for the gravest of crimes.<p>But hey, we absolutely need 1984 like surveillance. A cam in every home, if it's up to these schmucks.
It is pretty damning, that this lower sentencing for the rich or powerful happens over and over again all around the world. Usually one would expect judges to do their job, but it seems at a certain level many of them lose their ability to make everyone equal before the law.<p>Maybe what we need are machines to calculate sentences. I am intentionally not saying AI. I mean stupid simple machines, where you input raw facts and each wrongdoing has a coefficient assigned to it, that modifies the sentence. Someone embezzled so and so much money? OK money times factor. Someone didn't reveal their side income as a politician? OK plus coefficient so and so. Just really dumb machines or programs that add up and their result is the sentence, period. No wriggling, no bs, no nothing.<p>But I guess that would just move the problem to "Who inputs the crimes into the machines?" and then they would cheat their way out of trouble there. It's all so maddening.
> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.<p>According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified.<p>I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.
At the same time, proponents have said that the whole idea of the database is to detect people with suspicious behavior.<p>Also, this is still nothing like getting a warrant to a wire tap - any suspicion will reveal YEARS of private information about you to the investigators. Furthermore, knowing that this can be used to identify suspects, surely it will have an effect on peoples behaviors.<p>They propose to include health records! What if you like to read about bomb making out of curiosity, have a relative who is in jail for violence, and you start seeing a psychiatrist? How many boxes have to be ticked before a flag is raised, and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?<p>I also don't trust the police to not make mistakes or behave unethically enough to be comfortable with this. Denmark is not a very corrupt country, but we still see misuse of power. Just recently it was revealed how a police handler explicitly instructed an informant to lie in court and frame someone else, just so the handler could keep his source. Are these the kind of people who should have access to my search history and health data? No fucking thanks.
> How many boxes have to be ticked before a flag is raised<p>If the proponents are right, an infinite amount. The information will never "raise a flag" since looking at it would require the flag to already have been raised (in the form of a warrant).<p>> and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?<p>I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.<p>> but we still see misuse of power.<p>This concern I sympathise with more, but I also have to imagine that this information bank could make it easier to investigate and convict this sort of misuse of power.
> If the proponents are right, an infinite amount. The information will never "raise a flag" since looking at it would require the flag to already have been raised (in the form of a warrant).<p>From the main critical opponent Justitia which consists of law professionals:<p><a href="https://justitia-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Justitia_Hoeringssvar_om_aendring_af_PET-loven_2025.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://justitia-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Justitia...</a><p>"Samtidig lægger lovforslaget op til, at PET vil kunne træne maskinlæringsmodeller til at genkende mønstre i disse data. En sådan udvikling øger overvågningstrykket markant"<p>Translation: "At the same time, the bill proposes that PET will be able to train machine learning models to recognize patterns in this data. Such a development significantly increases surveillance pressure"<p>> I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.<p>That is not my point. A psychiatrist will not report you just if they think you are schizophrenic or a psychopath. However, how will a machine learning model categorize you if it knows this information AND all your social media posts AND any other things that may be attributed to you, such as your browsing history showing that you are interested in how to make TATP? Add to this that there is no way to ensure data quality and that collected data in the database may be incorrectly attributed to you, e.g. other people posting incriminating stuff on your social media profile.<p>> This concern I sympathise with more, but I also have to imagine that this information bank could make it easier to investigate and convict this sort of misuse of power.<p>The people misusing the power will also be the people who know exactly what to do to not end up putting a trail of evidence in the database.
How do you prevent a misuse or switching to "let's just start looking into this without warrant until this popular issue(i.e. immigrants, USA, Russia, religios tensions, ethnic tensions) is solved" when the next political crisis hits?
See recent article [1] about a municipality (?) violating its own law and state law to share surveillance data (license plates) with almost 300 agencies.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44747091">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44747091</a>
There is no reason to believe it wouldn't eventually be used to generate leads as opposed to needing a warrant to sift through.
Again, I'm no expert, but I do believe the law would be what would stop you. It could be poorly written, but then we should just rewrite it.
Police, in many countries, have already been found to violate the laws protecting surveillance systems that already exist.<p>If a warrant doesn't stop them today, why do you think it will tomorrow?
I don't believe in "police" as a transnational group. I don't believe that the actions of police in some other country carries any information about the culture of police in mine.<p>If police use these systems outside of their intended and legally mandated forms, that must be dealt with. We do need effective police though. We do that with robust surveillance infrastructure for police queries in the database, possible even with a mandatory log of queries as part of discovery.<p>I don't have to "think" it will stop them, I can utilize the levers of democracy to check them.
Once you have collected the data it won’t be uncollected, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, when the right one walks out of the door.
The same could be said of the entire state, or any heirarchical organization of people.<p>If we were truely, terminally, afraid of "the wrong one" we couldn't build anything.
Public Unix server will get a Reissanance. Tons of folks will learn to live under small Nix account to chat privately under remote Tox accounts or over I2PD. This will only boost up populace's knowledge.<p>Kinda like in Spain tons of people learnt to either burn cards with microcontrollers in order to pirate TV top boxes or run Nagra and satellite decoders with keys dumped fron sketchy sites to be read with Kaffeine. And, often, it was more fun to decode the signal than to watch the actual TV schedule.
These things won't magically boost populace's knowledge. People are born every day and they don't know anything. Each year the burden of things you need to know to be an adult increases. The populationbon general will not get hands on with something optional.
> Public Unix server will get a Reissanance.<p>That server is going to get a <i>detection order</i> and then the operators have to spy against their own users. This is in the chat control bill.
I think that's a great idea. I for one want to enable our governments to track down criminals and punish them for it. If they're not doing everything they can do so in this technological and digital age, then they are breaking their part of that pesky "social contract" I am being upheld to.<p>And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more <i>authoritarian</i> laws that prevent me as a citizen from protecting myself: You don't speak for all of us.
You speak as if there is a perfect equivalence between morality and law, and that every action that can be done to increase the rate at which crimes are solved is a good thing. I think that is a bit simplistic and naive.
My comment may come off that way, but I don't think there is a perfect equivalence, no. And if anything, every person has a different set of morality.<p>I come from a point of practicality and lack of chaos. It's bad enough that we all have different morality, but we have <i>somehow</i> through some semi-shared and semi-agreed process come up with a set of laws that we should all subscribe and be held-to. And on top of that, we have individuals that want to add more chaos to the mix by having us gimp and restrict the government from enforcing the laws we have <i>already</i> agreed to (for better or worse). They don't get to have that right anymore than I have the right to break any other arbitrary law, and I am tired of privacy advocates claiming some objective moral high ground and "universal" principle of privacy that they claim we all share or want.
I strongly believe that a little bit of chaos is necessary to actually make progress in civil liberty. Being able to detect any and all crime is indistinguishable from an authoritarian regime.<p>There are many laws today which are unjust, and which I think it is morally fine to break even though you put yourself at risk of being prosecuted. There have also been many laws in the recent past which have been repealed, and which we today will say were unjust. For example, prohibition against being homosexual was a thing in many western democracies up until just a few decades ago. Imagine if that was still illegal and we had this level of surveillance?<p>I also think that drug laws is a good example of unjust prohibition. I do not think all drugs should be available on a commercial market, but I think that we should have regulated sales so people can choose what they want to put in their own bodies. While I of course don't condone of the violence associated with it, I think the current situation of drugs being available on hidden dark markets to motivated buyers is a necessary evil to allow people to exercise their right to bodily autonomy in an unjust legal framework.<p>There has to be fudge factor for a democracy to actually make progress, or else I fear that we end up in some status quo where anyone who wants to open their mouth and protest a law will be afraid to do so because they don't know what dirt the state has collected on them.
Do you see any drawbacks with giving our authorities total information about you me and everybody else?<p>Perhaps potential for misuse?<p>Because as I understand the world, the people who hold the most power are generally not the best people.
What do you plan to do when definitions of crime start getting fuzzy? Crime is not just petty crimes where it's a clear cut to tell if someone did something bad in definitive terms.<p>Other crime types exist that are crime only within a structure. The crime of sharing copyrighted files is a crime within a framework of intellectual rights but then training AI on the same files and and producing alternative files bypassing the IP is not a crime. Then you get into political crimes, i.e. it can be a crime to deny the Armenian genocide, denying the Jewish genicide and protesting against the extermination of the Palestinians at this very moment. It can be crime to hide from the US embassy that you are not completely in support of extermination of Gaza people. Your government might cut a deal to save Greenland from US invasion that makes certain things a crime that the current US administration doesn't like.<p>This all can change as politics evolves. Do you intend to support whatever the current position the current government has?
Crime has ALWAYS been political in nature.<p>I steal $100 from the cash register. Cameras are pulled, and I'm arrested and charged criminally.<p>Company edits timecards and steals $100 from me. Its instead a civil matter, and maybe I might get paid back. Then again, probably not.<p>Person shoots and kills a home invader. Murder trial ensues, and they spend piles of money to defend themselves.<p>Cops shoot and kill person (likely black). They get away with it with 2 week suspended-with-pay because 'I thought I saw a weapon'.<p>Insider stock trading is illegal, unless you're congress. Then completely legal.<p>Highway patrols (read: state sanctioned gangs) confiscate cash for no reason. You have to sue the cash and prove good intent. You usually lose.<p>Illegal immigration: ICE goes to places including workplaces and arrests (in various legal issues) illegal immigrants for illegally holding a job. None of the managers or owners are ever charged with immigration fraud, identity theft, or similar laws.<p>There are 2 types of laws in our system: for those in power, and for those who don't have power.
Entire world seems to be making a pivot to surveillance state :(
The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic).<p>Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
By increasing the level of democracy and decentralizing the government.<p>Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations.<p>If you decentralise, any damage will be localised and would affect fewer people.
What can a decentralized, democratic government do against foreign autocratic powers that can influence any election in WEEKS?<p>A part of the problem today is that there are massive autocratic powers that have the resources, means and channels to influence any democratic powers. Decentralization in this case means less unity in opinion, and more opportunity for foreign influence.<p>I dont see a way out of this, because essentially as a decentralized democracy, you are playing with your hands open to the whole world, and trusting that your decentralized people will filter out the noise/influence and make rational choices when they are open to any foreign influence.<p>This is why we are seeing EU go more authoritarian. There is (rightfully so given the average technological literacy), no trust in that the individual will be able to see through foreign influence. Control of the individual is the only short-term solution.
It’s how the country I live in, Switzerland, is organised, one of the most prosperous places on earth.<p><a href="https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland" rel="nofollow">https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland</a>
I'm sure Switzerland's prosperity has absolutely nothing to do with conveniently safeguarding gold stolen from Jewish victims during World War II, perfecting banking secrecy to conceal assets of dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Sani Abacha, helping oligarchs evade sanctions, sheltering tax cheats, or warmly welcoming money from arms dealers, corrupt officials, drug lords, and fraudsters for decades.
I semi-agree, but the type of democracy you are referring to would involve much smaller groups with more power and would ruin the political "economy of scale" that we get from having the same laws apply to everyone over vast spaces.<p>I think having a mostly crippled central government is probably the most realistic alternative but you can see how that is taken advantage of in the US and how it fosters unnecessary discord between people whose interests are generally aligned.
It’s how the country I live in, Switzerland, is organised, one of the most prosperous places on earth.<p><a href="https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland" rel="nofollow">https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland</a>
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?<p>I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.<p>Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."<p>Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."<p>Pass a preemptive policing law, 10% outraged, 80% claim "If it makes me safer, I like it. I'm not a criminal after all, I don't have anything to fear."<p>Pass a law that codifies your nation's most popular religion as something to be promoted and enforced. 10% outraged, 80% cheer it on, because it agrees with their views.<p>The 80% is illustrative here, but it seems like the people who agree with the above statements are a very solid and overwhelming majority. So why it did take us so much time to creep up to deliberate censorship and surveillance? As someone who was born in the 21st century, the freedom to access and do things on the internet had only ever been on the downhill, any small wins are overwritten by inevitable losses that make things more controlled, more 'safe'.
>
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?<p>Simple:<p>A Cypherpunk's Manifesto<p>by Eric Hughes<p>written 9 March 1993<p><a href="https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html</a>
Was it really the internet that killed third places?<p>Among all candidates, it seems the least likely here. It didn't even happen at the same speed the internet grew.<p>(The issues with monopolized editorial powers are still valid, it's just this one that I think is wrong.)
My solice is that it’s all temporary, as climate catastrophe will bring down whatever system they’re building before too long
The scale you're talking about is total societal collapse, shutting down "the system" as it exists today requires nothing short of a worldwide apocalyptic event. It's not something I'd be hopeful about, especially since by the time it gets this bad, most people will already be dead. Or we might not even be old enough to see that happen, if we're lucky.
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?<p>Boom-bust cycles, including environmental ones don't do anything to harm capitalism. Rather, they just make it stronger. AI systems have locked in existing power structures forever and guarantee that we will technologically advance fast enough to solve for or at least adapt to climate change.<p>I'd argue that the whole climate movement for the last 20 years stymed and significantly harmed the left as a result. The anti-nuclear and some anti-vax positions taken by parts of the green left in particular were anti-scientific and have cost that portion of the party the support of many scientist types.<p>Scare porn about what will happen if you don't de-develop society and reduce your CO2 footprint just makes folks want to eat even more burgers. Same reason why the majority of non cyclists hate cyclists.<p>It's the same thing when you show a ton of kids how a chicken nugget is made. They all go "eww" for a moment, then you ask them "who wants chicken nuggets?" and literally every hand goes up[1] . We want our slop. We don't care that it's slop, and these days, emotions of cruelty, subjugation, and schadenfreude are political dominant and in the zeitgeist.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148</a>
Anti vax is nutty, anti nuclear makes some sense if the goal is worldwide disarmament. I agree AI is an incredible boon for surveillance and censorship but I’m highly skeptical that it will solve climate change and currently seems to be making it worse by measurably increasing power usage. XAI is using diesel for theirs and the air quality in town is measurably worse now.<p>I’m with you that cruelty and domination is winning right now, and that a sizable fraction of people are fundamentally evil and an even more sizable fraction basically don’t care. I still eat meat and acknowledge that it’s immoral to do so.<p>Just think that whatever happens after climate catastrophe / the water wars will likely be worse but it feels natural that it will at least be a different type of worse. I don’t see the global internet as being extremely relevant then.<p>Idk, as an individual there’s nothing much I can do and arguing here won’t help anything so I guess agree to disagree.
China has shown the world the way and most countries likes it.
No, people don't like this.
Most ordinary people don't but they still vote for authoritarian politicians who like it.
Chinese ppl don't like this either.<p>It's teleco vendors, ISPs and govn't agencies are advocating this.
People don't but those with power (i.e. the people who matter) do.
A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.<p>It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
> A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy<p>People think that, but once you tell them they will lose their drivers license since they chatted to their spouse about bad eyesight they bark differently. Or shrug it off with "that will never happen to me" and you can start the "and then they came for the [next group], but I did nothing" line of talk.<p>Everyone has something to hide, they might just not know yet what it is but they will when the option to hide it has gone away. There is a reason my country stopped recording religion since 1946 in the citizen records, it was fine to do so decades before.
lmao, like every other major power has been a bastion of free speech until China came up. McCarthyism, what? Politkovskaya, who?
Censorship and killing people who were too "out of line" were staples of human civilization ever since we started figuring out governance. What's unique about China is that it was a pioneer in capturing this new technology and using it to their state's advantage. Never before in human history could you monitor all the things people said to one another, all the money that got exchanged, all data that's uploaded and downloaded, and have automation that ensures that everyone's information is looked at. The internet had become a tool of centralized control, China just was successful at realizing it first.
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.<p>What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.<p>Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.<p>I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.<p>I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.<p>If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?<p>The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
I was saying their domestic mass surveillance is not directly tied to them becoming a preeminent world power. That their rise could've just as well happened without it.
> pulled millions out of poverty<p>but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
And there is no non-violent solution
I wonder how much support it would have if it was called "Speech Control" instead. Probably still a depressing percentage...
It has been given the name "Chat Control" by its detractors, no?
How much support does it have anyway? Outside of Parliament, I mean.
Full post:<p>Leak: Many countries that said NO to #ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided—even though the 2025 plan is even more extreme!<p>The vote is THIS October.<p>Tell your government to #StopChatControl!<p>Act now: <a href="https://chatcontrol.eu" rel="nofollow">https://chatcontrol.eu</a>
Note to poster if they happen to see this: as pointed out there's alt text... But it's plain wrong, saying "Countries like Germany, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and the Netherlands are in green, indicating opposition or neutrality" when only the Netherlands, Poland an Austria are opposed; it's probably just been copied from an older version and could use updating.
Are they going to vote on that every year until it passes?
It's actually scamier than that. They only propose if they know they have enough votes to win. Last time they withdrew when they realized they would lose.
Yes, there is no stopping it with the current structure and tools. They will push until the people give in. Best to prepare for it's existence and figure out how to use the good old sneaker-net.
No, the reason there's an article like this every 6 months is very specifically that it never gets to a vote
Yes, and when it does that's it, forever. Because the EU """parliament""" cannot propose laws, meaning it cannot repeal existing laws either.<p>It's like the IRA said to Thatcher: you have to be lucky every time, we just have to be lucky once.
For those who don't know how the EU works - the European Parliament (that can't introduce or repeal laws) is the actually voted in body, and the European Commission (who has the actual control) is appointed by member states but since it is several steps detached from democratic process, it (surprise surprise) often acts anti-democratically...
More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.<p>I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.
Argh, red and green colors are not great for accessibility, I had to look hard to find the countries that were opposed/neutral (Poland, Austria and Netherlands, afaict)
NL should be because, at least so far, they've been listening to the experts (many who are ex-colleagues & friends of mine). We have elections later in the year and that can change (although they're looking positive so far).
I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time.
Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
Is it clearly against the constitution?<p>What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?<p>Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?<p>Enormous pressure can be brought to bear in politicians over something like this. The most prominent British politician to oppose the Online Safety Act in the UK is being labelled as "helping people like Jimmy Saville" by the government (Saville was a TV presenter and notorious child abuser) .
> What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?<p>Usually a standoff based on whether the EU was delegated authority on the topic. If the delegation happened then EU law has precedence but depending on the topic national constitutional courts might ignore that which becomes a constitutional crisis<p>In this specific case it's much more likely that the ECJ shoots down the chat control part of the law before it gets to that anyway
the UK essentially does not have a constitution nor any significant judicial authority over lawmaking
It is against it and the law was revoked twice already by liberal politician SLS:
2nd March 2010 - 1 BvR 256/08
I don't like this rhetorical style were easy to prove facts are denounced with questions to evoke uncertainty.<p>If you now say this is not applicable as this is about storing connection data you don't understand the issue in full: This is a deeper incision than just storing connection logs. This violates a more fundamental right. We are talking about chats here. Not what IPs you connected to at what time (and that law was canned as violating the entire constitution, which i cited with the state's decision above). There is no middleground here.
A constitution is just a piece of paper. The ruling class can discard it as they wish.
The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).<p>Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
> It's against the German constitution<p>No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.
I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?
Just saying "It's unconstitutional" doesn't really cut it. It's a question for the courts to decide (based on the constitution).
A constitution is the basic big-picture law of the country. The court’s interpretation should be easy to guess. Otherwise, the people won’t feel like it is their document.<p>Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.
They did already, multiple times now. Hence my original comment.
Aside from the infamous privacy aspects, I'm wondering about the feasibility and the energy cost of running continously ML algos to scan content on a phone.<p>Given that the private malware providers aren't accountable for it, I guess that it will noticeably degrade the average battery life for phones in the EU.
Ironically, one comment a legislator made was: if you can quantify the carbon cost of this proposal, they’re much more likely to take it seriously than any arguments about privacy.
Dont worry about it, the house of cards will be propped up with those truck-trailer-nuke-reactors.<p>Only charging your phones if you have 3+ AI subscriptions and comply with all anti encryption laws of course
Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Easier than asking everyone you know to use GPG
Technically minded people and criminals will know how to use this technology. The general innocent population will be surveilled. This law is useless at fighting the objective at protecting the children.
It's not a solution if it passes with "Client-side scanning". Basically a AI bot watching your screen all day.
You're gonna need a whole secure deviant device.
If that passes it's over for the european internet, IMO. I would just shut off all personal online devices completely and go banking and work only on a cheap Xiaomi
That is not what the law is about.<p>It is client side scanning embedded in the apps themselves. Each app will have to deploy their own mechanism to intercept the messages. This is not (yet) an OS level scan so there is no AI bot watching your moves on your device yet. Furthermore the AI part will run on their own servers, not on the device.<p>Precisely, the way it has been described, is when you hit the send button, it will the send the message in clear text to the authorities and then send the encrypted message to the recipient, hence the stupid narrative from the proponents of Chat control that it does not break encryption because it was never encrypted in the first place.
Can't wait for my phone to report me for spreading anti govt propaganda or calling for a general strike.
The war on end to end encryption is far bigger and more global than you think, and you’re the boiling frogs. Here is the evolving map:<p><a href="https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-encryption/214" rel="nofollow">https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...</a><p>It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?
Ah Europe, never change. The continent slides ever so often towards authoritarianism. Once again, the Russians will invade, and once again America must go to war to civilize these barbarians and liberate their people, and once again after the people will choose authoritarianism. It's not imposed upon them. A continent of monarchs in this age is a people who desire to be ruled.
American exceptionalism, US is already more authoritarian than the EU by a wide margin, maybe try to get rid of the "barbarians" you already have in your country before pretending to help others.
Is this an active "undecided" or a "we restarted the count so everyone is undecided again" situation? France flipped, but Macron is more geopolitically mercurial than the average world leader.
Who would have thought?!
saying no to AI is a great way to become the third world
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.<p>And politicians complain that democracy is losing it's appeal! What's the difference between what the EU wants to do and what is being done in autocracies like China and Russia?<p>Snooping on all messages and conversations, even the Stasi did not have this much power!
> Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.<p>That works only if all your contacts are technically educated enough. It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.
> It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.<p>More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail. It's becoming crystal clear that "we the people" have no power anymore, and the way we can take some of that power back is by not participating in their laws - self hosting, use services outside of the jurisdictions where backdoors are mandatory, educating and helping others do the same.<p>Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.<p>When preventing the laws from passing fails, we still need to make it as difficult as possible to enforce.
> More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail.<p>I agree. But for now, we still have a window of opportunity to stop the law on the political level.
Nothing can stop the ratchet like progress clamping down on information control. These policies have been war gammed by think tanks decades in advance. The enemy is vast and deep with the control of nearly every nation-state on earth.<p>The overwhelming majority will be swept into a Neo-Dark Ages where truth is locked away and Dogma rules supreme. For a time the lockdown will be universal and complete but after the system is in place for a time I believe people will find a solution and break off the shackles.
There is no political solution in sight when even the countries that have been subjugated to the the horrors of communism and the secret police have decided that this is good thing.<p>If even these states agree that surveilling their entire population 24/7 after 50 years of communist rule is good then where do you see a political solution emerge from?<p>You would think that Eastern European countries would have learned their lesson but no, it seems that we are just trading one surveillance state for another.
It doesn't matter what you use. It is your device that will be doing the snooping - i.e. client-side scanning
The CSS in the proposal is implemented on an app level, like Whatsapp or Signal does the detection before sending the encrypted message, not at the OS level.<p>If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping.<p>Same if you encrypt your message and post it in Whatsapp.
I'm worried that as soon as this is implemented, someone will make a patched version of the signal client which doesn't do the scanning, and soon after all the affected apps will be forced by law to use remote attestation like Play Integrity.
Because politicians are not accountable to you and are paid for by lobbyists.<p>This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a UK/US only problem. The EU nanny statism isn't a good thing nor is the loss of sovereignty associated with it.<p>But hey, the left right binary choice strawman made it so that people basically pushed for more gov power no matter what and now it's too late to stop the inertia.<p>The next time you need to vote against accumulation of power they'll scare you again with extremists, terrorists, drug dealers, children safety, disinformation (which is basically calling for suppression of freespeech and criminalization of wrongthink), etc.<p>If you're still labeling people as "disinformation spreaders" that are dangerous then you can't complain.
Karl Popper, "The open society and its enemies":<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance</a><p>It's all about the paradox of tolerance.<p>That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.<p>The thing that makes me sick to my stomach is that some of the worst of worst intolerant discourse is going to be allowed and protected because it's "religious": because we are open, tolerant, societies we are tolerant with intolerance.<p>If you have a holy book that calls for killing non-believers and taking their wive and daughters as sex slaves: that's fine because, see, it's religious.<p>If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.<p>But <i>any</i> talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.<p>It's shooting the messenger.<p>Guess what's one of the issue concerning many people in a great many european cities at the moment? People feeling that religious extremism and obscurantism, middle-age style, is making a comeback.<p>And people are organizing marches all over the EU.<p>The last thing the EU wants is people on social media organizing themselves and protesting because they don't want the EU to become the next Syria or Somalia: most in the EU do not want the EU to become an intolerant continent.<p>You could say that <i>any</i> chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.<p>It's really sad: I already moved three times, lived over four different countries (all in the EU) and now I'm planning to leave the EU while I still can (not that there are that many great places where I can realistically go).<p>P.S: for those in the US you should cherish your first amendment
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Really, we're not allowed to agree with some of the EU's ideas but disagree with others? You demand that we take every policy proposal from the EU as part of a single coherent political philosophy?
If you give the EU a lot of power, which some people in HN are in favour of, they will use it for good and bad. I’d rather they have no power and live without the good things. Those who celebrate the good things are too ignorant to realise that the power they use to do good things will eventually be used to do bad things.
Go back and read those threads. It was all praise about the EU as an institution, more than the legislation.
>HN is one person
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Some legislation good, some legislation bad.
I distinctly remember, even months ago people here rejoicing at how the EU likes being bold - more countries should be bold; ignore Big Tech, screw Big Tech, force them to design a certain way. And are now shocked that pattern continues.<p>If you can dictate even the charging port, and what apps can run, why can’t you dictate CSAM scanning?
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I am not familiar with the charging port debate, but enforcing apps to be open to other developers and prevent addiction and be accessible by people with disabilities are all good things.<p>However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good.<p>EU can make good laws, and sometimes EU can make bad laws..,
I think the broader point here is that regulation is a double-edged sword. There's an argument to be made that a body which has the power to impose a particular charging port on your phone also has the power to impose what it would view as 'common sense' chat control and CSAM scanning.<p>Europe went from many years of regulating cell phones to mostly ensure they don't cause interference or spontaneously combust, to fairly rapidly achieving a normalized position of regulating ports, app stores, and software. (I suppose another way of looking at it is that the EU didn't seem to much mind when Nokia dictated most everyone's charging ports.)<p>I'm not taking a position on one side or the other on the above, there are compelling arguments for and against both, and millennia of political philosophy has attempted to grapple with the issue of how much power the people should permit the state to have, what those checks and balances should be, and how they should be enforced. Some will reliably naively assert we should only permit well-informed, well-intentioned, good-hearted people to enter into positions of power, but we've seen that play out too many times for it to be considered a viable assumption.<p>So a discussion worth having is whether existing constraints apply, and if not, what hard constraints can be placed on regulators to limit them from acts like this? We've normalized their ability to regulate the device industry to this degree, and they're overstepping. Does Title II Article 7 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights in the European Union prevent this? Or is a new solution needed?
Universal charger = good<p>STASI/GESTAPO 2.0 = bad<p>To the rest... install Tox, QTox/UTox for PC (any OS) and Atox under Android. Never post personal data, ever.<p>Learn to set up i2pd on Trisquel/Ubuntu distros
and set it as a daemon. Set up Links with 127.0.0.1:4444 as the proxy for everything and MARK the checkbox that says "tunnel everything to proxy" or similar. Disable cookies in the settings and DO NOT login to any web. Don't use "links -g", but "links in the terminal".<p>After you finish setting it up, save the settings.<p>Do the same with IRC clients, prefer simple ones such as IRC. Be aware to delete ANY metada and don't put your username as the login one under Unix/Linux, ever.<p>Get some Mutt config for it for the tunnel at /etc/i2pd/i2pd-tunnel.conf.
Again, if it's a bit technical, use Claws Mail and <i>disable</i> any enabled metadata for your account.
> Universal charger = good<p>> STASI/GESTAPO 2.0 = bad<p>That much is obvious.<p>The problem is when you delegate power and authority to a body which enables them to impose both, you're going to wind up with the port first, Gestapo second.<p>Edit: Your edit thereafter is all a nice idea, but not a viable solution, as the same body could classify much of what you describe as criminal activity. That, and a solution which requires everyone to live like <i>La Résistance</i> in perpetuity is not a solution, but a precursor.
Aw, Jeez, not this shit again.
ChatControl!--because Orwell was a rabble-rousing fool