They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
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.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
It’s pretty dang simple today. If you’re a usual W-2 employee, anyone who can read and follow simple instructions can file without paying any preparer a dime.
In Sweden and Denmark the tax service prepares a tax statement for you. In Sweden, if everything looks OK, you press a button. In Denmark, if everything looks OK, you don't even have to press a button.
But note that for Denmark, it's only correct by default in simple employment cases without notable investment, retirement, transport/house/mortgage related deductibles, etc.
And it's not at all simple once you have to actually check or change details. It's so complicated that the online UI will only show you a fraction of the available fields by default, and they often reset year-by-year, or get weird values. And then there's the whole real estate taxation scandal...
And more importantly than fixing the statement, you have to actually understand the whole taxation situation to make financial decisions throughout the year. How a mortgage partially interacts with capital gains taxation, dividend and income interact with progressive taxation, how your different investments are spread across a number of different taxation types and intervals, how your spouse's tax situation affects yours, etc. etc.
If you don't pay attention to that, you'll end up missing out on the deductibles the politicians promised you but intentionally handicapped to death by making it yet another obscure tax exception stacking on top of the rest. >:(
I'd gladly pay a bit more tax if I could just get it to be ONE flippin' rate.
I assume it is the same in Hungary, it definitely was the case a few years back, so I assume the same system is in place. It might not be rolled out for everyone, however. Probably not for companies, or in complex cases.
No, Americans can still do that. You can get the forms to file your taxes from many public places (e.g. the library), and filling out a 1040 is dead easy if you are just bringing in wages from your job. The instructions are very clear and will walk you through the whole process.
I agree that we should have a government-provided e-file option in the modern age, but it is not true to say that Americans have no way to file taxes for free.
It could be way easier. Many countries send everything filled out and you just verify.
They already know all my income, my dividends, everything that is sent to the government already… why can’t they give me it all auto filled? They are pretty good at finding out if you left something off, so they could do that before hand.
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?
I'm from Spain; before joining the European Economic Community (pre UE entity) in 1986 our country except for the main cities sucked a lot, it was behind France in lots of terms. By 1992 the gap went almost to /dev/null.
So, I you can be pro EU and denounce these STASI like mafias, you know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
It’s not a bad idea but it’s funny we need a funded people’s organisation to represent us to the democratic government!
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.
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 ...
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.
Assuming "the people" are on your side on this is first and foremost your biggest folly.
I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to us (and we obviously represent everyone).
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.
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.
They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.
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.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the current state of 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%.
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.
Work deterrence, inflation, and the tremendous cost would devalue your own currency.
In general most people work jobs solely and exclusively for the $$$. If they didn't need that $$$ they'd have much greater power to negotiate wages. That sounds amazing in theory, but in reality - how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets when you could otherwise sit and home and live a comfortable life with your family? Probably quite a lot to say the least. Or for a single young guy, how much would you need to pay him to work instead of him being able to play video games and chase tail all day, every day, if he wanted to? And if we're being honest - you can probably remove young as an adjective.
I did add "likely" because I used to be a huge advocate for basic income, but my view shifted on it overtime as I gained a greater appreciation for how economies, and even societies in general, function. Or that the large number of billionaires we have are largely due to accounting and speculation (read: total on-paper capitalization of stock market vastly exceeding the amount of money in existence), rather than them actually just making obscene amounts of money.
> how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets
If my needs were otherwise met, and there were clear instructions allowing me to do this in confidence that I wasn't inconveniencing any users of the toilet, I'd do it free. (Cleaning a toilet is less messy than changing a baby, and that's not hard either.) Given proper PPE, I'd do even more "disgusting" jobs, if they were jobs that needed doing: I draw my line at cleaning up sharps, but that's only because I'm not trained.
Maintaining communal infrastructure is not a thankless task: you can know that everyone who uses the infrastructure until next maintenance time benefits from your work, which is more than most people can say about their jobs. There are people who take pride in their work, even if you consider that work low-status, and beneath you. Do different work, then!
Do you really think most people would live lives of idleness, if not compelled to behave otherwise? If you saw something that needed doing, and you had the means to do it, would you just… walk by? If I may, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
Quite the strawman there. Not wanting to work [at times literally] shit jobs without excessive compensation, is not the same as everybody being idle. I can list thousands of things I'd rather do than clean public toilets, and I don't even do thousands of things! Though yes - I do think a huge chunk of the population would be generally idle, if possible, in terms of commercial productivity, and I see nothing wrong with that, besides the fact it would crash any economy where it was possible.
You not wanting to work "shit jobs" (without compensation you would consider excessive) doesn't mean that everybody doesn't want to work them (or even that everybody considers them to be "shit jobs").
I agree with your point about commercial productivity. I don't agree that it would crash the economy: it would crash GDP (by eliminating large classes of exploitative and abusive behaviour which currently prop GDP up), but we already know that GDP is a flawed metric. I don't see how this would interfere with food getting to our tables, buildings being built, or communal infrastructure being maintained, except that monied folk would be less able to demand that things be done "or else", so we might have to reorganise society somewhat (such as by providing better working conditions for "shit jobs").
I wouldn't want to clean public toilets if I didn't need to do so. You'd be willing to do it for free. I think one of our views runs rather closer to the overwhelming majority of people, like 99.999%, than the other. This issue is really not the one you want to argue. But I understand that you have to argue it, because if you simply accepted this point then you must accept the fundamental problem. When everybody starts demanding substantial amounts of money for any labor they don't want to do, you're not only going to crash your gdp but see hyperinflation as well.
Now not only is the basic income pointless because it's no longer enough to afford anything (and increasing it further just sends you closer to Zimbabwe), but you'd also completely crash your currency meaning you'd also no longer be able to afford any imports (though exporters would be getting filthy rich - see: why China intentionally devalues their own currency). The country would be obligated to rapidly transition, formally or informally, to another currency as the default unit of trade for anything of value, further nullifying the basic income.
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.
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.
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.
Have you paid attention to any US or global election since 2016? The special interests stay hidden and their influence works wonders.
If direct democracy could have ever worked, that opportunity died the moment social media became popular.
You are correct that mass manipulation is a critical issue. However, this vulnerability is shared by any system reliant on voters, including the representative one. It is not a unique flaw of direct democracy.
So there are three issues we're talking about in this context:
1. Reps are also uninformed.
2. Social media manipulation of the populace (or, generally, propaganda).
3. Concentrated influence on a handful of legislators.
Direct democracy eliminates the third vector.
Furthermore, the stakes and incentives for corruption are vastly different. A lobbyist gains far more from corrupting one senator who decides for millions than from swaying individual voters. The return on investment for corrupting concentrated power is orders of magnitude higher.
Even if propaganda shapes opinion, the resulting decisions still represent the people's will at that moment. Representatives can betray even that will for personal gain, adding another layer of distortion between what people want and what they get.
I think my argument was written in a way that could allow this misinterpretation, sorry. I wasn't claiming direct democracy makes people more informed, but I was saying it removes the additional corruption layer.
Direct democracy doesn't cure ignorance, but it eliminates the corrupted/coerced middleman. An uninformed public voting directly is still more aligned with public interest than uninformed representatives voting for whoever influenced them most.
Direct democracy would replace politicians being vaguely influenced by social media driven trends with government policies decided directly by the social media outrage cycle. I've got no end of complaints about the current system but that doesn't incline me to go for a swim in a manure pit.
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?
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!
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...
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.
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.
From wiki:
> 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"
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.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
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.
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.
Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties?
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?
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.
> Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying
It basically is.
You may be thinking of who is considered a lobbyist or lobbying firm, 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.
> How would it be ineffective?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a system like this in Switzerland. The voters can change the constitution by a public initiative+vote, which binds the parliament. Only another public vote can revert the constitution.
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.
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.
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.
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 everyone" 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 minority 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.
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.
There is a difference between long-term stability in foreign relations and long-term stability in citizens' freedom. The latter is supported by the absence of restrictions, i.e. the absence of laws and regulations.
The only people wanting stability in restrictive laws are those profiting from their legally guaranteed niche, typically of the rent-seeking monopolist kind.
The absence of laws and regulations enables exploitation, not freedom. We've seen that over and over. Libertarianism gives us the "freedom" to have monopolies price gouging, locking the fire exits to ensure we don't leave before our 16 hour shift for pennies is over.
I don't think the assumption that "law = things the government is doing" is a good one.
I could imagine a law that specifically restricts 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy
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.
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.
>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to.
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.
> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]
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?)!
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).
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 wanted 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).
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.
This is why most practical real world systems tend to be a hybrid of several different designs.
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.
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.
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.
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.
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.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.
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.
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.
I am sure Soviet Union is THE BEST example to demonstrate the concept.
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.
I don't think the USSR is the best example of a constitution protecting the rights and freedoms of the people.
> Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights
This rings pretty hollow when you look at the history of Russification. And no doubt this clause is in the constitution because of the Russification policies of the Russian Empire, yet that didn't stop the Soviet Union from doing very much the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
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!
Yeah, when reading about the collapse of the Roman republic recently I was struck by how unimportant the law (about not crossing the Rubicon with an army) was. For a long time, the law wasn't meaningful because nobody would think of bringing an army into Rome, it just wasn't done! Then eventually Sulla said "fuck this, I'm bringing in an army to enforce my will", and the law didn't do a thing to constrain him (or anyone who came after him). It seems to me that it was the social norms of Roman society which kept people from using military force to get their way, and that the law served no purpose except perhaps a very visible way to reinforce the social norm.
Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.
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.
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.
In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.
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.
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:
- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum
- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N
- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)
- 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.
- Get some useful skills.
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.
I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.
There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.
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.
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.
The entire model is basically set up assuming that:
1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.
2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.
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.
4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.
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.
That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.
Which means the fourth falls apart.
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.
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.
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.
No the problem is much more basic: you only get one vote and you can only pick from a very small number of parties. That means unless something is the most important issue for you, you have zero voting power for it.
This paints a depressing picture, which also has some support in empirical evidence.
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.
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.
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 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.
There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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).
> and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?
I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.
> but we still see misuse of power.
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).
From the main critical opponent Justitia which consists of law professionals:
"Samtidig lægger lovforslaget op til, at PET vil kunne træne maskinlæringsmodeller til at genkende mønstre i disse data. En sådan udvikling øger overvågningstrykket markant"
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"
> I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.
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.
> 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.
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.
> From the main critical opponent Justitia which consists of law professionals:
You're moving into some pretty specialized terrirory here. I'm not a lawyer, and I suspect you aren't either. We're quite frankly not equipped to have this discusion. I'll muddy up the picture a little for you to make that point clear.
It's true that Justitia wrote that in their opinion about the proposal. An opinion the relavant authority actually asked for and then incorporated into the proposal. What you're looking at there is part of the process of defining a law, not a critique of a finished law. In the their comments to the responses, justitsministeriet (the relavant authority in this case) writes[1]:
"Justitsministeriet finder det dog afgørende, at dette sker på en måde, hvor de nuværende regler i PET-loven ikke lempes i de tilfælde, hvor PET’s behandling af oplysningerne i et datasæt får en mere målrettet karakter"
Translated: "The relavant authority believes it is critical that this processing of data does not relax the current rules where the processing is more directly targetted"
Let me be clear. I don't intend to make a point for or against that law. I'm quite frankly not qualified to make that assesment. I don't understand most of what they write, nor do I care to. I read stuff like "it may have a chilling effect on freedom of speech" and think "well that's sort of the point. If you were going to write something about how you'd like to bomb a school, I'd like you to not write that", which is obviously missing the point of the discussion, but they're also not talking to me.
In cases like this I prefer to fall back to my trust in the process. I didn't vote for Peter Humlegaard, I'm much more anti capitalist than that, but I also have no reason to believe that he's some hitler-esque proto-facist. PET is calling on more tools, and two independant experts helped our authorities draft a law that looks roughly like something Norway and Great Britain has. That seems reasonable to me. I'm sure they'll land this in a somewhat reasonable way, and then I'm sure we can change it if it turns out it sucks.
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.
Information recorded will always have the temptations and tendencies to be misused. Might happen slowly, but over time they would find more and more reasons to get a warrant and at some point some hapless judge will just hand them out like daily business.
Experience shows, that humans cannot be trusted to remain vigilant forever.
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.
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.
I don't have to "think" it will stop them, I can utilize the levers of democracy to check them.
I'd be surprised it you couldn't find some instances, but I'm also confident that those cases were dealt with by procedural enhancements.
Just recently we had a case where an employee was caught snooping in some address and family data. The person was fired, reported to the police for investigation, and the relevant employer is now looking at their processes to make sure it doesn't happen again. Along with that, everybody directly affected has been notified. That seems like a reasonable response to me.
I'm much more concerned with all the times we don't find out. We need strong checks on access to this data, which is fortunately also a legal requirement. I generally trust that the relevant authorities are keeping track of that.
Importantly, what I hope you're seeing from this reply is a trust in the institutions of my government. I trust that the processes are being followed, and that the processes are built in such a way that they check each other.
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.
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.
Give the Southern Europeans ways to watch 'free soccer' for people over 40's and you'll find tons of people would have been good technicians if they had some motivation to build complex tools.
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.
And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian 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.
I come from a point of practicality and lack of chaos. It's bad enough that we all have different morality, but we have somehow 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 already 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.
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?
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.
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.
Indeed. The more powerful tools there are available, the worse kind of people get drawn to them. And the more it corrupts those with initially good intentions.
People seem to be longing for a God of sorts in their aspirations towards authoritarian governments (naively believing that those with the power will be (and remain) benevolent and act in their best interests and with fairness).
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.
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.
This all can change as politics evolves. Do you intend to support whatever the current position the current government has?
I steal $100 from the cash register. Cameras are pulled, and I'm arrested and charged criminally.
Company edits timecards and steals $100 from me. Its instead a civil matter, and maybe I might get paid back. Then again, probably not.
Person shoots and kills a home invader. Murder trial ensues, and they spend piles of money to defend themselves.
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'.
Insider stock trading is illegal, unless you're congress. Then completely legal.
Highway patrols (read: state sanctioned gangs) confiscate cash for no reason. You have to sue the cash and prove good intent. You usually lose.
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.
There are 2 types of laws in our system: for those in power, and for those who don't have power.
'ChatControl' = proposed EU-wide framework for detecting and reporting text keywords, images, and videos in all digital private communications, nominally to prevent CSAM.
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).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.
Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."
Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."
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."
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.
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'.
What can a decentralized, democratic government do against foreign autocratic powers that can influence any election in WEEKS?
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.
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.
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.
Could Switzerland's prosperity instead be linked to its historical role in safeguarding gold taken from Jewish victims during World War II, its tradition of banking secrecy that enabled dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Sani Abacha to conceal their assets, or its longstanding willingness to accept money from oligarchs avoiding sanctions, tax evaders, arms dealers, corrupt officials, drug traffickers, and fraudsters?
I don’t think these are core reasons why Switzerland is a prosperous nation, no. I would guess what you are pointing out has only benefitted a few select bankers and the average citizen has had little to gain from this.
I believe Switzerland is prospering because the citizens are in charge of their nation, not a select few belonging to the political class and well connected wealthy individuals.
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.
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.
The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems". The cypherpunk scene is still alive and evolving, but it's fairly niche, and a tough environment for people driven by external validation while 'things are well'. But there are still people around making sure the necessary pieces are in place in case they become necessary.
The privacy-preserving systems have been built and are finally making it into the mainstream, only to be uprooted by politics. Not that we no longer need to build more of such systems, but the root of the issue lies elsewhere.
Yes but the mainstream systems are not decentralized enough. We need better systems.
We, the technological community, have failed the wider public by not creating decentralized alternatives that are as good as centralized ones.
Chat Control shouldn't even be an issue, we should just be able to laugh it away.
Is anyone concerned about Mastodon being banned? No right because it would be almost impossible to implement. Yet it is possible for WhatsApp/Telegram(yuck)/Signal. Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
Why wouldn't signal just move their company to some random other country? It's not like they make money from their users, and people can easily sideload the app.
> Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
This. Signal is actively fighting against decentralization, which makes me suspicious. Their arguments were debunked by the Matrix team, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936929
I'd argue the actionable things are already happening: Hackers and cryptographers creating technical solutions that defy governmental control, people trying to sway public opinion (or trying to get people to realize that being surveilled isn't just about their secret it is about a fundamental balance of powers between companies/governments and individuals).
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
I imagine people blames the internet for lack of interest (as in "social networks are a dopamine machine"). But IMO it's absurd to jump into a lack of interest when the physical means for people to get together are destroyed.
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.
Im not hopeful for it, I think it will happen probably but under no pretense it will make things better.
It does make losing the battle for internet freedom in specific feel a little less bad for me though because that particular issue feels temporary.
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Idk, as an individual there’s nothing much I can do and arguing here won’t help anything so I guess agree to disagree.
Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
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”.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Which is why you see eg UK making it illegal to demonstrate, want more backdoors in communication tech (so they can scan for wrongthink), going harder banning free speech etc
Free speech is only really a thing in the US. Many in the EU love to prosecute and control speech they don't like usually with the vague and legally undefined "hate speech" knock out argument.
This link is full of the usual self-promoting priorities of politicians, and the modern "influencers" who mimic them.
1. Redirects to someone's personal-name Web site.
2. The top heading on the page is their personal name and what seems to be personal logo.
3. Immediately below that logo the navbar entry for "ABOUT ME / CONTACT".
4. The last entry in the navbar is "GET INVOLVED", and the first entry of that menu is "Follow Me".
5. The first entry in the navbar is "WELCOME" and redirects to a page with a huge photo of him, followed by a heading that starts "Patrick Breyer – Digital freedom fighter and former Member of European Parliament for the German and the European Pirate Party" subheading "Europe’s voice of privacy and the free Internet".
6. Then the page below all this has some information.
I think this is one reason that positive revolutions can't happen anymore: the potential leaders/actors see no non-corrupt role models for how to operate. It's a very fuzzy line between self-promotion in service of the mission somehow, and self-promotion in service of power/influence for its own sake.
This is purporting to be an issue thing (see the link). But it can't help be a personal brand thing.
I'm using this as an example of a problem with modern activism. Everyone wants to do their videos of themselves posturing like influencers, and building their brand, and the issue looks like a vehicle.
I was expecting to find a big CTA button that I could click to sign some message to my representatives. Instead I found a giant wall of text with "ideas on how to take action" followed by a list of points along the lines of "Is your government in favour? Ask for an explanation" OK, ask how? No links, no email addresses... basically it's just a page saying "if you care about this thing do your own homework and find a way to act"
Whoever made that page needs to look into the concept of conversion rate. As it is right now it's basically useless
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.
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.
Specifically the road to hell (as the saying goes).
It seems to be a problem with the whole 'Western' world - we're all on way with increasing authoritarianism and our leaders wanting to create police states...
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.
But they will keep trying to introduce it until they think they can win a vote. They keep trying to sneak it through and hope the public will either get too tired to keep fighting or can be distracted by other issues.
Personally I'm skeptical it's been shot down because of "the public" so far
In fact I think all of these impending doom articles are particularly counter productive because they de-sensitize people before it even gets to the parliament which (1) has already expressed opposition to this and (2) is a bit more starving for approval and thus potentially more receptive to this kind of stuff
But that's beyond the point regarding the "keep trying" part because I really can't imagine a way to "fix" that which isn't going to negatively impact the quality of legislation in the long run
Also I'm fairly sure that if there was a limit on how many times it can be considered in committee it'd already have been approved by council, so be careful what you wish for
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...
I am not sure if any political system does it democratically. That is have every single member of cabinet or equal to be voted in from popular open vote. As it should be in proper democracy.
i know it's included in the toot, but it feels like this thread should have the link to the act now site: https://chatcontrol.eu/
"The EU Commission proposes... ...Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence... ...network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world..."
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.
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?
What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is very very slow. This is an imbalance that makes it hard to fight such laws. They change a miniscule detail and it can pass a 3rd and 4th time.
As I understand it, the pressure for a surveillance state comes from the EU, right? While Germany and countries in their cultural sphere like Austria are fundamentally opposed to that. If that's the case, it won't ever change unless the EU changes
I'm afraid Germany ('s government) is not opposed at the moment and there is enough internal pressure as well. We had our fair share of moments getting surveilance like that and fighting it. I bet my ass off, that Ursula von der Leyen, the c... who tried to make it German law had her hands in that as well.
> Among the few traces of Thorn’s activities in the EU’s lobby transparency register is a contribution of 219,000 euros in 2021 to the WeProtect Global Alliance, the organisation that had a video conference with Kutcher and Von der Leyen in late 2020.
Thorn is the main lobbying group behind these proposals.
If any other country should know better, you'd think it would be Germany. Ursula in particular married into a family which was both persecuted as Anabaptists and participated in persecution by being Holocaust enforcers, so how on Earth is she not aware of the slippery slope here?
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).
Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
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?
'Constitution' arguments are used by ones in power only to server their agenda. Constitution argument won't save us from the surveillance. Most of the time western countries play 'national security' and 'think of the children' to circumvent the constitution and have ~100% success rate.
I don't feel like that's true in Germany. The constitutional court would like a word I guess. They have a pretty big history regarding surveilance and such.
Be involved in the legal battle (especially with the government) is a punishment already. The state has unlimited power to haras and do that frequently.
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.
Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.
Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the same page).
I’m not sure if that’s the case in Germany though.
as the constitution doesn't have that high of a place in our identity it's more something for constitutional lawyers and higher courts. I think there's more tension between our constitutional law and that of the EU's law. for most people that's background noise I guess.
In this particular question there are also fundamental human rights that are part of the EU legislation where it is fully plausible that ECJ would render any law implementing the EU law. Like Ipred, where our politicians tried to pass laws following it but it got struck down again and again. No idea if they have given up yet.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
That seems like it will be largely useless. Sure, the masses will continue using a bugged WhatsApp. But anyone with actual interesting/llegal things to say will switch over to an open source messaging app that hasn't been bugged.
That is just the first step of the plan. First they compromise the messaging apps, then they'll make it harder to install open source apps. Then they will force OS level monitoring which is exactly what North Korea does.
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.
He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).
The far right in France doesn’t want ChatControl. In fact I think only the soft left, middle and soft right want ChatControl (and it is not even a consensus for among these groups).
The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.
In the 1988 general elections Johansson was elected as a member of the Riksdag for the Left Party – Communists
This party was the sole political force in Sweden supporting the Soviet Union in the Winter War against Finland. They also supported Soviet military expansion along its Western border.
She may be center left now but she was a card carrying member of the communists before. She is a crook and completely bought by the lobbies. So no, I do not agree that she is center left.
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.
When preventing the laws from passing fails, we still need to make it as difficult as possible to enforce.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're still labeling people as "disinformation spreaders" that are dangerous then you can't complain.
That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.
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.
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.
If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
But any talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.
It's shooting the messenger.
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.
And people are organizing marches all over the EU.
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.
You could say that any chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.
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.S: for those in the US you should cherish your first amendment
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.
Yeah, sure? If you have a problem with individual posters and their opinions just talk to them directly. Trying to argue with an entire forum as a single opinion-block is just extremely futile.
Because the design of a charging port doesn’t open up your population to more cybersec vulnerabilities?
The same bureaucratic elite in Bruxelles loved to blame Russian hacking for election mishaps (remember Romanian cancelled elections?), seems antithetical to that
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.
However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
To the rest... install Tox, QTox/UTox for PC (any OS) and Atox under Android. Never post personal data, ever.
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".
After you finish setting it up, save the settings.
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.
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 disable any enabled metadata for your account.
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.
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 La Résistance in perpetuity is not a solution, but a precursor.
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.
Your comment history seems peppered with similar low-effort comments about Europe.
As a European, I have some strong opinions about the state of your country at the moment. Opinions shared by quite a large proportion of your own population actually.
But I manage to refrain from regularly and flippantly insulting entire continents and maintain some self awareness that we all have our own problems.
Doesn't take much effort to point out the truth. And it won't matter that much. When you've inevitably created your next crisis I guess we'll just have to come save you again.
With freedom we will fix our issues. But you guys always cheer as you go through one way doors.
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.
They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
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.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
Same for any legislation piece.
A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.
Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.
And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.
It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.
"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.
What does it mean "to make filling out your taxes"??
The omission was likely in that the failure is in trying to make filing taxes simple.
It’s pretty dang simple today. If you’re a usual W-2 employee, anyone who can read and follow simple instructions can file without paying any preparer a dime.
For those of us trying to collect all the weird tax situations: https://freetaxusa.com.
In Sweden and Denmark the tax service prepares a tax statement for you. In Sweden, if everything looks OK, you press a button. In Denmark, if everything looks OK, you don't even have to press a button.
But note that for Denmark, it's only correct by default in simple employment cases without notable investment, retirement, transport/house/mortgage related deductibles, etc.
And it's not at all simple once you have to actually check or change details. It's so complicated that the online UI will only show you a fraction of the available fields by default, and they often reset year-by-year, or get weird values. And then there's the whole real estate taxation scandal...
And more importantly than fixing the statement, you have to actually understand the whole taxation situation to make financial decisions throughout the year. How a mortgage partially interacts with capital gains taxation, dividend and income interact with progressive taxation, how your different investments are spread across a number of different taxation types and intervals, how your spouse's tax situation affects yours, etc. etc.
If you don't pay attention to that, you'll end up missing out on the deductibles the politicians promised you but intentionally handicapped to death by making it yet another obscure tax exception stacking on top of the rest. >:(
I'd gladly pay a bit more tax if I could just get it to be ONE flippin' rate.
I assume it is the same in Hungary, it definitely was the case a few years back, so I assume the same system is in place. It might not be rolled out for everyone, however. Probably not for companies, or in complex cases.
Same in France, I even get tax exempts from retirement plans and taxes from stock market holdings automatically.
You mean that Americans used to be able to do that. Last year. For this coming year, it's over.
Article: https://www.theverge.com/news/717308/irs-direct-file-gone-bi... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757262
No, Americans can still do that. You can get the forms to file your taxes from many public places (e.g. the library), and filling out a 1040 is dead easy if you are just bringing in wages from your job. The instructions are very clear and will walk you through the whole process.
I agree that we should have a government-provided e-file option in the modern age, but it is not true to say that Americans have no way to file taxes for free.
It could be way easier. Many countries send everything filled out and you just verify.
They already know all my income, my dividends, everything that is sent to the government already… why can’t they give me it all auto filled? They are pretty good at finding out if you left something off, so they could do that before hand.
*easier
Sorry
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?
The EU it's good, little American/Russian spoiled kid. It's these kind of turds who want Chat Control whose give the EU a bad name.
LOL thanks for your great insight into this matter
I'm from Spain; before joining the European Economic Community (pre UE entity) in 1986 our country except for the main cities sucked a lot, it was behind France in lots of terms. By 1992 the gap went almost to /dev/null.
So, I you can be pro EU and denounce these STASI like mafias, you know.
Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?
Check out the Chaos Computer Club. They're actively fighting this.
https://www.ccc.de
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Opposing the law will also be an ongoing process as those benefiting can just push for the changes again under a different name.
Should we call the organization “government” and the fee “tax”? </s>
It’s not a bad idea but it’s funny we need a funded people’s organisation to represent us to the democratic government!
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.
like a peoples’ line item veto online?
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.
Such laws are adopted precisely so that society cannot influence politicians and their decisions.
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.
Which is costly to do...
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.
Assuming "the people" are on your side on this is first and foremost your biggest folly.
I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to us (and we obviously represent everyone).
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.
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.
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.
“Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”.
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.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the current state of 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%.
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.
> That's something that would likely destroy any country that passed it
What makes you say that?
Work deterrence, inflation, and the tremendous cost would devalue your own currency.
In general most people work jobs solely and exclusively for the $$$. If they didn't need that $$$ they'd have much greater power to negotiate wages. That sounds amazing in theory, but in reality - how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets when you could otherwise sit and home and live a comfortable life with your family? Probably quite a lot to say the least. Or for a single young guy, how much would you need to pay him to work instead of him being able to play video games and chase tail all day, every day, if he wanted to? And if we're being honest - you can probably remove young as an adjective.
I did add "likely" because I used to be a huge advocate for basic income, but my view shifted on it overtime as I gained a greater appreciation for how economies, and even societies in general, function. Or that the large number of billionaires we have are largely due to accounting and speculation (read: total on-paper capitalization of stock market vastly exceeding the amount of money in existence), rather than them actually just making obscene amounts of money.
> how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets
If my needs were otherwise met, and there were clear instructions allowing me to do this in confidence that I wasn't inconveniencing any users of the toilet, I'd do it free. (Cleaning a toilet is less messy than changing a baby, and that's not hard either.) Given proper PPE, I'd do even more "disgusting" jobs, if they were jobs that needed doing: I draw my line at cleaning up sharps, but that's only because I'm not trained.
Maintaining communal infrastructure is not a thankless task: you can know that everyone who uses the infrastructure until next maintenance time benefits from your work, which is more than most people can say about their jobs. There are people who take pride in their work, even if you consider that work low-status, and beneath you. Do different work, then!
Do you really think most people would live lives of idleness, if not compelled to behave otherwise? If you saw something that needed doing, and you had the means to do it, would you just… walk by? If I may, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
Quite the strawman there. Not wanting to work [at times literally] shit jobs without excessive compensation, is not the same as everybody being idle. I can list thousands of things I'd rather do than clean public toilets, and I don't even do thousands of things! Though yes - I do think a huge chunk of the population would be generally idle, if possible, in terms of commercial productivity, and I see nothing wrong with that, besides the fact it would crash any economy where it was possible.
You not wanting to work "shit jobs" (without compensation you would consider excessive) doesn't mean that everybody doesn't want to work them (or even that everybody considers them to be "shit jobs").
I agree with your point about commercial productivity. I don't agree that it would crash the economy: it would crash GDP (by eliminating large classes of exploitative and abusive behaviour which currently prop GDP up), but we already know that GDP is a flawed metric. I don't see how this would interfere with food getting to our tables, buildings being built, or communal infrastructure being maintained, except that monied folk would be less able to demand that things be done "or else", so we might have to reorganise society somewhat (such as by providing better working conditions for "shit jobs").
I wouldn't want to clean public toilets if I didn't need to do so. You'd be willing to do it for free. I think one of our views runs rather closer to the overwhelming majority of people, like 99.999%, than the other. This issue is really not the one you want to argue. But I understand that you have to argue it, because if you simply accepted this point then you must accept the fundamental problem. When everybody starts demanding substantial amounts of money for any labor they don't want to do, you're not only going to crash your gdp but see hyperinflation as well.
Now not only is the basic income pointless because it's no longer enough to afford anything (and increasing it further just sends you closer to Zimbabwe), but you'd also completely crash your currency meaning you'd also no longer be able to afford any imports (though exporters would be getting filthy rich - see: why China intentionally devalues their own currency). The country would be obligated to rapidly transition, formally or informally, to another currency as the default unit of trade for anything of value, further nullifying the basic income.
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.
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.
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.
Have you paid attention to any US or global election since 2016? The special interests stay hidden and their influence works wonders.
If direct democracy could have ever worked, that opportunity died the moment social media became popular.
You are correct that mass manipulation is a critical issue. However, this vulnerability is shared by any system reliant on voters, including the representative one. It is not a unique flaw of direct democracy.
So there are three issues we're talking about in this context:
1. Reps are also uninformed.
2. Social media manipulation of the populace (or, generally, propaganda).
3. Concentrated influence on a handful of legislators.
Direct democracy eliminates the third vector.
Furthermore, the stakes and incentives for corruption are vastly different. A lobbyist gains far more from corrupting one senator who decides for millions than from swaying individual voters. The return on investment for corrupting concentrated power is orders of magnitude higher.
Even if propaganda shapes opinion, the resulting decisions still represent the people's will at that moment. Representatives can betray even that will for personal gain, adding another layer of distortion between what people want and what they get.
How does direct democracy mitigate the issue that the representative is uninformed and not even reading what they voted for?
I think my argument was written in a way that could allow this misinterpretation, sorry. I wasn't claiming direct democracy makes people more informed, but I was saying it removes the additional corruption layer.
Direct democracy doesn't cure ignorance, but it eliminates the corrupted/coerced middleman. An uninformed public voting directly is still more aligned with public interest than uninformed representatives voting for whoever influenced them most.
> Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work.
We have those now.
Direct democracy would replace politicians being vaguely influenced by social media driven trends with government policies decided directly by the social media outrage cycle. I've got no end of complaints about the current system but that doesn't incline me to go for a swim in a manure pit.
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?
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?
>advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
I really like this position from an ethical point of view.
But in reality you will be conquered by a neighboring country with different principles in about 3 days.
Voting yes on a war implies you're the one invading.
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!
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...
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.
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.
From wiki:
> 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"
Campaign donations, per this website:
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
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.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
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
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.
Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties?
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?
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.
See here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/22/lobbyists-flout-eth...
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.
> the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it
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
It basically is.
You may be thinking of who is considered a lobbyist or lobbying firm, 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.
> How would it be ineffective?
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...
... 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.
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.
There is a system like this in Switzerland. The voters can change the constitution by a public initiative+vote, which binds the parliament. Only another public vote can revert the constitution.
This is e.g. why there was an initiative to constitutionally forbidding some religious buildings: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_controversy
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.-
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.
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.
Classic "missed 100% of the point" literature phenomenon
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 everyone" 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 minority 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.
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.
There is a difference between long-term stability in foreign relations and long-term stability in citizens' freedom. The latter is supported by the absence of restrictions, i.e. the absence of laws and regulations.
The only people wanting stability in restrictive laws are those profiting from their legally guaranteed niche, typically of the rent-seeking monopolist kind.
The absence of laws and regulations enables exploitation, not freedom. We've seen that over and over. Libertarianism gives us the "freedom" to have monopolies price gouging, locking the fire exits to ensure we don't leave before our 16 hour shift for pennies is over.
I don't think the assumption that "law = things the government is doing" is a good one.
I could imagine a law that specifically restricts 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.
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?
> I could imagine a law that specifically restricts the government's ability to do things.
I fail to see how fairy tales are relevant to this discussion.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...
>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy
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.
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.
>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to.
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.
> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]
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?)!
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 wanted 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).
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.
This is why most practical real world systems tend to be a hybrid of several different designs.
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.
That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)
Not really. There have been multiple times that California passed ballot initiatives that violated their own constitution.
At the federal level in the US we have the annoying problem that effectively everything is interstate commerce.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on...
Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
Women and men have equal rights in the USSR.
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.
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.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.
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.
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.
I am sure Soviet Union is THE BEST example to demonstrate the concept.
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.
I don't think the USSR is the best example of a constitution protecting the rights and freedoms of the people.
> Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights
This rings pretty hollow when you look at the history of Russification. And no doubt this clause is in the constitution because of the Russification policies of the Russian Empire, yet that didn't stop the Soviet Union from doing very much the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
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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!
Article 35: Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20...
Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.
Yeah, when reading about the collapse of the Roman republic recently I was struck by how unimportant the law (about not crossing the Rubicon with an army) was. For a long time, the law wasn't meaningful because nobody would think of bringing an army into Rome, it just wasn't done! Then eventually Sulla said "fuck this, I'm bringing in an army to enforce my will", and the law didn't do a thing to constrain him (or anyone who came after him). It seems to me that it was the social norms of Roman society which kept people from using military force to get their way, and that the law served no purpose except perhaps a very visible way to reinforce the social norm.
Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.
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: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903. The government's response so far is "lol no"
And just because they respond, it doesn't actually mean anything will result from it.
"No more something!" "We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
And You can use the response as campaign material. Ultimately democratic governments are accountable to the people at the ballot box.
This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.
> This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
That's gighting against an organized crime syndicate. It requires coordination, resources and aim.
1984 is coming in its worst scenarious.
There will be no win for the people, no hope. Freedom is gone.
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 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.
In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.
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.
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:
- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum
- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N
- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)
- 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.
- Get some useful skills.
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.
I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.
On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.
So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.
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.
There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.
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.
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.
The entire model is basically set up assuming that:
1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.
2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.
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.
4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.
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.
That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.
Which means the fourth falls apart.
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.
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.
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.
No the problem is much more basic: you only get one vote and you can only pick from a very small number of parties. That means unless something is the most important issue for you, you have zero voting power for it.
This paints a depressing picture, which also has some support in empirical evidence.
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.
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.
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 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.
There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: https://digitalcourage.de/en
You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/
All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space
(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)
It's equally difficult to support it, no?
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 no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.
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.
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.
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.
> an educated populace
Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.
Leaked record of a meeting on 11/07/2025:
Original:
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
Translated to English:
https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...
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.
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?
> Do you have some issue that in Denmark its deemed solvable only through that?
No. On the contrary, our crime rates are some of the lowest in the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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).
> and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?
I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.
> but we still see misuse of power.
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).
From the main critical opponent Justitia which consists of law professionals:
https://justitia-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Justitia...
"Samtidig lægger lovforslaget op til, at PET vil kunne træne maskinlæringsmodeller til at genkende mønstre i disse data. En sådan udvikling øger overvågningstrykket markant"
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"
> I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.
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.
> 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.
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.
> From the main critical opponent Justitia which consists of law professionals:
You're moving into some pretty specialized terrirory here. I'm not a lawyer, and I suspect you aren't either. We're quite frankly not equipped to have this discusion. I'll muddy up the picture a little for you to make that point clear.
It's true that Justitia wrote that in their opinion about the proposal. An opinion the relavant authority actually asked for and then incorporated into the proposal. What you're looking at there is part of the process of defining a law, not a critique of a finished law. In the their comments to the responses, justitsministeriet (the relavant authority in this case) writes[1]:
"Justitsministeriet finder det dog afgørende, at dette sker på en måde, hvor de nuværende regler i PET-loven ikke lempes i de tilfælde, hvor PET’s behandling af oplysningerne i et datasæt får en mere målrettet karakter"
Translated: "The relavant authority believes it is critical that this processing of data does not relax the current rules where the processing is more directly targetted"
Let me be clear. I don't intend to make a point for or against that law. I'm quite frankly not qualified to make that assesment. I don't understand most of what they write, nor do I care to. I read stuff like "it may have a chilling effect on freedom of speech" and think "well that's sort of the point. If you were going to write something about how you'd like to bomb a school, I'd like you to not write that", which is obviously missing the point of the discussion, but they're also not talking to me.
In cases like this I prefer to fall back to my trust in the process. I didn't vote for Peter Humlegaard, I'm much more anti capitalist than that, but I also have no reason to believe that he's some hitler-esque proto-facist. PET is calling on more tools, and two independant experts helped our authorities draft a law that looks roughly like something Norway and Great Britain has. That seems reasonable to me. I'm sure they'll land this in a somewhat reasonable way, and then I'm sure we can change it if it turns out it sucks.
[1]: https://www.ft.dk/samling/20241/lovforslag/L218/bilag/1/3009... (page 11)
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?
You don't. Democracy has to be able to make those decisions to be legitimate.
See recent article [1] about a municipality (?) violating its own law and state law to share surveillance data (license plates) with almost 300 agencies.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44747091
Information recorded will always have the temptations and tendencies to be misused. Might happen slowly, but over time they would find more and more reasons to get a warrant and at some point some hapless judge will just hand them out like daily business.
Experience shows, that humans cannot be trusted to remain vigilant forever.
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.
If we were truely, terminally, afraid of "the wrong one" we couldn't build anything.
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.
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.
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.
I don't have to "think" it will stop them, I can utilize the levers of democracy to check them.
The obvious question there is... Has it ever happened in yours?
I'd be surprised it you couldn't find some instances, but I'm also confident that those cases were dealt with by procedural enhancements.
Just recently we had a case where an employee was caught snooping in some address and family data. The person was fired, reported to the police for investigation, and the relevant employer is now looking at their processes to make sure it doesn't happen again. Along with that, everybody directly affected has been notified. That seems like a reasonable response to me.
I'm much more concerned with all the times we don't find out. We need strong checks on access to this data, which is fortunately also a legal requirement. I generally trust that the relevant authorities are keeping track of that.
Importantly, what I hope you're seeing from this reply is a trust in the institutions of my government. I trust that the processes are being followed, and that the processes are built in such a way that they check each other.
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.
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.
Give the Southern Europeans ways to watch 'free soccer' for people over 40's and you'll find tons of people would have been good technicians if they had some motivation to build complex tools.
> Public Unix server will get a Reissanance.
That server is going to get a detection order 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.
And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian 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.
I come from a point of practicality and lack of chaos. It's bad enough that we all have different morality, but we have somehow 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 already 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.
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?
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.
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?
Perhaps potential for misuse?
Because as I understand the world, the people who hold the most power are generally not the best people.
Indeed. The more powerful tools there are available, the worse kind of people get drawn to them. And the more it corrupts those with initially good intentions.
People seem to be longing for a God of sorts in their aspirations towards authoritarian governments (naively believing that those with the power will be (and remain) benevolent and act in their best interests and with fairness).
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.
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.
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.
I steal $100 from the cash register. Cameras are pulled, and I'm arrested and charged criminally.
Company edits timecards and steals $100 from me. Its instead a civil matter, and maybe I might get paid back. Then again, probably not.
Person shoots and kills a home invader. Murder trial ensues, and they spend piles of money to defend themselves.
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'.
Insider stock trading is illegal, unless you're congress. Then completely legal.
Highway patrols (read: state sanctioned gangs) confiscate cash for no reason. You have to sue the cash and prove good intent. You usually lose.
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.
There are 2 types of laws in our system: for those in power, and for those who don't have power.
'ChatControl' = proposed EU-wide framework for detecting and reporting text keywords, images, and videos in all digital private communications, nominally to prevent CSAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
I don't like pizza and hot dogs anyway
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).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.
Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."
Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."
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."
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.
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'.
By increasing the level of democracy and decentralizing the government.
Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland
Could Switzerland's prosperity instead be linked to its historical role in safeguarding gold taken from Jewish victims during World War II, its tradition of banking secrecy that enabled dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Sani Abacha to conceal their assets, or its longstanding willingness to accept money from oligarchs avoiding sanctions, tax evaders, arms dealers, corrupt officials, drug traffickers, and fraudsters?
I don’t think these are core reasons why Switzerland is a prosperous nation, no. I would guess what you are pointing out has only benefitted a few select bankers and the average citizen has had little to gain from this.
I believe Switzerland is prospering because the citizens are in charge of their nation, not a select few belonging to the political class and well connected wealthy individuals.
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.
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.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
Simple:
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
by Eric Hughes
written 9 March 1993
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
I don't think there are actionable items in that manifesto, and was written during the RSA munitions debate.
The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems". The cypherpunk scene is still alive and evolving, but it's fairly niche, and a tough environment for people driven by external validation while 'things are well'. But there are still people around making sure the necessary pieces are in place in case they become necessary.
The privacy-preserving systems have been built and are finally making it into the mainstream, only to be uprooted by politics. Not that we no longer need to build more of such systems, but the root of the issue lies elsewhere.
Yes but the mainstream systems are not decentralized enough. We need better systems.
We, the technological community, have failed the wider public by not creating decentralized alternatives that are as good as centralized ones.
Chat Control shouldn't even be an issue, we should just be able to laugh it away.
Is anyone concerned about Mastodon being banned? No right because it would be almost impossible to implement. Yet it is possible for WhatsApp/Telegram(yuck)/Signal. Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
Why wouldn't signal just move their company to some random other country? It's not like they make money from their users, and people can easily sideload the app.
It is suspected that Signal was originally financed by the CIA:
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/signal-faci...
> Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
This. Signal is actively fighting against decentralization, which makes me suspicious. Their arguments were debunked by the Matrix team, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936929
> The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems".
Indeed. At the parent page of https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html (https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/), you can read:
"if you want to write code, go to OpenPrivacy.org":
> https://www.openprivacy.org/
This website perhaps gives you some inspirations.
I'd argue the actionable things are already happening: Hackers and cryptographers creating technical solutions that defy governmental control, people trying to sway public opinion (or trying to get people to realize that being surveilled isn't just about their secret it is about a fundamental balance of powers between companies/governments and individuals).
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
Was it really the internet that killed third places?
Among all candidates, it seems the least likely here. It didn't even happen at the same speed the internet grew.
(The issues with monopolized editorial powers are still valid, it's just this one that I think is wrong.)
Say more?
You mean what other candidates are there?
Overwork, lack of space, lack of transportation.
I imagine people blames the internet for lack of interest (as in "social networks are a dopamine machine"). But IMO it's absurd to jump into a lack of interest when the physical means for people to get together are destroyed.
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.
Im not hopeful for it, I think it will happen probably but under no pretense it will make things better. It does make losing the battle for internet freedom in specific feel a little less bad for me though because that particular issue feels temporary.
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
Chinese ppl don't like this either.
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”.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You and I are in complete agreement on that front.
> pulled millions out of poverty
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
And there is no non-violent solution
Which is why you see eg UK making it illegal to demonstrate, want more backdoors in communication tech (so they can scan for wrongthink), going harder banning free speech etc
I wonder how much support it would have if it was called "Speech Control" instead. Probably still a depressing percentage...
Free speech is only really a thing in the US. Many in the EU love to prosecute and control speech they don't like usually with the vague and legally undefined "hate speech" knock out argument.
It has been given the name "Chat Control" by its detractors, no?
Yeah, it's real name is CSAR.
The fact it's named after a know autocrat (squint your eyes to view the name) should give you enough to think about.
Let's hope the opponents are from a small village of resistance and have some magic potion because it's going to be needed.
How much support does it have anyway? Outside of Parliament, I mean.
Full post:
Leak: Many countries that said NO to #ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided—even though the 2025 plan is even more extreme!
The vote is THIS October.
Tell your government to #StopChatControl!
Act now: https://chatcontrol.eu
That website is pretty bad. Don't say "act now" with a link when the link has no concrete actions listed.
"Ask your government not to do that" means absolutely nothing.
There should be a list of what people should do step by step based on their country.
This link is full of the usual self-promoting priorities of politicians, and the modern "influencers" who mimic them.
1. Redirects to someone's personal-name Web site.
2. The top heading on the page is their personal name and what seems to be personal logo.
3. Immediately below that logo the navbar entry for "ABOUT ME / CONTACT".
4. The last entry in the navbar is "GET INVOLVED", and the first entry of that menu is "Follow Me".
5. The first entry in the navbar is "WELCOME" and redirects to a page with a huge photo of him, followed by a heading that starts "Patrick Breyer – Digital freedom fighter and former Member of European Parliament for the German and the European Pirate Party" subheading "Europe’s voice of privacy and the free Internet".
6. Then the page below all this has some information.
I think this is one reason that positive revolutions can't happen anymore: the potential leaders/actors see no non-corrupt role models for how to operate. It's a very fuzzy line between self-promotion in service of the mission somehow, and self-promotion in service of power/influence for its own sake.
In a representative democracy there is nothing nefarious about a representative presenting himself as a person who would stand for certain policies.
This is purporting to be an issue thing (see the link). But it can't help be a personal brand thing.
I'm using this as an example of a problem with modern activism. Everyone wants to do their videos of themselves posturing like influencers, and building their brand, and the issue looks like a vehicle.
On the other hand, Patrick Beyer is doing more for internet freedom than any other person I know.
Who else is fighting chat control and informing the population as well?
With the way the world is I wouldn't be suppressed if it's been infiltrated and is controlled opposition designed to fail.
I followed the link to that .eu website which then redirected me to https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
I was expecting to find a big CTA button that I could click to sign some message to my representatives. Instead I found a giant wall of text with "ideas on how to take action" followed by a list of points along the lines of "Is your government in favour? Ask for an explanation" OK, ask how? No links, no email addresses... basically it's just a page saying "if you care about this thing do your own homework and find a way to act"
Whoever made that page needs to look into the concept of conversion rate. As it is right now it's basically useless
On the other hand, templated mass emails to representatives get filtered out.
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.
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.
Hell is paved with good intentions.
Specifically the road to hell (as the saying goes).
It seems to be a problem with the whole 'Western' world - we're all on way with increasing authoritarianism and our leaders wanting to create police states...
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
But they will keep trying to introduce it until they think they can win a vote. They keep trying to sneak it through and hope the public will either get too tired to keep fighting or can be distracted by other issues.
Personally I'm skeptical it's been shot down because of "the public" so far
In fact I think all of these impending doom articles are particularly counter productive because they de-sensitize people before it even gets to the parliament which (1) has already expressed opposition to this and (2) is a bit more starving for approval and thus potentially more receptive to this kind of stuff
But that's beyond the point regarding the "keep trying" part because I really can't imagine a way to "fix" that which isn't going to negatively impact the quality of legislation in the long run
Also I'm fairly sure that if there was a limit on how many times it can be considered in committee it'd already have been approved by council, so be careful what you wish for
Yes, and when it does that's it, forever. Because the EU """parliament""" cannot propose laws, meaning it cannot repeal existing laws either.
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...
I am not sure if any political system does it democratically. That is have every single member of cabinet or equal to be voted in from popular open vote. As it should be in proper democracy.
i know it's included in the toot, but it feels like this thread should have the link to the act now site: https://chatcontrol.eu/
"The EU Commission proposes... ...Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence... ...network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world..."
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.
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).
It's jarring seeing these proposals after which we like to brag about being better than China on digital rights.
The sad truth is that it's so much easier, cheaper and faster to have these laws than actually doing "police" work.
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?
What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
No, I am not arguing anything, I was just asking.
Right sorry the topic is very exhausting and I extrapolated my frustration, assuming you are interested, it came back in 2015 and was canned again in 2019: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung_in_Deu...
I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is very very slow. This is an imbalance that makes it hard to fight such laws. They change a miniscule detail and it can pass a 3rd and 4th time.
As I understand it, the pressure for a surveillance state comes from the EU, right? While Germany and countries in their cultural sphere like Austria are fundamentally opposed to that. If that's the case, it won't ever change unless the EU changes
I'm afraid Germany ('s government) is not opposed at the moment and there is enough internal pressure as well. We had our fair share of moments getting surveilance like that and fighting it. I bet my ass off, that Ursula von der Leyen, the c... who tried to make it German law had her hands in that as well.
Ursula has been in favor since the beginning.
> Among the few traces of Thorn’s activities in the EU’s lobby transparency register is a contribution of 219,000 euros in 2021 to the WeProtect Global Alliance, the organisation that had a video conference with Kutcher and Von der Leyen in late 2020.
Thorn is the main lobbying group behind these proposals.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
If any other country should know better, you'd think it would be Germany. Ursula in particular married into a family which was both persecuted as Anabaptists and participated in persecution by being Holocaust enforcers, so how on Earth is she not aware of the slippery slope here?
Like most people on this planet in positions of power - corruption and cognitive dissonance
the UK essentially does not have a constitution nor any significant judicial authority over lawmaking
> Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
tldr: A US based surveillance company called Thorn has been lobbying for this for years.
‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Chat control & Kutcher: Ombudsman criticizes secrecy https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-control-Kutcher-Ombudsman-...
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).
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
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?
'Constitution' arguments are used by ones in power only to server their agenda. Constitution argument won't save us from the surveillance. Most of the time western countries play 'national security' and 'think of the children' to circumvent the constitution and have ~100% success rate.
I don't feel like that's true in Germany. The constitutional court would like a word I guess. They have a pretty big history regarding surveilance and such.
So shouldn't be a concern then for Germans? Somehow I don't buy that. See for example https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-artikel-5-e-v-anot... and that's not an isolated event. Before that were jabber chat nodes.
So did they go to court? I think that would be crucial to rectify that. If not, they let the rogue agents have a free hand.
Be involved in the legal battle (especially with the government) is a punishment already. The state has unlimited power to haras and do that frequently.
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.
Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.
At least in America, a classic go to for Republican and democrats alike for opposing legislation is "that's unconstitutional!"
Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the same page).
I’m not sure if that’s the case in Germany though.
as the constitution doesn't have that high of a place in our identity it's more something for constitutional lawyers and higher courts. I think there's more tension between our constitutional law and that of the EU's law. for most people that's background noise I guess.
In this particular question there are also fundamental human rights that are part of the EU legislation where it is fully plausible that ECJ would render any law implementing the EU law. Like Ipred, where our politicians tried to pass laws following it but it got struck down again and again. No idea if they have given up yet.
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.
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.
Only charging your phones if you have 3+ AI subscriptions and comply with all anti encryption laws of course
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:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
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?
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.
Matrix like most decentralized services make it possible to choose the client app. Just pick one outside of EU jurisdiction.
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.
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.
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.
That seems like it will be largely useless. Sure, the masses will continue using a bugged WhatsApp. But anyone with actual interesting/llegal things to say will switch over to an open source messaging app that hasn't been bugged.
That is just the first step of the plan. First they compromise the messaging apps, then they'll make it harder to install open source apps. Then they will force OS level monitoring which is exactly what North Korea does.
This is a power grab pure and simple.
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.
He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).
The far right in France doesn’t want ChatControl. In fact I think only the soft left, middle and soft right want ChatControl (and it is not even a consensus for among these groups).
The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.
No. That was Ylva Johansson, a Swedish social democrat. They are center left, with emphasis on the center part.
> Ylva Johansson
In the 1988 general elections Johansson was elected as a member of the Riksdag for the Left Party – Communists
This party was the sole political force in Sweden supporting the Soviet Union in the Winter War against Finland. They also supported Soviet military expansion along its Western border.
She may be center left now but she was a card carrying member of the communists before. She is a crook and completely bought by the lobbies. So no, I do not agree that she is center left.
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Who would have thought?!
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping.
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.
Signal said that they will the EU market if push comes to shove, so there won't be a Signal client to patch because there won't be a Signal app.
There will still be an APK which can be sideloaded, and you could continue to use it through a VPN.
saying no to AI is a great way to become the third world
Because politicians are not accountable to you and are paid for by lobbyists.
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.
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.
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.
If you're still labeling people as "disinformation spreaders" that are dangerous then you can't complain.
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Karl Popper, "The open society and its enemies":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It's all about the paradox of tolerance.
That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.
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.
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.
If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.
But any talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.
It's shooting the messenger.
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.
And people are organizing marches all over the EU.
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.
You could say that any chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.
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.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.
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>HN is one person
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Yeah, sure? If you have a problem with individual posters and their opinions just talk to them directly. Trying to argue with an entire forum as a single opinion-block is just extremely futile.
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Some legislation good, some legislation bad.
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Because the design of a charging port doesn’t open up your population to more cybersec vulnerabilities?
The same bureaucratic elite in Bruxelles loved to blame Russian hacking for election mishaps (remember Romanian cancelled elections?), seems antithetical to that
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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.
However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good.
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.
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.)
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.
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
STASI/GESTAPO 2.0 = bad
To the rest... install Tox, QTox/UTox for PC (any OS) and Atox under Android. Never post personal data, ever.
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".
After you finish setting it up, save the settings.
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.
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 disable any enabled metadata for your account.
> Universal charger = good
> STASI/GESTAPO 2.0 = bad
That much is obvious.
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.
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 La Résistance in perpetuity is not a solution, but a precursor.
[flagged]
Aw, Jeez, not this shit again.
ChatControl!--because Orwell was a rabble-rousing fool
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.
The main lobbying group behind the proposal is a US surveillance company called Thorn.
‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Chat control & Kutcher: Ombudsman criticizes secrecy https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-control-Kutcher-Ombudsman-...
Your comment history seems peppered with similar low-effort comments about Europe.
As a European, I have some strong opinions about the state of your country at the moment. Opinions shared by quite a large proportion of your own population actually.
But I manage to refrain from regularly and flippantly insulting entire continents and maintain some self awareness that we all have our own problems.
I’d strongly encourage you to do the same.
Doesn't take much effort to point out the truth. And it won't matter that much. When you've inevitably created your next crisis I guess we'll just have to come save you again.
With freedom we will fix our issues. But you guys always cheer as you go through one way doors.
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.