The best way to deal with this is non-compliance and there need to be technical solutions to deny such attempts.
One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
Google just added age restriction on blogger. Result is that you need to provide Google with ID information to access some content. If more an more users elect to ID with their Google account you can see where it can lead. Naturally the EU wants to increase such schemes as well.
It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes of said tech companies is either an oversight or something worse. I would think it is the latter and giant tech companies are very glad about the behavior of the commission. Because they too tried get people to use their ID solutions.
Digital tech doesn't really prosper in the EU but certainly surveillance leveraging services of others.
The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible. While Google did many good things for net security, their compliance on topics that serve its self-interest is a danger. Same goes for other large tech companies.
That there is close collaboration between certain political elites and tech companies is pretty much a given. It was decried as a conspiracy theory until it was proven. Although it should be no surprise that there are such connections. Perhaps the influence of the EU commission is smaller, but I would not bet on it. Access to the market is on the hand they can play. Easily a strong enough hand to subject users to surveillance.
> The best way to deal with this is non-compliance and there need to be technical solutions to deny such attempts.
I disagree.
While these are good to have, they are not enough.
The reason is always the same: if you are found to be using the circumventing tech., you'll likely be in breach of the law, which will give the goons a legitimate reason to come and harass you.
In a civilized country, that can translate into a fine, community service, etc...
In the borderlands, it'll land you in jail or worse.
The goons will come and harass you if you are inconvenient or a threat to the ruling class, even if you are complying with all existing regulations. This happens in every country and region.
For the common man non-compliance is the only non-violent way to preserve his rights or exercise freedom. You can do it successfully if you are smart and agile.
No it doesn't happen in every country and region. In many places there's no such thing as a "ruling class". Politicians are just another type of public sector worker and certainly not the best paid or wealthiest.
As European living in country with highest inflation rate I must agree. What annoys me a lot is a trending narration about blaming Putin for everything. Ministry of interior has leaked manuals where is writen guide for public relations about it. Basically it says that media need to blame Putin for hungry and problems with food supply chain.
Sometimes I think we have romanticized civil disobedience a little too much. Not because having authoritarian laws is good, but because it seems like some people would rather be heroic resistance fighters than engage dry policy work and advocacy. It would be better to never live under bad laws at all.
>some people would rather be heroic resistance fighters than engage dry policy work and advocacy
This is a nice take, that would be the right one if you operated in a fair system.
But if you have ever engaged in the very dirty game of trying to change or remove a bad law (bad for whatever reason), you soon learn how very dirty the game is.
Extremely few people who play that game are in it for the betterment of society as a whole rather than the betterment of their own destiny and that of their friends.
And even if they started out that way, it never lasts. Human nature.
Want to change policy? Quid pro quo. Read all about it, and be ready to do nothing but.
> people would rather be heroic resistance fighters than engage dry policy work and advocacy
Isn't it tiring? I mean you can raise hell and get some picture but you know one or 4 years from now they will try the same bullshit with a different name until it works.
You are wasting your time and energy on activism while there are crooks literally getting paid (by your money) to degrade your life. I think that time and energy should be best spent building things which are immune to power abuse.
It's much easier for people to resist by using "forbidden" systems in private, than to affect political change. In the context of the EU, other rights afforded to citizens make things like this hard to enforce.
The reason is always the same: if you are found to be using the circumventing tech., you'll likely be in breach of the law, which will give the goons a legitimate reason to come and harass you.
Similarly, open resolvers, e.g., "public DNS service" from Google, Cloudflare, Cisco (OpenDNS), Quad9, etc. or DNS provided by an ISP. A remote DNS cache is, IMO, a "MiTM". It can censor among other things. Quad9, for example, is doing this right now.
Even so-called "encrypted DNS" such as DNSCrypt or more recently DoH only applies to the path between the client and the cache, not the cache and the authoritative server. In the same way that the path between a client and Cloudflare and the path between Cloudflare and the origin server are separated by CF as a "MiTM".
NB. It's possible to exclude the remote DNS cache and have encrypted DNS between client and authoritative server, the software exists, even for DNSCrypt, but it never caught on. I have often thought about starting a registry that requires registrants to offer encrypted authoritative DNS.
I’m guessing they mean “man in the middle as a service,” referring to the fact that Cloudflare (by design) is a trusted party in your TLS traffic if you use them.
let's encrypt made a huge improvement on the status quo, but now that 95% of the web depends on them, they're an obvious central point of vulnerability for censors and spy agencies
...you're not concerned about all of the other Trusted Root CAs that ship in OS/browser updates? Why would the NSA/GCHQ/etc need to compromise a high-profile target like LetsEncrypt when they could bribe any of the dozens of companies names listed in my own local certmgr.msc that I don't recognize at all[1].
1: I'm seeing names like "Actalis", "Baltimore CyberTrust", "Cetrum" - some of these sound more like pharmaceuticals than tech companies...
I'm more concerned about why I can't see a list of sites that CA has authenticated, or put my own restrictions on them.
Taking the first one: AC Camerfirma S. A.
I suspect I've never authenticated anything against that CA. I'd love to know what sites it has authenticated, and maybe I'd be happy with a lot of .es sites
Wouldn't surprise me if I rarely if ever encounter 80% of the CAs that I trust. Looking through I'd be happy if some of the signed .ae, or .cn, but not .de.
If I did visit an unusual CA, I'd like to make a judgement call on that access. Sure, the big ones (letsencrypt, globalsign, etc) woul dneed to just trust completely, but having a "you are visiting youremail.com, last time you visited this was signed by Globalsign with a certificate expiry of 5 months time, today it's signed by Odd Looking CA, continue?
Sure for 90% of users would click though, and it shouldn't be an option for 90% of users, but I'm not 90% of users.
Same with importing. If I make my own certificates for my own stuff, I want to import my CA and trust if for .mydevdomain.com, but not for mybank.com, because I don't trust my own security enough to have anyone, including me, have a skeleton key to my entire communication chain for key sites.
That's all available from Certificate Transparency. Chrome refuses certificates that haven't been submitted to CT.
AC Camerfirma seems to operate multiple CA certificates (e.g. some labeled by year). Here's a search that finds certificates issued by one of them: https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=51020
a compromised root ca allows an attacker who already has dns or ip control (via bgp, arp spoofing, a captive portal, etc.) to leverage it into a working mitm attack on a tls site, but it can't revoke certs it didn't sign, and the attack is over as soon as the attacker loses dns or ip control
by contrast, the ca you chose to sign your cert can revoke it, or refuse to renew it, taking your website permanently offline with zero effort on their part, unless you can find another ca to sign a new cert for you
but if you could, let's encrypt wouldn't have had to exist in the first place
the dozens of companies you mentioned make that less of a threat, not more of one, though they do of course increase of mitm attacks as i described in the first paragraph of this comment
> a compromised root ca allows an attacker who already has dns or ip control
DNS or host/IP control is not a requirement at all: a Trusted CA is already trusted to sign a certificate for any hostname (with exceptions): that's what Trust means, and it also means that we trust them not to issue certificates for domains/hostnames without doing at-least Domain Validation - and we have schemes like Certificate Transparency to help bolster that trust, but it still doesn't prevent an already-trusted CA from issuing its own certificate for, say, google.com or microsoft.com. This is why techniques like Certificate Pinning and co/counter-signing, and others exist - but they're only useful when the client isn't a human-operated web-browser ("smart clients", "IoT", etc). EV certificates were (amongst other things...) meant to help protect against small-time crooks but again, don't help when the CA itself is compromised.
if i type https://gmail.com/ into my browser, it usually doesn't matter if you have successfully gotten comodo or actalis to issue you a fake certificate for gmail.com, because my browser doesn't try to connect to your malicious server; it tries to connect to google's actual gmail server, and so you don't receive my packets, and your fake certificate does you no good
but, as i said, if you can feed me fake dns results so i connect to the wrong ip, or if you can arrange so that packets to gmail's legitimate ip go to your server instead (for example by having me connect to your wifi), then you can leverage the fake certificate into a successful mitm attack
but your explanation of the part of the basics of tls you understand, incomplete though it is, is irrelevant to the attack i was actually discussing, where someone doesn't like what you're saying (or the communication service you're providing) and gets your cert revoked to shut you up
If the browser enforced that the certificate had been issued in line with the domain's CAA record, such an attack might be less tractable without DNS control...
Let’s Encrypt, like other major CAs, participates in Certificate Transparency for this reason. “Central point of vulnerability” means very little without actual evidence of compromise, which CT would give us. And we haven’t seen any such evidence.
As far as I know. LE does not get access to the sites private key so they can not intercept traffic using their certificates. And if LE tried to replace certificates with fake ones, it would be spotted through certificate transparency like normal.
> The best way to deal with this is non-compliance and there need to be technical solutions to deny such attempts.
You cannot solve human issues by technical solutions
> One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
And what is your solution for that? Any authentication solution will inevitable converge to having trusted actors authenticating you. There's no technical solution for that.
> It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes
So what is your technical solution to this human law?
> The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible.
I also want to wish for moon and the stars. But we're not dealing with the realms of fantasy.
Strangest thing to me about the topic is that it’s obvious vast percentage of citizens within democracies wish they lived in an authoritarian country, yet choose to live in a democracy and use the liberties they’re provided to actively destabilize and destroy it. To me this is the largest issue, not a given topic that results from it.
Yes, I am aware current authoritarian countries wage propaganda campaigns, but in my experience such campaigns would be meaningless without an existing tendency to seek out authoritarian rule.
While likely flawed opinion, I do feel like one possible explanation is nationalism in general, since while many democratic countries will argue they believe in the rule of law, ultimately any non-citizen is treated as if they are within an authoritarian country and for sure not as citizens by default. Only once there are countries that treats all people equally and as citizens, will such an issue be addressed in my opinion.
Most people voting/supporting these kinds of things believe there is a dastardly "other" that this will apply to more than it will apply to them. There are plenty of recent political endeavors where this was extremely obvious and loudly detailed and, yet...
So much of the large-scale political nastiness these days isn't because a rising minority wants to enforce fair rules that everyone has to abide by together. They want rules that suppress the opportunities of someone else and are certain that the rules won't suppress them.
You can argue that there's little difference between one side or the other, but it's like a game cube -- in one direction it's left vs right, flip the cube and it's rich vs poor, spin the cube again, it's majority race/religion against others. The dastardly part is that, say, the propaganda of one orientation of the cube is often accepted by the oppressed parties of another orientation of cube.
Agree. Another possibility (or possibly expansion of your points) is that people feel that they are being responsible by amplifying the predictability of their current environment without realizing the potential for it to destabilize it instead. Honestly puzzled by topic and it’s one that spent a lot of time and effort trying to impact. Ultimately, I want to believe people understand they’re making an informed choice, but obviously concerned and puzzled by the pattern, which is neither new, nor likely to fade away, especially as AI‘s role advances in societies. That said, I have hope, and believe future is truly open to those willing to take the time to make a positive difference.
> They want rules that suppress the opportunities of someone else and are certain that the rules won't suppress them.
It should be noted that some of this sentiment comes from people who used the same techniques themselves to disrupt social arrangement, and who want to suppress them precisely because they know that it can work. Here's what one Soviet dissident had to say on the subject of human rights after USSR was gone:
"I always knew that only the decent people should have rights, and the indecent ones should not. ... Personally, I've had enough. Some time ago we [dissidents] and the USA have used this concept as a ram against the USSR and communists. This concept has served its purpose, and we should stop lying about human rights and promoting their defenders, lest we undermine ourselves."
It's rarely that blatant, but you can kinda sorta see similar sentiments in e.g. the explanations of why ACLU "evolves" on free speech.
Agree, it’s very common pattern, one that in part is caused by power grabs, but also by people suddenly realizing they now the ones in control and if they fail, they’re next on the chopping blocks.
Would be curious about the evolution on ACLU on free speech you referenced. Does this article cover your understanding, or is it something else?
To be fair to ACLU, they did backtrack somewhat on all this. Speaking as a member who joined years before this became somehow contentious for the organization, I hope that it'll get back on track, but I'm pessimistic about it - I think the zeitgeist is too contrary, and historically, ACLU did waver at such times (e.g. on defending rights of communists in 1930-50s).
Might be wrong, but it’s likely that only real solution is for the organization to introduce controls that attempt to put distance between the donors and operations of organization. Issue is donors, especially large ones, are very aware that organizations crave additional funds and often willing to bend the operations and positioning of an organization to gain them.
Beyond that, free speech is complex topic, so one for which I am sure I lack an even partial understanding of. I can easily see how hate speech is outsides of free speech in part because it feels without fail it’s only matter of time before someone takes the words to heart and lashes out in violence.
Given it appears only four lawyers at ACLU actually engage in free speech litigation according to prior article I linked to, beyond ACLU brand recognition and legacy funding, likely be worth funding and alternative organization instead of waiting for ACLU to default on its founding principals; possible retired ACLU free speech attorneys would be willing to mentor and advise these new attorneys.
Lastly, ACLU might easily address issue by making their potential case review assessments public and requiring those assessments include disclosure of any conflicting values and beliefs related to the case, especially case which they choose not to represent.
I don't think it's an issue with big donors specifically, or at least not just them. Thing is, a lot of people join ACLU for other causes - abortion is a popular one, for example. And back in 2016, many lefties joined during the Trump scare, on the general basis that something vaguely like ACLU was needed to push back all across the board. Naturally, the people who would do something like that tend to be those who feel strongly about politics and have strong opinions on various issues. But then those new members bring the entirety of their public politics to the internal politics of the organization, not just that one issue they joined over. A kind of Eternal September, if you will.
I don't think there is a solution to this, though. If ACLU doesn't get a steady supply of new members, it will wither and die. If it constrains itself to be small enough that the available supply of new members who fully support the existing platform is sufficient to sustain it (even as that platform becomes further away from the mainstream), it will be too small and lacking power for many important fights.
For reference, many years ago when a similar surveillance law was implemented in Sweden (the FRA law), 90% of people were against it (in random polling) but politicians voted it in anyway. It later turned out this was a diplomatic back channel direct order from the US, which was found out through that big Wikileaks dump.
So, the people are not at fault in these situations imo. First, it’s politicians and after that it’s journalists. Sunlight keeps malicious politicians in check, investigative journalism has been severely crippled with corporate media. As has whistleblowing.
> So, the people are not at fault in these situations imo.
In 2022 elections year one of the largest parties in Sweden (Moderaterna) had "more cameras and surveillance on our streets" as one of their big campaign points, including campaign signs and bilboards. It came in second.
Regardless of what form of government is currently ruling a given country, ultimately the people within it are responsible for the actions taken by the government, not the government itself.
As for your other point, I agree, free balanced independent journalism, whistleblower, leaks, etc - play a clear role in insuring public stays informed.
That said, in my opinion, if 90% percent of a population was against something, but they passively allowed it to happen, it is no one’s fault but there own. I don’t for a second believe average person does not understand they have a choice over who rules them and how, even if that choice is to fight to the death to defend that right, flee the area, or for that matter, simply do whatever they’re told to do.
There's a difference between "90% of the population is against something" and "the same, but they are also willing to vote against their chosen representative in order to stop it, and have a viable alternative that will".
In the US, we talk a lot of partisan issues that pit parts of the country against one another; and of bipartisan issues that unite them. I'd like to introduce the concept of an antipartisan issue: one that unites the country against its own politicians. In this particular case, surveillance is antipartisan, because:
- People do not want to be surveilled
- Politicians believe the people need to be surveilled in order to stay in office
The last one might seem confusing. But keep in mind that things like high crime rates tend to get politicians thrown out of their job. Big, high-profile busts of scumbag criminals tend to make politicians look more competent and thus increase chances of reelection. And if politicians as a class believe that surveillance is necessary to prosecute crime, then they will disobey democratic instruction not to.
I can be against something but not believe it is worth fighting to the death for. My town implemented a new tax that is highly unlikely to accomplish its stated goals. I’m not going to overthrow the government over $300 a year.
It’s the thousands of little paper cuts that build up over time but that can go on for an entire lifetime without ever reaching a breaking point.
Agree, there’s rarely critical point that would merit such a response, but obviously one that for some reason, for example being invaded by an authoritarian regime that intents to kill you regardless of what you to would I think for most be an ethical response. Fortunately, world has managed to avoid significant percentage of the world needing to make that choice for awhile.
While understand the death from thousands of little paper cuts issue, generally speaking, even when face with notable conflict, most people rarely independently take responsibility for insuring they aware of what’s going on and attempt to have an impact on the situation.
> it’s obvious vast percentage of citizens within democracies wish they lived in an authoritarian country, yet choose to live in a democracy
Most people don't get to choose where they live. It's really a relatively tiny percentage of the population who would have the financial ability and/or skills to emigrate, and those are really the people you're talking about. They have no loyalty to where they live because they don't need any; they can leave whenever they want, and threaten to whenever they get upset about anything.
Understand your point, though disagree. My understanding is the majority of people on Earth stay within days walking distance from where they grew up. Further, there are numerous countries that if they wanted could easily cover the costs related to relocating anyone that desired to leave another country.
I would argue the real explanation is most likely regardless of person’s situation, most want a predictable future, regardless of how good or bad their current situation. Moving to a new culture with no home, no source of income, no family or friends, etc — is viewed as predictably unpredictable by most.
> My understanding is the majority of people on Earth stay within days walking distance from where they grew up.
I can't see where you're disagreeing with me. What I'm saying is that people aren't choosing democracy, they just happen to live in one, and aren't willing or able to give up everything in order to move to a country that matches their political beliefs better.
> there are numerous countries that if they wanted could easily cover the costs related to relocating anyone
I don't understand what this means. If who wanted? Are you saying that there are lots of countries that are paying poor people to immigrate to them?
I think both you and parent are right to an extent. Both are, in fact, factor when it comes to a person staying within a certain distance of their birthplace. I did move and pretty far by most standards, but I did have both opportunity and some support to do just that. I am not entirely certain I would do the same without it. On the other hand, I was young and predictability was the least of my considerations. Come to think of it, I wanted to break free of the predictable pattern within my own familial social circle.
That said, I do value predictability and stability now, but being young has its own rights and values. I guess what I am saying is that we need to look at it as more than just x or y. There are multiple reasons for moving and lots of reason people choose to remain where they currently are. If pressed for one, I would argue convenience or maybe 'devil known'.
For clarity though, I don’t mean literal predictability, I mean relative predictability from the individual’s perspective, which for some actual means life being predictability unpredictable; to some degree, I am, in part because I value the chance to improvise, but anyone that knows me would say that’s predictable.
As for population migration, statistics I had heard before, was roughly half of world’s population doesn’t move more than days walk from where they grew up and remaining in a given area is rarely tied to personal or regional opportunities or threats. Clearly my understanding might be wrong or things like climate change might force people to move; for example, roughly billion of the eight billion people on Earth will likely be displaced by climate change.
I am absolutely willing to buy the rationale based on personal anecdata, but wouldn't it also mean that the other half of the world's population does ( as in, it is basically a coin toss as to whether or move or not)?
I might be conflating some word meanings here so please correct me as needed.
Nationalism is such an ubiquitous and powerful ideology, we don't realise that pretty much everyone today is an extreme nationalist.
Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Most today think it's a good-and-fitting thing to defend "one's country". And this impulse is vastly more powerful than defending "democracy".
Who would die to stop a coup? Few. Who would die to stop an "invasion", apparently, many.
What motivates Ukrainians after all?
Quite an extreme ideology, one that puts so many men on the battlefield. But nations were invented, there is nothing "natural" to fight for here; nor anything even clearly moral.
"Democracy", therefore, is clearly a vastly vastly weaker ideology. Nationalism is the most powerful ideology to ever exist.
I don't think Ukraine is a good example of your point, as apart from being a war between two nations, it is clearly also a war between democratic and authoritarian belief systems. That ideological divide is a large part of what sparked it in the first place--the whole thing began with mass pro-democracy demonstrations that ousted an authoritarian leader.
My perception is that Ukrainians know what it's like to live under an authoritarian system and they would rather risk death and the total destruction of the country than go back to it. Nationalism is clearly a factor as well, but it is deeply intertwined with pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian ideals. I don't think you'd see anything close to this level of resistance if victory would mean an authoritarian Ukraine rather than a democratic Ukraine.
> I don't think you'd see anything close to this level of resistance if victory would mean an authoritarian Ukraine rather than a democratic Ukraine.
Ah, well: I do.
I think this has extraordinarily little to do with any "political system", of which Ukraine and Russia were both quite similar.
One Nation invaded another, and in such moments people's nationalism is trigged. One defends' "one's own nation" regardless.
This is a vastly more powerful reaction than any intellectual-sentimental philosophy. This "Nation" is "Ours" and not "Yours".
Indeed, the heart of the matter is that Russia isnt nationalist. They're still operating in a pre-National era of loose ethnicities being "of a common group" and hence do not think these borders matter so much.
What russia hasnt fully understood is that essentially the rest of the world has become nationalist, whilst it still operates under an ethnic-imperial model.
Russia as a polity is very confused on this. Officially, it's civic nationalist - you're supposed to think of yourself as a part of the "Russian nation" regardless of your ethnicity, but it's also defined broadly to allow for incomplete assimilation.
As a side note, it's more difficult to talk about this in (most) languages other than Russian because they don't have the distinction that Russian itself does. The word "русский" ("russky") usually means Russian in an ethnic sense, while the word "российский" ("rossiyskiy" - from the name of the country, which is Rossiya in Russian) means Russian in a sense of pertaining or belonging to the country. Thus you can compare and contrast "russky nationalism" (ethnic) and "rossiyskiy nationalism" (civic).
In practice, the government tolerates and sometimes encourages ethnic Russian nationalism so long as it does not manifest as open political opposition.
I don't think your reading lines up with history. Putin was clearly content to allow Ukraine a large degree of sovereignty and autonomy as long as they remained under an authoritarian system. If nationalism was the only driver, why overthrow Yanukovych, thereby spitting in Putin's face and risking domination by another country?
What wasn't tolerable to Putin was a bourgeoning democracy on Russia's doorstep with similar ethnography and demography to Russia. If it proved to be more successful than Russia's model (which isn't hard), that's a clear threat to his regime.
'I think this has extraordinarily little to do with any "political system", of which Ukraine and Russia were both quite similar.'
It seems like you're simply ignoring what happened in 2014. The stark difference between Ukraine and Russia's political systems (and their future trajectories) after that point is one of the main causes of the war.
The "authoritarian system" in question was russia's ethnic-imperial system of empire. That it was "authoritarian" is far less important than its being Russian, ethnically and culturally.
The offense to russia was first to turn to the west, and hence as Russia sees it, a counter-empire; and the secondly, the suprise and outrage, to believe that it's a Nation.
Both are incomprehensible to Russia -- it has nothing to do with how "authoritarian" anything is.
I see some truth to your point, but it's also very reductive, and you're providing nothing to back up your reductionism.
The "turn to the west" is geopolitical but it's also a turn away from a conservative authoritarian order and toward a liberal democratic order. Is that just a meaningless geopolitical coincidence? No, it's clearly part of the equation, though certainly not the only part.
Well my point is only that a person reading my comments comes to see their "intuitive nationalism" as an explicit feature of their thinking, rather than a natural fact of the world.
My analysis doesnt need to be 100% to show that even the very idea of "invasion" in the modern sense is full of contingencies we don't acknowledge.
What a weird thing, no, in the history of the world that the US invades iraq and wishes for it to govern "itself".
Once you remove the "Nation" from your thinking, various issues become clearer, esp. why so many "countries" appear unstable. Ie., politically they are countries, but havent yet "progressed" to "default nationalism".
Once a region adopts nationalism, it seems there's no going back; and people of that Nation are fundamentally radicalised by that notion. There are "borders", "immigration" and indeed -- how strangely -- "illegal" immigration; there are armies, and you should join one if you're "invaded".
These ideas appear in our thinking as transparent, obvious, facts of the world; and if we feel they are violated, then we feel outraged -- and would act very severely to get redress. This is radicalism, and a certain "liberal nationalism" has deeply radicalised the west.
I think, foremost, we want Ukraine to fight Russia because we believe Ukraine to be a Nation. I think something many of its own people did not think 20 years ago, and now, many die because they believe it.
I actually like the point you tried to develop in this thread, because I feel most people don't question their assumptions often enough. However, you are clearly reducing complex phenomena to a single cause, incorrectly so in my opinion.
Greek city-states fought each other all the time. They definitely had a concept of "Nation", even though they would have a different name for it. All patterns you associate with Nationalism were there, including xenophobia - that's where the goddamn word was created. The rise of what we call Nationalism in modernity has its own peculiarities, including the rise of military-industrial complexes that have every incentive to weaponize it as well. But it is simply wrong to think that, for example, the issue between Ukraine and Russia can be meaningfully reduced to one or the other side "adopting nationalism". Also, it is factually incorrect to say 20 years ago Ukrainians (or inhabitants of that region) would have wanted to be ruled by Putin or Russia in general.
It gets less clear-cut as the war drags on. For example, a rather extreme law on mass media has been passed in Ukraine recently, with the justification that it is necessary to block Russian propaganda.
I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine ends up winning a Pyrrhic victory in a sense that it'll liberate all of its territory, but its internal politics will radicalize in the process, if not to the point of becoming outright non-democratic, then at least becoming more like Hungary or Poland: a democratic majority voting in fully support of a crackdown on all political, ideological, and cultural opposition.
Yes, that is true, though similar erosions of democracy also happen in well-established democracies like the US and UK when there are wars. I think there is clearly still an aspiration towards western-style liberal democracy even if there are many gaps in how it's implemented.
I think this aspiration is the fundamental problem for Putin. He sees it as encouraging things like the ousting of Yanukovych, which he desperately wants to stop from being repeated in other countries within his sphere of influence. He already almost lost Belarus in a similar way.
I'm pretty sure that Putin literally believes all that tripe about "triune people", and I don't think he needed any excuses beyond that. Well, there's also the part where I think he really wants to end up in the history textbooks with the same standing as Ivan III and other famous "gatherers of the land".
So, in a sense, he is also fighting for his country and its nation - it just happens to be an imaginary one: "Greater Russia".
> Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
"Nationalism" had more to do with the relationship between the state and the nation, not the existence of nations. The word "nation" is very old.
Nation comes from the Latin "natio" meaning "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe"[0]. Thus, the essential basis for nationality is familial, a matter of common descent (as all human beings form an extended family, where you draw the line on this blurry map will depend on other factors like culture and language and ultimately the good held in common; note how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians speak basically the same language, it is the religious and therefore cultural differences that separate them). Naturally, people migrate all the time between nations. That is normal to the degree that migration does not harm the common good of the host society. But immigration is effectively a matter of adoption. We can adopt children. We can also adopt nations.
To expand just a bit more, the map is very blurry. Nation states tap into some real and old sentiments, but are not just a translation of those to a modern political language. They are their own new political projects, with a shape that is a result of historical happenstance and personal ambitions of specific people. It is surprisingly malleable – depending on what common enemies appear, what leaders and writers become popular, etc.
You are fighting for who has the “monopoly of violence”, which is the most natural thing ever, that we have those cliques as big as they are might not be though.
Tribes have existed since before written history; not sure if you’re referring to something else, but to me a tribe is essentially same thing, us vs them.
I think we need to slow down and look at this with level heads.
1. What is a reliable measure of this "vast percentage"?
2. Are you perhaps lumping any departure from your preferred political model as "authoritarian"?
3. Are you perhaps overattributing the level of "democracy" to your preferred political regime?
4. Have you considered the motivations behind the distaste with ostensibly "democratic" regimes?
Simply declaring "nationalism!" is not an intellectually substantive remark and probably caricaturish because a) what do you mean by "nationalism", and b) you haven't identified the confluence of motives to see what might be happening and why.
My 2 cents: liberalism as a political ideology traceable to Locke and Hobbes is unraveling because of its inherent tensions and errors (like the tension between knowledge and the mistaken liberal notion of "freedom" understood as "do what thou wilt" versus "do what thou ought"; its radical individualism; its totalitarian "neutrality" which is a manipulative, underhanded means of entrenching liberal presuppositions; its egalitarianism). It is to be expected that someone whose sentiments have been shaped in a social climate that valorizes an ideology will view any departure as hostile and "authoritarian", not on objective grounds, but merely according to habituated affect. You had the same thing in post-Soviet Russia and post-War Germany.
From the first sentence of the related post — “The European Commission is currently in the process of enacting a law called Chat control. If the law goes into effect, it will mean that all EU citizens' communications will be monitored and listened to.”
Level headed person would see that the next step is logically that all communications regardless if they’re in private, in person, etc should be monitored. If that’s not an authoritarian state, I am happy to be listen to why.
As for a vast percentage, I mean that topic like this would not even see the light of day if there wasn’t source of significant support; hint, there is.
I have neither have preference over given political party, nor would I be affiliated with a given group; that is, I am fine independently observing, understanding, evaluating, and if needed, acting on any situation as needed.
Not sure understand you point 3, please feel free to clarify.
As for point 4, I covered a possible reasoning why current democracies might be viewed as unjust; if you missed that, might be worth reading my OP comment again.
And yes, nationalism is toxic. It treats other humans as subhumans by default, that is non-citizens are not treated equal, and for sure not as citizens by default. If there was a country that treated all humans as citizens, equally, fairly, etc - I would be happy to reevaluate my beliefs related to nationalism.
And for your two cents, I prefer plain-English and first principle reasoning, not reference to historical ideologies, list of ism’s, etc. Said another way, I don’t understand what you hoped I would understand, but happy to listen.
"I mean that topic like this would not even see the light of day if there wasn’t source of significant support; hint, there is."
Where are you from? This is an initiative of the EU Commission. The EU is not a democracy, the Commission doesn't care what voters think and is quite open about that. It can take that attitude because there are no voters: the Commission is an appointed civil service and the people there get their jobs via opaque processes. So the Commission trying to do something tells us exactly nothing about society, democracy, the will of the majority, how supported the policy is, or anything else beyond what a tiny club of Eurocrats thinks and wants.
As for the percentage of people who want to live in a totalitarian system, it's probably about 25%-30%. A lot but not a majority. That's roughly the proportion of people who in polls in the UK during the Brexit campaigns said they're true EU supporters, and not merely supporting it due to fear of the consequences of disobedience. Why do they like it and support it so much, well, exactly because it's not a democratic system and they'd like to live under such a system (they had no answer back to criticism of the EU as undemocratic).
>If there was a country that treated all humans as citizens, equally, fairly, etc - I would be happy to reevaluate my beliefs related to nationalism.
I don't see how a democratic system could possibly work without nationalism. Why would you allow people all over the world to vote in your country's elections? This runs completely counter to the very idea of democracy, which is that people should govern themselves and choose their own leaders. People outside the country being non-citizens is simply necessary for this to work at all.
Understand your point, though you might make voting requirements that for example require a residence duration. Problem with that is it would likely result use of cost of living increases that would make residence unaffordable by default.
That said, would be extremely interesting if the whole world was allowed to vote how things would go, never know until you actually try. Likely closest existing comparable would be the UN, not because of it’s democratic representation, but because on the global nature of its membership. Also, easily see other countries actually making dual citizenship illegal, which would mean to
Well, I think we had a solid bipartisan support for classical-liberism up until 2015. It's worth going back to it with the lessons learned. It was the bedrock that allowed limited centralization and most importantly, accountability.
We need new journalism that keeps powers in check and hold them accountable, not pander to their readers in an ever resonating echo chambers.
Assuming by “we” you are referring to Americans, which to me not a democracy, but a plutocracy; that is, a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth, either as a individual or organization.
As for American media, issues related to pandering to readers is likely related to it deregulating media industry in the 80s; for more information see:
One where majority of citizens actively participate in matters impacting the majority of citizens, understand all significant views on a topic, and no entities are allowed have power beyond their own personal independent interests. As is, to me, America, Russian, China, EU, etc are all plutocratic — because the average person doesn’t want the responsibility of dealing that comes with running a society.
As for my specific response, the existence of a non-global power example to me is irrelevant, since it’s unlikely to change the course of humanity. If you have an example, specific counter point, request for clarification, etc — happy to attempt to respond.
This comment by me within this thread might also expand on the topic you’re asking about:
1. I have seen that page multiple times. For starters, what does it have to do with plutocracy? Do you know there are different forms of democracy? What does a direct democracy have to do with plutocracy? You seem to conflate true democracy with direct democracy.
You can have a true democracy that is indirect and not plutocratic. You can assert otherwise but nothing in the definitions contradict that.
2. We seem to be going back and forth. But it seems you don't have any country that matches your original definition
3. > As for my specific response, the existence of a non-global power example to me is irrelevant, since it’s unlikely to change the course of humanity. If you have an example, specific counter point, request for clarification, etc — happy to attempt to respond.
This is another strange shift in the thread. I am *not* asking for a non-global power that will impact the course of humanity. My simple original request was just a single power that fits your *original* definition of true democracy (not the modified one you suddenly have presented here).
It is not irrelevant as a true democratic non-global power can become a huge power (thanks to true democracy^TM).
Direct Democracy was addressed and criticized specifically by American founding fathers. You should read the fedaralist papers, specifically the numbers written by Madison. They were aware of what I see here as an extremely naive case for "democracy".
No thanks, if you have a point to raise, please do so yourself in plain-English, I am not going to read 80-100 documents written hundreds of years ago by men who thought a democracy meant 3-5% of the population should be able to control the rest.
> Well, I think we had a solid bipartisan support for classical-liberism up until 2015.
This is a fantasy history. We have had solid bipartisan support for neoliberalism (property rights are king) and neoconservatism (and we need motivating myths about them to keep the proles in line) for a long time. That consensus continues. "Classical liberalism" has never been popular anywhere.
edit: we're having an extreme authoritarian wave as a reaction to the internet, but we shouldn't pretend like we don't come from countries that used to open people's mail to look for pamphlets about contraception.
“Strangest thing to me about the topic is that it’s obvious vast percentage of citizens within democracies wish they lived in an authoritarian country, yet choose to live in a democracy and use the liberties they’re provided to actively destabilize and destroy it.”
Yes agreed.
“Yes, I am aware current authoritarian countries wage propaganda campaigns, but in my experience such campaigns would be meaningless without an existing tendency to seek out authoritarian rule.”
Yes agreed.
“While likely flawed opinion, I do feel like one possible explanation is nationalism in general, since while many democratic countries will argue they believe in the rule of law, ultimately any non-citizen is treated as if they are within an authoritarian country and for sure not as citizens by default.”
Losing me. Non citizens aren’t citizens by default and therefore should in any country be extended the same rights. As they don’t bear the same responsibilities.
“Only once there are countries that treats all people equally and as citizens, will such an issue be addressed in my opinion.”
This is where I think the breakthrough was lost in my opinion. Having the realisation of the first few paragraphs but getting it backwards. All I have ever seen is a corrupting influence of some groups from authoritarian countries who move to democratic states only to attempt to take their brutal systems with them. Specifically here to avoid doubt I’m talking about Islamic and Chinese immigration both have in various countries setup their own police systems. This is wholly unacceptable and should not be tolerated in the same way Irish/Italian/Russian organised crime shouldn’t. Not saying it’s all people from a place or a “racial” thing cause there are many people trying to escape the regimes of their homes. However it’s clearly motivated by nationalism but by external nationalism. People taking pride in their own countries is a counter to this influence.
Thank you for the clear breakdown, thought that might be a possible explanation, but didn’t want to assume.
> Reply to: “Losing me. Non citizens aren’t citizens by default and therefore should in any country be extended the same rights. As they don’t bear the same responsibilities.”
Rights while sometimes related to responsibilities, resistance, etc — obviously do not always require those features to be present. For example, basic human rights. In this case, right to privacy for many is a basic human right. Additional rights, for example voting rights, might be limited to factors like those mentioned prior.
> Reply to: “This is where I think the breakthrough was lost in my opinion.”
Stating the obvious, repressive law enforcement requires repressive laws. Further, citizenship by default based on some preexisting factors, such as birth parents being citizens and present in the country at the time of birth, clearly already exist as a path to citizenship which requires literally no threshold other than having happened to be born within those circumstances. If those citizens, while in many cases given rights, must follow laws. As such, might easily make laws that state things such as it is a crime to participate in creation, administration, enforcement, etc - of laws which breach basic human rights. As such, those individuals might in turn lose voting rights, face trial, etc.
_________
Additional clarification: Again, not claiming to have solution, just attempting to understand a potential root cause of the situation. For example, if non-citizens have no right to privacy, it makes sense to develop technologies, skills, etc to use for surveillance of non-citizens. Problem is in doing so that it creates a culture that sees such behavior as justifiable and creates tangible resources that might easily be used on citizens at the whim of current leadership.
If there’s anything that’s flawed reasoning, needs clarification, etc — just let me know and happy to attempt to resolve it.
Unpopular opinion: If you don't like democracy and use your democratic rights to actively work to dismantle it, you probably shouldn't actually be allowed to participate in democracy since you are operating in bad faith.
That's not unpopular, it's a typical authoritarian opinion. Every censor out there is defending us from threats to our democracy. They would love the idea of setting up the Agency for the Good Faith Belief in Democracy and Democratic Rights, who would certify individuals as being qualified to vote.
Reminds me of Popper’s idea that a democracy shouldn’t give it’s tools to those who seek to destroy it.
“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Karl Popper
While I don’t agree, I do believe it’s a common perspective and one that’s important to have dialogue on.
While for sure an imperfect response, I would say that no democracy will ever be absolutely perfect, since it would require a consensus on everything and everyone understanding the topic equally prior to voicing their opinion. Further, authoritarian beliefs are only true threat to a democracy if majority support authoritarian rule, at which point I would argue it’s not a democracy.
That said, with the advancements of AI, it increasingly dangerous, since if given the tools and opportunity, an authoritarian minority might over take an unprepared majority.
If you let them vote, they'll vote to destroy their society.
If you don't let them vote, they'll act to destroy their society.
It would be emotionally satisfying, but ultimately destructive. It would also be ripe for abuse; imagine how awful it would be if we had secret lists of people who weren't allowed to do other normal activities, like air travel or vehicle registration.
A few constitutions explicitly defend democracy, so you cannot modify the constitution to remove the democratic system. Germany is the most famous example (because, you know, Hitler).
But then, of course, you need some kind of enforcement. And once you set that up, it turns out that it is subject to the same problems as other law enforcement / intelligence agencies:
"In 2001, the federal government, the Bundestag, and the Bundesrat jointly attempted to have the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ban the NPD. The court, the highest court in Germany, has the exclusive power to ban parties if they are found to be "anti-constitutional" through the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. However, the petition was rejected in 2003 after it was discovered that a number of the NPD's inner circle, including as many as 30 of its top 200 leaders were undercover agents or informants of the German secret services, like the federal Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. They include a former deputy chairman of the party and author of an anti-Semitic tract that formed a central part of the government's case. Since the secret services were unwilling to fully disclose their agents' identities and activities, the court found it impossible to decide which moves by the party were based on genuine party decisions and which were controlled by the secret services in an attempt to further the ban. The court determined that so many of the party's actions were influenced by the government that the resulting "lack of clarity" made it impossible to defend a ban. "The presence of the state at the leadership level makes influence on its aims and activities unavoidable," it concluded."
That is a good opinion in principle, but rather complicated to implement in a way that would work as expected. Most implementations would at best add too much bias to the process which would make it counterproductive, at worst it would corrupted in no time and lead to an authoritarian government which would defetat its porpouse.
Every time this comes up people talk about protecting privacy and anonymity and what not and while luckily for us most of the time the laws die out they still do pass on occasion. The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy. As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up? I doubt very many. I ran into a similar scenario once defending privacy when a lady who said she was abused as a child came into the conversation and told her story to the crowd. As you can imagine the crowd was very supportive of her and my concerns were more or less dismissed afterwards. There is nothing technical I could say that could persuade them as much as the poor lady's life story could.
Say "Most sexual abuse is domestic. Shall we mandate cameras in every room of every house? Or remote engine-lock to stop terrorist car attacks? There are cameras everywhere, forensics is more advanced than ever, 'going dark' is the opposite of reality. But there is always some small remaining scrap of freedom left to sacrifice for supposed 'safety', until we are reduced to cattle. Doing so is spitting on the graves of everyone who ever died for freedom, of everyone who chose to fight instead of 'peacefully' submit to foreign conquest or domestic dictatorship.
But suppose you do prefer 'safety' to all else, to privacy and liberty. Suppose you want to sacrifice everything for it. Will you even get it? We can today build prisons and surveillance far more effective than at any point in history, and once we've turned society into a safe cage, how sure are you the wrong people won't get the keys? Historically, how many governments would you have trusted with such total surveillance of their citizens? Tsarist Russia? Soviet Russia? Present day Russia? Communist China? Present day China? Nazi Germany? The Stasi? The Khmer Rouge? The Ottoman Empire? Iran? The British Raj? But you're sure nothing like that will happen here? This time, benevolent government will last, and we can safely surrender all means of opposition?"
It's a great argument but way over the head of the average citizen. Most people are unable to think about things this way. The government and police are the good guys etc.
> The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy.
Speaking from a U.S. perspective here.
A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement without the 4th amendment is worse.
A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president without the 1st amendment is worse.
There are people who do terrible things in this world. Unfortunately people who do terrible things can run for government and be appointed to positions of power.
There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
that's only specifically the first 10 amendments, which are generally referred to as the bill of rights as they were added to the constitution when it was ratified and cover most basic freedoms so they're taught in school
other rights-granting amendments are the post civil war ones which are slightly less well known but also covered in school
Most Americans won't know those, because those are state-specific (usually for California; most states don't even have Propositions that citizens can vote on).
Every American knows what the 1st Amendment is, by contrast.
They are more than just a law, they are part of the constitution (much harder to change).
And the reason why the first 10 (the Bill of Rights) and some others are learned by all schoolchildren is because the rights delineated within directly address many dire problems Americans had suffered as British colonies (and why there was a war, so is said), and so the reasons why America was formed by its founders in the first place. Part of the mythology and moral license.
> There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
I agree with you, but this illustrates part of the problem of our messaging. These policies are still just tools which don't have an inherent moral value. The evil comes from their abuse on a mass scale, and the huge temptation to abuse them, with the emphasis on how easily the powerful can be corrupted.
This is prone to being called out for being a slippery slope fallacy, but we need to just back it up with historical precedent, like how similar policies were abused in the US as revealed by Snowden.
There are people who would like the government to outlaw racism/hate speech on social media. The first amendment prevents that. I think r3trohack3r's point is that eroding those 1st amendment rights to outlaw hate speech would be worse than the actual hate speech.
I believe the general concensus is that it doesn't because private media companies aren't public spaces, so the company rules. How far the company enjoys freespeech, whether it extenda to their users and who gets to define hate speech I don't know, but lible is criminalized already and further analogies aren't impossible.
I mean, I could call a hackernews a punk ass neoliberal cunt and wait what happens next.
This is true, but the first amendment should also prevent the government from pressuring said companies to censor speech as well. This would be the government using it's power and coercion to violate people's 1st amendment rights via a third party. Think "hiring someone to murder someone is still murder for the person hiring," or a police soliciting a trespass.
The recent "Twitter files" showed that the government is/was working directly with Twitter and probably all the media companies to censor speech. The government, on multiple occasions, provided specific tweets and people to censor and Twitter complied. I believe they had weekly meetings to do just that.
This stops being true when U.S. government officials (including publicly elected officials and folks in 3 letter agencies) get involved with those moderation policies.
I think it’s still an open question whether it’s acceptable for government officials to be involved in any way with the moderation policies of a company outside of the 1st amendment including:
* asking for changes to moderation policies
* asking for enforcement of existing policies
* passing lists of users to be watched for policy violations
* etc.
Which has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen until the courts figure out whether or not the U.S. government is allowed to launder away 1st amendment protections through collaboration with private companies.
> how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up?
Well, putting aside the "shut up" part, I'd be happy to state publicly that under no (reasonable, peacetime) circumstances should the government be allowed to read my texts, emails, and documents.
Obviously there's a bunch of qualifiers to assign to that (if I'm under suspicion of something, OK, sure, maybe the government can get a warrant) that I'm not qualified to speak intelligently about, but that's the gist. Saying that the government should not be able to read your email or list to your phone calls is not an unpopular opinion, at least in the States, and it's also not one that requires you to be of an overly technical persuasion to have.
People support victims of child abuse and they also distrust the government and don't want it to have awesome powers of espionage it can wield against the entire populace at scale all of the time. Those positions might conflict with each other if you frame the conversation that way, but if you do frame it that way, I don't think it's a given that the child abuse argument is always going to win the debate.
Don't worry about that audience. Us profesional-managerial upper-middle class types are surrounded by people whose beliefs are subordinate to their personal ambition; it's a qualification for entering the class, because it takes an enormous amount of hard work, social connections, and study to reach and maintain that position. So you end up surrounded by people who live a politics of personal interests i.e. real concern about issues that affect them and the people they love (deemed universal), and ephemeral concern that sometimes borders on actual ignorance of things that don't affect them and theirs. This ephemeral concern and ignorance is entirely based in fashion.
Upper-middle class PMCs generally aren't worried about being monitored or censored by authorities (except within the games of party power politics and wedge issues.) If anything, when they hear about it, they look to see if there are job openings. They are concerned about child abuse, because even wealthy children get abused. Universal.
They constitute (if I'm being generous) 20% of the population and are useless to try to convince. It's their duty to explain to you that the society that has rewarded them generously for their hard work actually has everyone's best interests at heart, no matter how ludicrous it seems.
Side argument - why do you need protection from drug dealers? Just don't buy drugs from them if you don't want any.
Main argument: you bring up very important aspect - emotional one. We are very emotional and in the heat of the moment you probably won't be able to make good technical and reasonable case to persuade people, but that doesn't mean they are right.
Also I am not against _solutions_ to the problem. I am against solutions that when implemented have really low cost of switching them into tools of abuse.
Example: There is law that allows banning of websites (just DNS resolution) that promote gambling, illegal porn etc. It was recently used to "take down" a website that leaked emails of politicians of current government (it could be bad if we speak of some national security / military stuff, in that case they share info about corruption and nepotism)
Conflating privacy stripping laws with paedophilia protection is something I'd happily deconstruct, whether in front of a camera or otherwise. It's not difficult to show with logic how one doesn't help the other, and I could even go as far as showing how the laws make things worse.
> Convincing people not to support privacy eroding laws isn't a logic fight as you are imagining it
Who said anything about convincing people? The logic will stand on it's own merit, regardless of who "wins" the argument. Anybody caring to examine the arguments — or continue arguing logically — can make up their own minds.
I'll happily argue logic, but other people's opinions aren't my problem.
> As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up? I doubt very many.
I think I'm misunderstanding you here, are you implying presently real politicians would have to do that to advocate for privacy laws?
It isn't logic, and I think that's the point--it's an appeal to emotion, and if you pit logic vs emotion, emotion will almost always win in the broader culture. (A few oddball cultures like ycombinator and lesswrong etc. aside, perhaps).
It's always a matter of availability, balance, justification, right. The justification is there, so your argument is a strawman.
It would be more relevant in a direct comparison to gun control, which. Blades are fairly easy to furnish on the spot, easier than guns, so this comparison fails, too.
Balance requires a need for knives, which is difficult to put aside and certainly not the point of this argument. The ball park figure alone is not making a rational argument.
The internet is not the breaking point either way, though it could be used to implement access control.
So, I am effectively unsure if your whatabout'ish strawman is in favour of intrusive regulation.
This is an awesome point, and one I think geeks need to hear often: We act based on our emotions even if they are well-hidden beneath logical explanations.
Perhaps the "answer" to the lady who was abused as a child is to tell another emotional story--for example, Ann Frank:
> Have you heard the story of Anne Frank? She was a Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. She and her sister lived in hiding for two years until they were eventually discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. They later died of typhus in a concentration camp.
> How did surveillance play a role? No one knows who betrayed her. She lived through constant fear of being caught. Knowing they were being watched added to the already difficult conditions of living in hiding--the stress of the situation affected their relationships and mental health.
> If you or those you care about ever find yourself on the "less desirable" list in society, it's vital that you have some control over things you say to others in confidence. The Nazi's oppression of the Jewish people limited their freedom and contributed to Anne's tragic end.
As a pro-EU citizen I feel more and more inclined to agree on some of the Brexit rhetoric.
Commissioners have shown multiple times that they are too permeable to lobbying, too willing to water down tough environmental regulation, and too keen on 'security' surveillance.
So far the EU parliament members have balanced the act with some sanity. But the power and lack of transparency of the EC both with regards to lobbying and conflict of interest is very concerning.
I am making the point that the parliament votes, and _rejects_ proposals that overreach.
My point is not Britain as an example, but that one of the Brexit rhetoric points was the rah rah 'unelected officials'.
Arguably we both know that EC comissioners are appointed by democratic governments but we see multiple times how permeable EC commisioners are:
1. Surveillance proposals such as posted in this thread
2. Net Neutrality exemptions - allowing Facebook/Youtube/et al. 'zero ratings' on metered connections
3. SUPD with guidelines that have so many Plastic exceptions that basically only q-tips and plastic forks got banned. Nestle, Coca-Cola, all the supermarket wrapping remain untouched.
4. 'Green Deal' was completely watered down on implementation. [0]
The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that.
And as pointed out before, the UK is ahead of the EU in terms of surveillance. You even have to opt in with your ISP to watch porn.
The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country.
The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anything else, it was marketed as "we don't want the EU telling us what to do", but that just played heavily into nationalism.
All that aside, if you think any major political system in the west, or indeed globally is safe from lobbying and major corruption you are wrong. Corporate and industrial influence is rife throughout, IMO. When was the last time you saw any significant legislation come through to give working-middle class any kind of help or upward mobility?
I am wandering from your initial point, but I am angry and frustrated with our rapid decline. We trashed our economies over COVID and we're now splooging billions of dollars into an un-winnable proxy war which escalates monthly.
All of this shit is done in the same vein as this surveillance proposal "think of the children", I mean how could you not think of the children?? How could you not think of your neighbour? How could you not think of your fellow Europeans? It's all built to socially shame and coerce us into terrible policy that ultimately puts us in the hole unable to get out.
Anyways, yes I have an axe to grind and probably have some stuff wrong here, but I am frustrated with my economic decline. It feels like the middle class is constantly being drained for the benefit of oligarch, war mongering liars.
Apologies for a reactionary derail, it's cathartic at least. Please feel free to tell me how I am wrong, I genuinely want to be corrected because I feel depressed with my perspective.
Absolutely, every government is absolutely a bunch of corrupted criminals.
Totally onboard. The thing is the more layers of corrupted politicians you put on top of people, the more theft and harassment you'll get from the aforementioned politicians and - surprise! - less accountability or ways to complain / protest.
Brexit actually damaged me personally, but I'm glad for the British people that they won't be subjected to the extra EU rules. The UK government is bad enough, they don't need EU bureaucrats on top.
But at least those are the fault of the UK government itself. The people have greater likelihood of being able to fix it than if they have to defer to the EU commission for compliance. Brexit is expensive in the short term, but, in the long term, the nation is much better off for having preserved some of their sovereignty.
With the US govt. literally creating a Ministry of Truth[1], and no one batting an eyelid, 1984 is actually a reality.
Our media is compromised. The recent Pfizer scandal has been buried, NYT went to great lengths to dismiss it. The article was laughable.
The phrase "conspiracy theory" is slapped on any descent. We have lost our way while we sleep through social media. We follow the script or face social isolation.
10 years ago our current society would look like China, now the general pop is adopting that as a good thing.
We are fucked and it's going to take violence and death to claw back any sense of moral decency. No one wants that, and when all our wealth has been extracted we won't be able to compete with the robots that will keep us compliant.
I know this sounds crazy, but the writing is on the wall. I can see no reason it won't happen. Crazy shit becomes reality time after time and it's accelerating.
"The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that."
It has had zero unelected PMs. Every single PM was elected by:
1. Members of their constituency. You have to be an MP to be a PM.
2. Members of their party (at least to some extent).
If you mean the UK doesn't use a presidential system then yes but so what, everyone knows that. It's normal, lots of countries use a parliamentary system.
"The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anything else, it was marketed as "we don't want the EU telling us what to do", but that just played heavily into nationalism."
Wanting decision makers to be accountable isn't nationalism, that's just normal support of democracy. Besides, this criticism is off base because the EU is a nationalist project. The EU has its own flag, its own currency, its own borders, even its own national anthem. It is in love with the idea of being a nation. Replacing the nations of Europe with a new nation called Europe is the goal of the project. It is and always has been a nationalist project, which uses "nationalism" as an insult to mean love of the existing nations rather than of itself.
The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me. I really just don't get it at all. Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap?
I'm all for European trade, but I felt I had to vote Brexit because obviously the goal of any political system should be to maximise the political power of individuals and local communities. The more you centralise and expand power over larger geographical areas the less tolerant of regional political difference your political system must become. This become obvious when we talk about a country like Turkey potentially joining the EU.
That said, I hate the UK government with a passion and they are arguably even worse when it comes to surveillance, but at least we can vote them out.
>Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap?
Basically, no. What you're asking for is what the EU has tried to do somewhat: become a confederation. It doesn't work. The USA tried it back in the 1700s and it was a disaster. The country couldn't defend itself, have any kind of central banking and currency, or any consistent policy. It was replaced in 12 years with the more centralized federal system that exists now.
The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity that could rival the US, and have the same benefits and power on the world stage. But there are costs to this: you need much greater centralization. Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.
Basically, if you want to be a world power, you can't just be a bunch of small, disparate countries in a loose trade confederation. You need more centralization of power, and the problems that come with that. If you don't want that, you need to just be happy with being a bunch of separate, sovereign nations with different currencies and trade barriers between them all. Pick one.
From my perspective, the EU's problems you see are because it won't just commit to a centralized system and eliminating national sovereignty, and it's trying to have it both ways.
The USA was hardly a disaster. Mutual defense is possible without unifying everything under a single government (see NATO), the US didn't even have central banking at all until the 20th century so not sure how you concluded the lack of that was a disaster within a few years of the USA being born, and "consistent policy" is something it still doesn't have in many key areas - without the USA being a disaster.
> The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity
It was created as a trading bloc, literally the European Economic Area. That project later got hijacked by federalists who wanted to do what you say, but they never had agreement on that from the actual citizens. That's one reason the UK left.
> Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.
Arguably the US's internal problems come from too much centralization, hence why Americans famously loathe Congress but like their own Congressman/woman.
The Federalist Papers explain both what was a disaster about the confederacy and why a confederacy had no possible outcome other than to be a disaster.
A quick skim suffices to get an overview of what the authors say are unavoidable failures in confederacies. Each paper focuses on a particular topic, giving examples from governments in antiquity and contemporary governments, with some exposition about how the way they were set up led them inevitably to failure in that area.
> The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me
Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!
The EU is literally a government by committee. A kind of technocracy with very little accountability for those making these decisions. The UK has a lot of problems right now, but at least BREXIT helped preserve some sovereignty from that behomoth. That is good for the long term.
I had several discussions like that and always said something along the lines of: "Well, I am not so sure about it being a bad decision in the long term. I think time will tell." and every time people have valid arguments of why Brexit is bad for the UK, but still I will say something like "Lets see how it all turns out.", because we do not know the future.
When the EU cooks up the next surveillance law attempt, I am always reminded of those conversations. But where else to go, if even EU gets too crazy? There are probably only worse places with regards to privacy.
It isn’t a democratic system. It’s clearly been infiltrated by both lobbyists as you say but also foreign powers. Further integration should be halted in my opinion until the undemocratic elements are dissolved and replaced with ethical moral means of representation if that doesn’t happen then we are at an impasse for which I see no future in this system. Personally I will not donate the labor my life to it. Everyone is free (for now) to do what they wish. Nothing is perfect but society should benefit those who benefit society not oligarchs and tyrants.
We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
This will only hurt people actually fighting for their rights, and this needs to stop.
> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.
In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done.
Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
TFA rightly calls on citizens to instead be that group, on the side of freedom.
> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
It's marketed to upper-middle class elites as reasonable, and of course it's upper-middle class elites that are paid to put together this marketing. But it's really orders from an owner class that has entirely different interests from the other 99.9% of the population.
If an individual member of of the upper-middle class has a problem with {the imposition of the week}, they are harshly corrected, shunned, then eventually ejected from the upper-middle class. Your credentials will be taken away, your friends will avoid you to keep from being suspected themselves (and will rationalize this behavior to overcome cognitive dissonance, becoming energetic state chauvinists), your credit will be destroyed.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
This is just a slander. There are people who own large parts of the economy, and people live for decades, and people pass their ownership to their children. They are also friends with their peers. The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.
There is no conspiracy, it has all already happened.
Maybe not on a global scope, but have you heard of the "stasi"?
Any political party can conspire to enforce something against the voter base that is not represented, pretty much any time.
The saying "knowledge is power" and 1984 and such havent been there for no reason.
People have written conspiracy theories about rfid chips, they have been ridiculous and what could these have given away other than location data and body temperature?
Meanwhile, everyone has a mobile phone and a pc and smart devices which are phoning home sending the data to be sold to the highest bidder.
There have been terrible people in power on this planet and their paths should be full of obstacles.
Ask the people who suffered under pinochet, stasi and countless african dictators.
Better to not hand anyone the full infrastructure for absolute power and control if it can be prevented.
Nuclear codes and production secrets are not visible on youtube, and I think medical data, bank accounts, browsing history and docs on pcs should not be subject to preemptive surveillance.
If there are issues with child pornography, we have police forces for that, by all means, go for them.
If there is a terrorist problem, we have armies to sort them out, by all means, go for it.
Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.
I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”.
Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.
Better said than me. There are different approaches to changing someone's mind if they're misunderstanding something, versus if they're straight-up lying to you.
The fact that there exist highly public straight-up lying politicians doesn't mean the mass of politicians are liars. Most are trying to do a decent thing, with the understanding they have.
Casting one's democratic agents as "other" corrodes democracy, decreases participation, and generally furthers the problem being bemoaned: lack of attention to citizen desires.
Yes, and it’s frustrating to see people whose policy positions I generally agree with (less surveillance, please) resort to this kind of rhetoric. People who disagree are not only wrong, and not only intentional wrongdoers, but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know?
These people have obviously never tried to get four people to agree on what movie to see.
Secret motives aren't really the right argument, I agree. Citing the seemingly-inevitable negative outcomes may be a better approach.
When someone argues for ubiquitous mass surveillance, ask them to explain exactly how the Stasi worked, how they came to power and what can be done to keep it from ever happening again. Point out that these questions have to be addressed before arming the state with surveillance tools that previous abusive regimes couldn't have dreamed of.
That's the biggest thing that frustrates me about NWO (as a concept) used as a rhetorical device in argument: it's not necessary.
You have world history littered with examples of mass surveillance platforms being used for oppression.
No explanation or justification of why that happens seems necessary! It's a stronger and supported argument to just say "Whatever the cause, when mass surveillance has been implemented historically, it is eventually used to errode civil liberties and increase population control."
If OP can’t acknowledge that he’s just ideologically partisan and won’t be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree. Deeply understanding the opposite position requires accepting that there are smart reasonable people that hold it (for good reasons!), not that they’re all some “shadowy cabal” lying and hiding bad intent.
There are definitely a lot of smart, reasonable people with sincerely held beliefs who nonetheless lie about their motivations and work with like minded people to draft and support legislation under false pretenses for the greater good. They say they want to stop child pornographers and I’m sure they do, but their actual motivations are to monitor political dissidents.
Sure, but they’re not the entire set - and it’s the people that hold the view earnestly that are more interesting to steelman.
The same could be said for people who want encryption (and often is by partisans on the other side, “you just want to hide bad behavior and only pretend it’s about general privacy”).
I think strong encryption and user control is important (I work on urbit full time at Tlon and encourage friends to use Signal), but I still recognize there are real tradeoffs that result from empowering individuals this way, I just think on net it’s the right decision even with the often terrible downsides.
It’s easy to pretend there are no downsides and people like to structure policy opinions as if this was the case, but it rarely is.
##
> “ Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.
I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?
On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there’s a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called “balance of evidence” should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, “strong evidence” is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument.
But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided?
Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”
Nonsense. Government organizations never do things in secret. The very idea is patently absurd. I mean, how would that even happen in practice, someone does something without blasting it on Twitter, as I said, absurd.
There are boatloads of laws in any democracy that would never survive a referendum. This law is one example.
Let's face facts here: 90% of the aim is to make policing cheaper and more pervasive. To make it possible for algorithms to police people, because then those algorithms can replace attention by police officers. Even most police officers themselves wouldn't agree to that.
I’m truly astonished that there are people who refuse to believe that the people in power are constantly conspiring. It’s like you are completely ignoring all evidence, or discounting it as one-offs.
Sure, maybe it’s not NWO or the illuminati, but you can’t possibly dismiss all the behavior we see and impacts we experience?
Sure, but it's not a singular shadowy cabal in a star chamber. There are different groups who all have an negative impact on our lives.
The banal and stupid: Elon Musk and his fellow trust fund buddies and VCs doing jello shots and going "Antifa sucks amirite?" and acting on their stupidity because they have money and power.
Banal and stupid category 2: CEO groupthink. Let's all have layoffs before there's an actual recession because activist stockholders demand it and we don't have the guts to propose something better.
Then there's the John Birch Societies of the world: the actual organized shadow political movements. The Koch brothers using massive corporate profits to fund the right wing think tanks over multiple decades. They don't take credit, but the ascent of the right wing crazies is entirely down to them and fellow travelers.
Banal and stupid category 3: the people attending the WEF/Davos. enough said.
etc. you can probably list your favorites here, and you might slice them differently than I have. What there isn't is a single central group making decisions for the rest of us, nor is there any organized left-wing cabal. If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America, I'd love to know about it, because I'd like to join that group and I've never seen one in 20 years of looking.
If you study system theory you'll understand that a bunch of seemingly self-motivated actors without a central leader can achieve a system-wide outcome.
A ant colony might be a simple example of this.
> If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America
I’m neither American, nor was talking about “left wing” American cabals that control the world.
I’m not sure why this has to be a singular group. It’s a tale as old as time, rich vs poor. One can clearly observe multiple not-necessarily-colluding but powerful groups globally and locally, who all aim to control and subjugate the rest of us.
This makes no sense to be a semantic debate where you grind an axe that “there is not just one illuminati” and act like that means something impressive.
It's like being biten by an unknown insect and refusing to acknowledge the fact for the lack of a correct binomial nomenclature for that insect. No name = no entity, that's their motto.
Another way of phrasing this is "always argue against the best possible interpretation of your opponents argument."
It's a HN rule for good reason. It makes your own arguments stronger.
Even if your opponent _is_ a shadowy new world order cabal member or supporter, arguing against the best possible interpretation which requires of their stance helps sway random citizen X who may not know of or believe in such a cabal.
That’s fair, but it’s still an unsavory argument style. “I know the secret motivations of those in power, which even they don’t know”. It’s a weird way to remove agency from the powerful in the name of, IDK what.
I think hide implies intent to deceive. It's often more like conscious and sub-conscious reasoning. We constantly tell a story to ourselves about our motives. We're impulsive and wrong a lot of the time. And nobody is the bad guy in their own story.
Maybe it's willful ignorance. Ignorance of the misuse and harm of mass surveillance.
Maybe. Are you as open to the idea that those who oppose surveillance (that’s me) also have secret motives and engage in willful ignorance, so you can’t trust my anti-surveillance arguments? Because, the theory goes, even I don’t know the dark motives that are making me say those things?
Do you see how impossible any dialog becomes in that model?
If you frame it as ignorance, the next step is to enlighten the other side with the factual arguments you want to make. "The threat landscape isn't as bad as you claim it is." "Mass surveillance has downsides that are worse than you would think." If you assert deceptive intent, it kind of slides into character attacks.
It's true that people sometimes don't argue in good faith, and it's fair to question hidden motives. But I think if you have better facts, you should keep arguing the facts.
> It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either.
NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer. This exact terminology is openly used by many politicians now, demanding for a NWO. Depending which bubble you live in, you have not seen any or only too little such speeches.
The term New World Order has been used for over a century by politicians. It’s hardly believable that Woodrow Wilson was using a secret code word to communicate a plan to do evil things in the 21st century when he was advocating for the League of Nations.
It never was. Conspiracy nutheads just took it for them, and gave it their own evil twist. They always take something and see the evil option in it, and sell it as some fact which never was there. A similar thing happened recently with the term "Great Reset".
But the simple truth is, we always strive for a better world, so aiming for a new world order is something totally normal happening. Nobody thinks the world today is flawless.
Example, even though I don't believe many of the conspiracy theories regarding them, here's the WEF calling for everyone to literally build a "New World Order."
Not necessarily an intentional conspiracy, but it can just be that of a herd mentality. As a species, we are conditioned to follow the herd, to go along to get alone. Those that do not follow tend to get trampled, their concerns not even listened to.
This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history. The PATRIOT act in America was quickly used to facilitate mass surveillance, and it reflects a greater pattern of government behavior. While there are "useful idiots" who embody the technically clueless bureaucrats you describe, there is absolutely collectives of nefarious actors aiming to control populations.
> This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history.
I take issue with your inclusion of the word "just" in this sentence. I don't disagree that it is an "ignorant" (in the technical sense, not pejorative) take with ~~no~~ little regard for real history, but that isn't all ("just") that it is. Almost certainly, this behavior is a consequence of heuristic (sub-perceptual) intuition, that is as it is as a consequence of the substantial and constant training/propaganda humans have been subjected to regarding "democracy" and "conspiratorial thinking" over the last decade or so, and especially heavily during the Trump and then COVID periods.
So when questions like this arise, it genuinely(!) seems to people like government officials are trustworthy, in fact. "Seems in fact" is an oxymoron of course, demonstrating how influential cultural norms can be, and in turn how bizarre "reality" is (and why, partially).
If hackers on HN used the same logic & epistemology they use in forum discussions when they are writing code at work, imagine how much of an even bigger disaster things would be out there!! :)
While I'm at it, I should probably also take a shot at this comment from above:
>> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
And who is it pushed by? Politicians. And who is not asked their opinion on the matter? Voters. And what does this demonstrate? That "democracy" in practice is not a match for how it is described, not even close. And yet, day after day millions of instances of these same sorts of illusory discussions take place, here and elsewhere. It may never end.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream....
As a jailhouse lawyer at a Federal Prison the amount of parallel construction in America is shocking. If you know the level the average FBI agent works at, look up other cases they are involved in and the level of work they did on them and 'quality' of their testimony and 'understanding of tech' they demonstrate, and then see these cases where they made amazing leaps of logic and connections and suddenly became technology geniuses it's easy to identify.
But of course you need paid access to Lexus Nexus to look any of that up because while 'case law' is the law of the land and cases records are 'public' you have no way to, you know, access it or the information from all those 'public' cases they are involved in without paying big $$$. So the average person has no way to get exposed to how things really operate and instead go off some Constitutional and televisions crime drama 'ideals' that we all want reality to look like. It was really interesting spending hours going through those cases in the law library when I had 'free' (just trade a day of your life) access to it.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them"
How did you got this out of GP?
I think you both saying/meaning the same.
> and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
Yep, and their actual desire is to control people's freedom (even admitting that some or all of them themselves belief that this is only for good cause, the reasons that also GP listed.. ).
Because they present a social good (less crime, adherence to law, order) that's one of the bases of civilization to those bodies, and those bodies give them more latitude than competing interests because of the primacy of that good.
Which is how I'd want the system to work, because any system fully optimized for freedom without national security exceptions wouldn't survive as a major world power.
They don't always get what they want. They do tend to get what they want. Occasionally things are scaled back later, as excesses are discovered.
Working as designed and intended.
Or to put it another way, what substitute system would you rather put in place, and how would it handle malicious internal groups and external world powers?
Same reason every parliament in the world, including congress, has their own separate police force protecting them rather than relying on the real one?
Those two police forces do have competing interests at times, hence the domestic police does not enter the parliamentary premises unless it is specifically called by a parliamentary decision.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy
I wouldn't be so naive. Groups like the Council For National Policy and Lance Wallnau pushing The Seven Mountain Mandate have been working for DECADES to push the agenda that you're seeing in schools and politics today.
Maybe not a "world order", but they'd certainly like to be.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe too much in the existence of such a group, but I can argue this is really bad logic.
A. Do you think such a group would be public with their ambitions? Such a group would doubtless deny their own existence. Arguing that they do, or do not exist, can only be based on observation and opinion, because it is not falsifiable.
B. Secret societies do exist, and there are some that still exist to this day that had major political power previously. The Freemasons, for example, were pretty influential in the French revolution on both sides, and counted leaders like Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Paul Revere, and so on among their members. We know that nine freemasons, at a minimum, signed the US Constitution. (Then, fun fact, they put "Novus ordo seclorum" on the great seal of the US.)
C. And even if there weren't powerful secret societies historically (which is doubtful), we currently live in a very globalized world with much easier ability to meet and privately message, so there's always a first. Saying that it never happened, therefore it can't happen, is always misguided.
D. The World Economic Forum literally called for everyone to build a New World Order in 2018. With that exact terminology. It's still on their website. I would argue that makes them partially culpable for the conspiracies. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together...
I dont think it will be a "secret cabal". It will simply be a bunch of powerful people arguing that their personal interests are the national/global interest. And believing this whether its true or not. And institutions falling in line with this.
You see this kind of attitude at a lower level on HN, for example, all the time. And this flaw in human nature only grows the more powerful you become.
When I was in IT, the rule was 'no essential businesses processes in Excel unless defined and approved' to ensure 1. The formulas were actually correct and 2. We could provide continuity should the person leave 3. These items were included in corporate backups not just user level ones, etc. Hardly anyone followed that process. People are going to use the easiest/best/quickest tools available to get their job done. Add in promotions based on making 'big' cases and you have quite the incentive to abuse these tools without some huge conspiracy. Simple human nature.
15% of my day job (for going on a decade now) is helping people untangle Excel hairballs. It's opened my eyes to how creatively badly people can solve problems, given no alternatives.
Whilst the connection between excel and an evil, secret world cabal is not unreasonable, I'm going to assume you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
There is no need to pretend. People with power want more power. As a thought exercise consider how you would arrange the world were you in a position to do so and try to determine placement of structures that could undermine your benevolent rule. Freedom of speech is such a structure. It is not really a paranoia if there are people out there working on just that. Now, just because there are also fellow travelers who truly believe 'for the children' cry, that is quite another and separate conversation.
Sometimes those goals align with other people's interests. Sometimes not. Unless there's a way to portion out power across a population on a case by case basis there's going to be conflict of interest.
Not sure Eternal September is an apt ad hom, when the parent you're responding to has been bitching about government overreach since the original meaning of the phrase.
> I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.
> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
If public servants were left to their own devices and could mandate any law they like, they would instantly prohibit any behavior that is not explicitly allowed. Because that's how they themselves must function so that public can hold them accountable.
The trouble is that they inherently push this mentality to the politicians who must rely on them to get popularity contest points and sometimes manage to win these nonsense laws that help nobody.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
Sure, but there actually is "them". They are clueless, individually powerless, out-of-sight, largely disconnected social class that actually makes this happen. And they can wait decades for the right situation. In Czechia, the public servant actually responsible for introducing DNS blocking was actually tasked with online hazard oversight. He pushed it through in order to block just 6 websites because it was somehow easier for him than negotiating banning payments to them, probably because of turf wars. The respective two ministries are rivals and won't ever cooperate. He lobbied for this for like 10+ years and then a bunch of idiots has gotten elected and ran with it.
So in a way, you are right. But you are also somewhat wrong. From my experience finding the actual people pushing for this (it's usually not the politicians) and outing them would work way better.
The reason is, and always has been, to enable lazy police work. They won't have to do their jobs if facebook will just tell them who the criminals are.
Another way of phrasing this might be "people will not have to pay as much tax if technological tools are used to assess crimes rather than traditional high-touch policing (ie high man-hours)".
Generally people want all the [other] criminals catching, but do not want all resources of the state used solely for policing. Optimisations then are preferred even if there is collateral harm.
In goriest form, I think of this as the drone argument.
Is it better to put boots on the ground, some of whom may die and who may cause collateral casualties in executing their mission, or a (hypothetically idealized) drone that kills only the target?
Still haven't decided if I have, or there even exists, a good answer to that.
The answer is yes. Murdering other humans who have no way to see it coming and no way to defend themselves is deeply evil. Especially when you factor in the murder of innocents (also referred to as collateral damage), and the facts that mistakes happen.
But people are people. They get nervous/scared in situations. Maybe the boots on the ground snap and murder a bunch of civilians they thought were threatening.
A perfect drone wouldn't do that.
But on the other hand, a perfect drone has no cost of use, other than monetary. Which seems far too low a bar to set for the seriousness of taking a life.
Send police to deal with the situation. If that is not possible for some reason, then that is the problem that needs fixing. You don't need murderbots.
It's never impossible, but in e.g. a hostage situation, this may result in a lot more innocent deaths.
I suppose a better question would be, why do you feel that in this particular situation - a murderer on rampage - you still feel that it is "deeply evil" to kill them in such a way that they "have no way to see it coming", to the point where you'd prefer other people to risk lives to do it in some other way?
State of the art encryption has become so widespread and well known that anyone with the tiniest interest in privacy can download one of the hundreds of open source E2EE messaging platforms to use for their criminal activities.
This line of thinking has always struck me as extremely odd - as soon as current, presumably E2EE, methods of communication are tapped into for intelligence and law enforcement purposes, criminals can and will switch to projects that don't comply with the backdoor laws. It's a violation of privacy that only law-abiding citizens will be subject to, for everyone else it's optional.
You might catch a wave of them off guard in the beginning, but in the long term all you end up doing is surveilling innocent people and maybe catching lowest hanging fruit - the types of people who are already dumb enough to share their criminal activities on Facebook.
That goes way beyond the scope of legislation in question. Suggesting that something akin to the great firewall of china could be deployed in the EU is unrealistic - having said that, it sure feels surreal when expression and support of these authoritarian ideas by EU representatives doesn't lead to immediate political suicide.
First, I was being sarcastic. But in terms of "political suicide", remember that politicians a) have info we don't, b) have fear mongering elements screaming in their ears, and c) have surveillance lobbyists taking them out to dinner.
It would likely break dozens of individual member state laws protecting freedom of speech, privacy, net neutrality, and the scope of policing powers which would have to be changed or grossly violated. This seems, to me, culturally and politically untenable on a national level because the population at large hasn't been condition to accept iron fist authoritarian rule and gross violations of their personal liberties.
Actual criminals don’t only communicate with just other criminals. They actually have to get out and do crime… So police can catch them the way they always did, when things were organised by talking together in private when nobody else could listen to them.
Ever think there aren't as many pedophiles as you think? Maybe many have their own children to abuse or organizations with trust, like the church, in which encryption doesn't mean anything.
"Them" is a metaphor for aligned incentives. If there are incentives for something to happen, it will happen. These incentives create a self-organizing conspiracy where the participants don't even need to communicate with each other, but they are co-operating anyway, just by acting in their own interest. It doesn't matter whether "them", the NWO or the lizard people are real or not; the end result is the same.
Parts of Germany instated laws that allowed to arrest people without trial for 30days.
They claimed to only use it to prevent severe crimes like terrorism.
Current statistics show, the most people that got arrested via that laws are climate activists.
So either the law makers and police are incompetent and therefore shouldn't make these laws way or they know what they are doing and therefore shouldn't make these laws.
BTW these laws made for "good reasons" don't get the jobs done.
On the other hand in UK we pass laws that make it illegal to steal dogs. Which was obviously illegal anyway.
I think American terror watchist has grown to nearly two million people. Are there really milkions of terrorists in US? How have they not yet blown up everything
I think the craziest thing you have in UK is Section 60. Specifically, the fact that a measly police inspector can unilaterally declare that "incidents involving serious violence MAY take place in a specified area", and then cops can stop and search anyone in that area without reasonable suspicion.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
Thankfully, we don't have to pretend! A cadre of wealthy Americans have a documented history of conspiring against the people of this country.
It doesn't need to be a "World New Order" for three letter agencies lobbying to increase surveillance, and hence their power over the people. You are right, bureaucrats are clueless, but they don't need to be sharp, the agencies that will benefit from violating people's privacy and right already are. The is no possible good coming from those laws, the argument of "saving the children" falls flat, because you could extended to anything, "ban knives because children could cut themselves", etc... Privacy is a right, and those agencies(also known as deep state) pushing lawmakers to subvert it, are doing in to control people indeed.
> A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
I agree with you. We are too dumb, to selfish, to humans to be able to run a a New World Order, with decades-long plans in silence. For sure one stupid member would do a tiktok video while using their funny clothes
How do you explain the countless tyrants in ancient and modern history? Hell, even in contemporary times. The truth is that there are absolutely very dangerous people around. And also a lot of good people too. We can't know for certain who is who, so the best approach is to be as polite as if they were good people but as cautious as if they were evil.
1) Put someone in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of the masses
2) Put the masses in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of individuals
Naturally the Romans, governmentally smart buggers that they were, adopted both.
In modern times, I think the best we can get is putting the masses in charge, with specific prohibitions on dumb things we know they'll try to do (e.g. trade freedom for security when they're scared).
no matter the reasons, even if current politicians and institutions are 100% trustworthy, no such law should be made.
you cannot guarantee that future institutions, and governments will be benevolent, and with such laws you give them easy access to tools of oppression.
There is a "them" though: Tech giants. And they are pushing/lobbying hard with their huge financial reserves, which they extracted from clueless uninformed masses. A company like Google would love for all privacy protections to disappear tomorrow, because of the riches they can amass then. It is simply capitalism and greed at work.
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out:
1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next?
2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what?
3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement?
Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud.
If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate and access information freely.
IMO, your hypothetical falls apart at the second point:
> Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures.
A government could legislate that it may not rain anywhere in the country on Tuesdays, but executing that isn't practicable. Likewise, backdooring one family of CPUs may be possible, but you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.
And I want to say that there exists provably un-backdoor-able "zero-knowledge" computing, something like Ethereum's smart contract ISA, but I may be misremembering.
In the end, our governments are democratic, we elect politicians to represent our will. They shouldn't be pushing for things like backdoors at all when no citizens are in favour. So yes,
> [...] we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak.
I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.
> you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.
Yes, it's supposed to be an unrealistically optimistic thought experiment, both in favour of the efficacy of technical solutions (ignoring the societal component) and government power (ignoring economic side-effects). It shows that technology alone cannot outmanoeuvre unchecked power, and so power must be kept in check.
In reality, there are multiple forces beyond legislation that naturally add friction, which you allude to... However governments can get very far before hitting those thresholds, especially if there is no pushback from the people. There is also the problem of compounding policies eroding democratic freedoms, that can allow for easier enactment of ever more extreme policies, even in spite of economic consequence. For instance this is the case with the GFW in China where workers no longer have access to the full wealth of information available on the wider internet to perform their jobs as effectively.
The ultimate point I'm trying to make here (and I think we are in agreement), is that as technologists we cannot simply bury our heads in our code, we must acknowledge that developing more resilient technology is only a single component, it is not sufficient. Supporting the fight against freedom eroding policies is necessary.
I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.
I know. It's a thought experiment to show that even in unrealistically optimistic conditions, technology is still not sufficient to solve the problem. I intentionally ignored the societal component of adoption for this reason, showing that it makes no difference.
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.
here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it
in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them
many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too
in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did
"if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought
the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers
This draws a false dichotomy between "people use X" and "nobody uses X." There's actually a sliding scale of how many people use X. When a thing is illegal, fewer people will use it and the people who do use it will be at risk. If we thing a thing is important and that people should be able to use it, it's bad if that thing is illegal. There's a reason why people fought so hard decriminalize gay sex—not because laws against gay sex made it impossible, but because those laws were nevertheless really bad for gay people.
uber cab is not especially enjoyable, and the legal alternatives (for riders) include taxis and remises (not to mention buses, trains, bicycles, private cars, private motorcycles, and electric scooters; buenos aires is pretty dense and public transport is pretty good)
uber was just better
the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them, geez
the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex, which many people actually preferred; possibly you haven't heard, but it's a more popular alternative even today
you're right about heroin and meth though, so, one out of four i guess
Only Uber had an alternative, the rest you either didn't address or are incorrect
> the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex
Unless you're subscribing to a unscientific "people choose to be gay" philosophy, having sex with a gender you're not attracted to is not at all an alternative.
> the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them
You mentioned surviving today, currently a lot of those games cannot be bought legally, which is what I meant with no alternative. Back then also a lot of people didn't pirate, and a lot of people who did did so because they had little money. I would count that situation as having no available alternative.
We were discussing a hypothetical chat application which currently are offered for free, so money is not an issue there.
arguably caffeine and alcohol are even less adequate as a replacement for heroin than a bicycle is as a replacement for uber cab
i mean if the objective is just 'euphoria' (as opposed to avoiding opiate withdrawal or having a 60-hour-long orgy) there are a lot of ways you can get it: hyperventilation, falling in love, roller coasters, exercise, praying, etc., and i thought about saying this, but i think that this really is a pretty weak counterargument to dtech's claim that heroin and meth have no legal alternatives; they're pretty much right about that
plausibly, and plausibly making private communication illegal would result in less private communication successfully taking place, but it certainly wouldn't result in private communication dwindling to an insignificant activity, which is the most charitable interpretation i could come up with for the obviously absurd claim i was rebutting, 'if it's illegal people just won't use it'
Anyway, in retrospective, Napster times were fun, university networks were clogged by students downloading music all day long and, at least in my country, many people bought a dial up internet connection just to use it.
But it had serious unexpected consequences, it gave birth to new generations of listeners that do not buy music, because they never had to, and the musicians are now paid virtually nothing for the music they create, while majors still make a lot of money, which isn't exactly what we hoped for when we hated on Metallica for suing Napster.
People were not using it because it was illegal, people were using it because it was cool. It was mostly young people.
Chats are a different beast, if they were ever made illegal, a lot of people would stop using them, because they would disappear from app stores and a prominent smartphone manufacturer we all know would probably delete the app remotely from the users' devices and report to the authorities whoever would dear to sideload it.
I feel sometimes a little bit conflicted about those years when I see my musician friends touring over and over because selling records and make a living of it it's not a thing anymore, and now I buy a lot more music than I did in the past (which was already a decent amount), directly from artists when I can.
People were also using it to discover new music. Most radio stations in the US are owned by a couple of large corporations who play the same bland stuff nationwide. Most of my CD collection comes from artists I discovered back then.
Once a decentralized system becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, banning it becomes tantamount to imposing economic sanctions on yourself. That's basically what happened with the internet. That might have just been a fluke, but it would be awesome if we could somehow manage to create more systems like that.
The problem is that when political elites are faced between the choice of ruling an impoverished population and losing power, they will always choose the former.
I've always wondered behind the rationale on privacy being a human right. What if it wasn't? What if instead we were enforcing transparency? Force everything to be public, starting from the government down to the local coffee shop. All transactions, all communications, everything. Make privacy a crime for everybody, including the government and the military. Just as a thought exercise, it would be a remarkably different world. I think the problem privacy is solving enables a different set of problems to emerge that would have otherwise been impossible. And one could argue that these new problems are those that enable the necessity for privacy to be established as a human right in the first place.
The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively).
Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.
Privacy though is perpetuating that priviledged class because they can do their shady business in secret. If everything was transparent, that would be harder to achieve.
Also the "every human society that's ever existed" isn't true, because for sure when humans were nomads, you basically knew what's happening with everybody in your tribe, transparency was at 100%, privacy at 0. It's also the case today in many places such as small villages where everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it seems to be ok.
It'd be great to expose shady business, but somebody has to enforce the forced transparency and that's a LOT of power. Whoever has that power can pretty easily keep privacy for themselves and their friends, use it to blackmail others, and enforce it more harshly on their enemies.
My point is that no matter what society you look at, the privileged get the nice things (like privacy) automatically whereas the underprivileged have to get it encoded into law, and even then it's not guaranteed. It's a rigged game, and the right to privacy levels the playing field.
When humans were nomads, we didn't have human rights so the point is kind of moot, but we still had secrets (even if gossip made it harder to keep them secret) and we still had a strong social hierarchy with privileged elders.
Of course, it needs to be constitutional for it to work, a complete ban of privacy. There can't be any entity that is priviledged over that because that would be terrible. Keep in mind that "human rights" is a thing we invented (or those people in power invented) and also a thing we can change, my point is that the human right of privacy really only actually benefits those in power more than the common person (who is going to be subjected to the violation of their privacy anyway) and by making privacy illegal constitutionally is really going to level the playing field.
people need privacy not because their acts are unworthy
people need privacy because others' intentions and judgment are unworthy
if you've ever known anyone who was gay, who got divorced, who secretly had a deprecated ethnic background, who left their faith, who didn't want their ex-boyfriend to know where they lived, who revealed government corruption, who struggled for political change, or who could be raped or robbed by a stranger, you've known someone who needed privacy
even though they had nothing to be ashamed of
you might argue that if nobody had privacy, nobody would be able to get away with rape, or with lynching people they discovered had a drop of black blood, or with lynching apostates, or with gay-bashing, so these things wouldn't happen in a world without privacy
that would be a stupid argument because people did those things openly all the time, and they usually got away with it, and some of them still do; humans have a social
pecking order, and it is defined by aggression with impunity
also people murder their ex-partners all the time even when they won't get away with it
Dealing with aggression using privacy doesn't seem to be solving the problem though, nor it is a solution? You shouldn't live your life hiding. We need privacy because of X, underlies the assumption that X is something different and unwanted, perpetuating that idea it's trying to protect. If everything was public then it would more easily become part of reality, part of normal. Hiding in privacy just keeps the problem going.
We need privacy because of X, underlies the assumption that X is something different and unwanted, perpetuating that idea it's trying to protect
this is poorly expressed, but i think you're trying to say that privacy can only be justified to hide 'unwanted' things, and so, for example, arguing that people need privacy to hide being gay implicitly accepts that it is bad to be gay; is that what you meant?
this is the premise i explicitly rejected in my comment; to use that example, this is an instance of what i said
gay people need privacy not because being gay is bad
gay people need privacy because others' intentions and judgment toward gay people are bad
you seem to be arguing that it would be good to improve others' intentions and judgment toward gay people, and this is correct, but there are limits to how much mere exposure can effect such a change
i am not willing to sacrifice gay people's lives for that
it should be extremely obvious that your reasoning is invalid in some of my examples
your teenaged neighbor doesn't want everyone to see her in the shower and to know when she's alone and unprotected because she's vulnerable to being raped
there is no assumption that the shape of her breasts or her walking home alone last thursday are 'something different and unwanted' or in any way bad; quite the contrary, her ability to walk home alone is precisely the good that it is important to protect in this situation
the problem is, as ought to be obvious, certain other people's intentions toward her; she needs privacy to protect herself
But if you take today's societies as an example, those that do encourage being openly gay are those that have much less incidents of judgement towards gay. Societies where it's culturally fine to be naked in various situations, you forget about it, it doesn't become a thing to notice anymore. If you're at a nude beach, or at a sauna, people don't suddenly rape each other because they see them naked. It becomes normal very quickly.
I understand what you're saying but my point is if we didn't try to protect X, it would eventually be normalized, become part of daily life and not noticeable as a thing that needs to be protected AND that it seems that when putting protections for X, that protection implicitly includes the assumption that X is bad. A naked body isn't inherently an invitation for rape, unless you implant that idea into someone's mind through the ban of public nakedness, and being gay isn't a thing to judge, unless you make it a taboo and discourage its public expression.
I'm not convinced, the real life evidence in actual tolerant societies seem to suggest that the more open we are, the less secrets we keep and the more transparent we are, life improves.
Sure, let's make everyone to walk around naked. Let's also make sure, that everyone knows what is going on in your life, where you and your loved ones live, what they buy, how much money they make, what they say, ....... Your argument is ridiculous.
Because we have structured society and our culture in such a way that some people can only feel safe when inside a small thick wall cell with the door locked behind them. That's terrible though, my proposition is to invert that, what would allow people to sing in the streets without any fear of judgement, and use that as a basis. Privacy as an idea suggests "let's put more doors with locks" when in fact that doesn't help at all. It doesn't address the problem that necessitates those doors with locks to exist.
I couldn't agree less. It's not a function of social structure or culture, it's an innate human trait. Your proposed society is to me simply a dystopia where no one is free to be a complete human being.
Separately, privacy and secrecy are related but distinct things. Telling me that you sing in the shower is a different thing than inviting me in to see and hear it.
There are a lot of people objecting to the "real motivation" argument (it's just bureaucratic incompetence, they don't know what they're doing, etc. etc.)
Usually those are good arguments. Not this time.
This proposal is Pure Evil. Hardly anyone is willing to come out and say they admire the Chinese social credit system. But when their every action leans towards replicating it, it's more than fair to drag them out into the sunlight.
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.
Trying to fight legal frameworks with technology, failed in the past with some notable but hardly repeatable exceptions. In the 90s a few geeks tech awareness could match the resources of a small state, non tech-savvy state. Nowadays it is impossible because the discrepancy in resources is huge.
There are countries that force you to download their own "secure" SSL certificate, so they can sniff all traffic. China is the worst and most prominent example.
This battle need to be fought on the street, with votes, by raising awareness, etc. If we want to be "free" we need to take-over the political battle, not the tech battle because if we win on that front, most likely won't matter. I don't want to risk jail for using an open source encryption tool.
>No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.
I'm reminded of the EMH joke about the economist walking by a 100 dollar bill on the street, assuming that it must be fake because if it were real, someone already would have picked it up.
If you pay enough attention, you will notice that the same argument is used to push many political agendas (for better or worse):
- "You can't ban encrypted messaging. Terrorists will always find a way to communicate."
- "You can't outlaw abortions, just safe ones. Women will always find a way."
- "You can't uniformly enforce gun control. Dedicated criminals will keep buying weapons on the black market."
- "You can't ban cryptocurrencies. Enthusiasts will still trade on P2P exchanges."
All of these are half truth, and half lie.
Every policy introduces a certain amount of user friction, which is proven to discourage action. Some people will refrain from infringing the policy (e.g. using guns, performing abortions, using encrypted messaging apps), some others will comply. Percentages obviously vary depending on the specific policy, but it's never 0% nor 100% like "both" sides want you to believe.
The common theme of most of the above points is that the freedom of the innocent will be reduced or their suffering increased if the change is enacted, while less innocent people can continue to ignore the rules. It's oppression of the weakest.
In general, society should be very careful with the things it bans. Prohibition is a hammer best left for extreme situational outliers, not one that should be used for each and every thing someone happens to dislike.
I'm sure all of these examples (encryption, guns, abortion, crypto currencies) are considered by some people to be that extreme situational outlier, and needs to be banned yesterday.
Mine is proof-of-waste crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, or Ethereum before the PoS merge. Too much CO2 for too little gain.
(There's also the Ponzi aspect, but I don't think we need new laws to ban Ponzi schemes: if a crypto currency turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, just sue them for making a Ponzi scheme.)
Unfortunately, societal amnesia means we will never learn this lesson. We will continue to ban things too much, and be too oppressive, until it becomes too overwhelming and a revolution happens. Rinse and repeat.
It should be noted tho that the easiness of "finding a way", and the difficulty of enforcing the law, varies widely between these.
For example - and I say this as someone pro-gun - gun control would likely be the easiest to enforce since it necessarily involves physical things, and not easily obtainable ones at that, at least if you want efficient guns. E.g. black powder is not hard to make, but good luck trying to make it work in anything semi-auto without constant jamming. Sure, there's an active "gun hacker" scene where people come up with designs that can be made at home with readily available tools etc, and it's great as a counterbalance to heavy-handed attempts to regulate... but there are no from-scratch designs that are even close to just about any semi-auto rifle on the market in terms of firepower or reliability (the non-from-scratch designs involve making the regulated parts of the firearm at home, and buying everything that can go over the counter; in US, the latter is everything except for one part).
OTOH if you ban encrypted messaging, how would you enforce that? It's hard to detect on the wire if the protocol is specifically designed to withstand such scrutiny, so you'd have to go after distribution of software. You could force Apple and Google to scrub their app stores, but then people can still install directly on everything other than iOS, and they'd just download it from foreign websites. So now you need some kind of a national firewall to detect and block that etc. It's not that any of that is impossible, but it's certainly much harder, and it would affect a lot more people overall, resulting in more pushback.
A quicker way is to note that a given policy would be difficult to effectively enforce. People like to say unenforceable, which is rarely true given enough resources. But if there are two solutions to an issue, and one isn't as easy to enforce, that is a valid point. Using gun control as an example, restricting sale of ammunition instead of firearms might be difficult to enforce, because ammunition is easier to manufacture at home. Restricting sale of marijuana isn't effective because anyone can grow it in a closet, but testing at employment centers adds a lot more friction as you say, and you don't neednto monitor people's power usage or send around sniffer trucks.
For years the US government has attempted to limit the use (and 'export') of strong encryption protocols like PGP using the argument that they should be treated as munitions. The case against Zimmermann in the early 1990s regarding his posting of PGP to a Usenet site, and the eventual decision by the US government not to proceed with the case, is illustrative. Here's an excerpt from the statement by lawyer on the case. It's from over two decades ago, but still worth reading (the laws have been relaxed somewhat since then, but it's not really clear how far):
> "Now, some words about the case and the future. Nobody should conclude
that it is now legal to export cryptographic software. It isn't. The
law may change, but for now, you'll probably be prosecuted if you break
it. People wonder why the government declined prosecution, especially
since the government isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be
that Mr. Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a
deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't sure whether
someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that person to find out.)
Another might be that the government did not want to risk a judicial
finding that posting cryptographic software on a site in the U.S., even
if it's an Internet site, is not an "export". There was also the risk
that the export-control law would be declared unconstitutional. Perhaps
the government did not want to get into a public argument about some
important policy issues: should it be illegal to export cryptographic
software? Should U.S. citizens have access to technology that permits
private communication? And ultimately, do U.S. citizens have the right
to communicate in absolute privacy?"
> "There are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our
liberties. There always will be. But at least in the United States, our
rights are not so much stolen from us as they are simply lost by us. The
price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation. Those
folks I mention in this message have participated and no doubt will
continue. My thanks, and the thanks of Philip Zimmermann, to each of
you."
One obvious concern about this move in the EU is that they'll try to criminalize the use of cryptography again.
Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.
Isn't the whole point that they're trying to make mathematics illegal? To my knowledge, encryption is currently legal.
To those who say "it's impossible to make encryption illegal": there have been sillier laws. George Orwell once imagined a society where 2+2=5 was a law. While they usually do, laws don't have to make sense.
We don't need to look to fiction in the US to see examples of encryption controlled by the State with laws, it was literally US government policy in the 90s/early 2000s. Examples include banning export of encryption keys longer than 40 bits etc to make it easier for US secret services to crack the foreign purchaser's systems, the debate during the Clinton administration on what should be permitted encryption-wise was intense at times.
My favourite example in the world of "silly" laws - Saudi Arabia invests massive money in scientific research, and still executes people for Sorcery and Witchcraft
You should look into the so called ghost guns that show up. It hasn't been easier to get one, whether from assembling a kit to 3d printing to finding plans to build one from scrap.
Outside of the USA you can't simply order gun parts or ammunition without a licence. You'd have to manufacture everything yourself. That's a lot harder than simply 3D printing a lower receiver.
Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose. You'd be prosecuted even if you used it to defend yourself.
You pretty much need to be a gunsmith to create a reliable weapon that won't jam and won't explode in your face. In most countries you can't order weapon parts online - all load-bearing parts are regulated. You can't manufacture those without gunsmithing skills and equipment.
This is why criminals prefer to smuggle industrially manufactured illegal guns from somewhere else instead of making them at home.
Gun laws don't prevent someone from making shitty homemade guns. They prevent them from getting properly made ones. Accessing gun smuggling networks isn't that easy without connections to the criminal underworld.
I looked up Luty's homemade firearms. He claimed that they can be manufactured by anyone. But that's obviously not true. He definitely had good metalworking skills. I certainly would not be able to manufacture anything like that at home.
It's still hard. I couldn't go out and make a gun right now. Meanwhile, many children have invented their own codes and ciphers by age 10, armed only with paper and pencil and the desire to keep a secret. A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that "hey, maybe asymmetric encryption is possible" and the knowledge that (F_p \ {0}, ×) is a group.
> A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that
And I bet the NSA would break your homegrown RSA built with your basic understanding of group theory in a few minutes. RSA is extremely subtle to implement correctly and if you get it wrong you can easily leak everything.
Unlikely. The hard part of implementing RSA is making it secure against timing attacks, but I doubt my desk calculator and I will be particularly vulnerable to that. It's not like I'm going to suffer from the ECB penguin issue: MY MSGZ R SMOL and my key size is large enough to avoid that.
RSA really is very simple group theory. It was independently invented at least three times, as I recall.
Systems outside the control of any government entity devolve into a familiar cavalcade of horrors. You need a better answer for the fact that those horrors exist, and that many people who draw government paychecks devote their careers to fighting them in good faith, with good results.
You'd think that after twenty years the debate would have moved past advocating for complete lawlessness, but we get stuck in the same puerile tropes. The fact that bad state actors exist does not change the fact that horribly abusive material, with real victims, will be shared on any platform those abusers consider safe, and that the existence of such platforms will encourage further abuse.
Anyone who has worked on child sexual exploitation material on any platform knows this, and any privacy advocate has to have a better answer for it than 'nuh-uh'.
> Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography"
The four horsemen of the Infocalypse
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime.
>Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
That's the hard part, IMO.
Imagine that we really got that "decentralized system that cannot be controlled" going and everyone is using it. Everyone, including those who is into illegal things. And they don't get caught.
Now the government starts to push their "this decentralized shit is doing more harm than good" agenda. Whatever their motivation is, it would be easy to sway public opinion against surveillance-free communications, because the harm is real, not hypothetical, like it is now.
They are not widespread now, though. The government is keeping their communications under control, more or less. Only most educated criminals have good enough opsec. The gov can subpoena whatever service they use today and disrupt their communications without disrupting everyone else's. They don't have so called collateral privacy. The 'encrypted' part doesn't really add much harm.
With truly decentralized system things would be different.
WhatsApp chats are secret, but not necessarily private.
Authorities can ask Meta to release the meta data and they can inspect phones to retrieve the chat logs.
Private communications have never been secret, it was always possible for the people with the necessary authorizations to access them.
Privacy is consensual, secrecy is not.
But there is no right to secrecy.
As much as I love mullvad and their excellent products, they never link the proposal they talk about in that page, which hinders the people' ability to form their own opinion.
All the material we can find revolves around the same actors, quoting each other, some like the Pirate party, say it was leaked
Leaked Commission paper EU mass surveillance plans
But it's not true, it's officially published on the EU website, it wasn't being kept hidden, it had to be translated to all the EU official languages before being published.
I understand being concerned, what I do not understand is being catastrophic.
Even if everything they wrote was true, a proposal is not a law, so whatever happened in the Swedish parliament, was not influenced by the EU proposal.
p.s. the system is similar to CSAM, which I don't like either, but sooner or later such systems will be everywhere, like it or not.
The discussion must be held in a way or another.
Apple too considered scanning the users' devices to match CSAM pictures, they dropped it, for now, but probably only because they are developing their own system, independent from the government, so they don't have to give them any kind of access.
Here the discussion is being held in public, by people elected by European citizens directly with their vote, these people are paid exactly to discuss these matters, theya re doing their job.
You wrote "the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it." but the they you mention are elected officials, not SP.E.C.T.R.E. evil agents
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen.
Though, part of this deal is that we take control on when they go too far, and do stupid things. Which seems to be the case in this case, because of which we push against it, because that's how we hope to get a healthy world.
> Privacy is a human right.
So is security. It's all about balancing interests and abilities.
> whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.
> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
No, they are not. The majority of criminals are not some organized super villains. They are usually also depending on the same tools and networks as everyone else. And they are also just flawed humans, making errors.
Not sure if it was here before, but they also posted an article yesterday on how this may (or may not, its up to interpretation) affect open source operating systems
There should be a law against spamming the lawmaking process with proposals that have previously failed or are near identical to it, for a set time period. Means, you are no longer allowed to lobby for a law proposal once it has been rejected for a time period of one voting cycle.
1. The book of law should have a fixed number of words, written in stone in the constitution. Side effects:
a) you want to pass a new law? Pick one in the book to get rid of.
b) magically, the enforcement budget and the size of the fat leech that feeds off of it (the government) remains constant. See "The Advantage of a Dragon" by Stanislaw Lem [1]
2. A law should always (with the possible exception of those in the constitution) have an expiration date, voted with the law, with a maximum of 10 years, at which time the law should get re-voted on if it turns out it was actually useful to society.
This proposal hasn't been made before (at least in the EU at the EU level)
If you're thinking that you saw something like this last year and now again it's the same law. The EU legislative process is extremely slow (not that it's a bad thing in this case, I'd rather this not get rushed through, or even better not get through at all)
And even now it is not likely to pass before December 2023 or might even get delayed to January 2024
Article 6 of the law requires all "software application stores" to:
- Assess whether each service provided by each software application enables human-to-human communication
- Verify whether each user is over or under the age of 17
- Prevent users under 17 from installing such communication software
- “impact assessments” before launching new features that kids are likely to access
- businesses, not parents, to figure out what’s in the best interest of children
- [treating] children as if they all .. face the same risks .. lumps together 17 year-olds and 2 year-olds
- threatens to make face scans a routine and everyday occurrence
- before you can go to a new site, you will have to do either face scanning or upload age authenticating documents
- would require every adult in Utah to submit age verification in order to use social media
- minor accounts would need to be associated with a verified adult account
- social media companies.. collect personal information from their parents
For all of the software engineers here, you would have a much larger impact by tackling this problem at a technical level, or contributing financially to groups that lobby against this sort of thing. Going out and protesting, or even helping to circulate a petition is going to be less impactful, and an inefficient use of your time and skillset.
Your vote is worth 1, maybe your influence is worth a dozen or so. You could make millions of votes against you totally moot with the right piece of software.
Look for existing projects that deal with secure networking, E2EE, self-hosted apps and ask how you can help.
That piece of software still needs to be legal. If it's illegal much fewer people will actually use it, and those who use it anyway can arbitrarily be punished for it.
Detecting whether someone is using a particular piece of software is just part of the threat model, another technical problem, with a technical solution.
Loss of balance. Child protection appears to have infinite weight. Conversely, personal privacy, access to information (esp. medical), and right to education appear to have zero weight.
Yep. You can justify any injustice with "won't somebody think of the children" or similar fears which inspire pearl-clutching. Don't fall for these authoritarian tactics.
Here in the comments I see dozens of instances of the same argument: is legislation like this the result of malicious power-grabbing conspiracy or the blind social fear of out-groups?
Either way, the conclusion is the same: government-run mass surveillance gets proposed and taken (politically) seriously. It's impossible to use that conclusion alone as evidence for either side of this argument, yet that is precisely what most of the comments here are trying to do!
It's such a pointless argument to be had. There is no utility in either answer.
It's impossible to fight a conspiracy without constructive evidence, and if a conspiracy is using propaganda to increase fear (as opposed to that fear being organic), then fighting that propaganda directly (as opposed to fighting the fear itself) requires knowledge of the propaganda's source, which itself is evidence of conspiracy!
Right now, both perspectives seem likely to be valid, but choosing one over the other is pointless. We are stuck fighting a single conclusion: fear itself; so we may as well focus our energy on that.
The EU just seems like a more and more dystopian place where they placate the docile population with a few social benefits and threats to corporate interests at the cost of any sense of individual liberty and a rapidly declining set of rights and privacy from the state.
I'm certain my neighbour is secretly conspiring against me. I've seen the signs, I'm not an idiot. He closes the curtains when I look into his place, I've seen him talking with the other neighbours, and you won't believe it! He named his dog Bozo, which I'm sure is just to allow him to call me names scott-free! I confronted him but he tells me to chill out. The balls on this guys...
Now if we get that mass surveillance going on, we can safely assume that they'll mission private companies to do it. We all knoe what's happening in this case, they hire the best of the best (and by that I mean the best at cutting on cost and maximizing shareholders revenues). These have the best security teams! (and by that I mean that they cost very little). I can only hope for an Equifax or a Lastpass like breach, but worst case scenario I'm sure they will gladly sell my neighbour's data, and I'll finally be able to prove that SoaB is after me.
I know all the privacy-conscious sissies out there will cry out, but I don't have anything to hide. I take good care of deleting my browser history and using private mode when I browse illegal websites
Jokes aside. You and me knows that this will happen. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but it will happen. And when the day comes nobody will be accountable for the great mistake some politicians are gonna commit.
Every SMS and phone call on the PSTN of most European countries is already part of a long-term archiving process dating back more than two decades. This legislation is in part meant to bring purely Internet-based communications into the dragnet, and part just retroactive legal gyrations to publically formalize the already established mass-surveillance of the PSTN.
The making of EU legislation can take years and is surprisingly transparent; in particular, the public is asked for input at several stages. So I am surprised that the article does not provide any link to an actual proposal - without it, how am I going to believe its claims?
I should note (as someone who has been fighting against this) is that commissioner Johansson has avoided meeting with civil servant groups in the lead up to this proposal (we have tried _multiple_ times to get a meeting).
Well, thank you for your efforts but I do not think I see anything alarming at this stage. (Perhaps this means that your efforts paid off...)
The proposal itself does not explicitly forbid end-to-end encryption; it might one day try to, but the regulatory scrutiny board insists that the legislation should "respect the prohibition of general monitoring obligations."
In fact, having seen all this I think I can kind of see why journalists are not actively "pursuing" this as the article keeps asking.
Funnily enough it is European companies and not American ones that are leading the charge on privacy. ProtonMail / Tutanota etc for example on the email front. I've heard of a company called Snacka! as well that seems to be using some gaming tech in streaming for end-to-end encrypted communication that doesn't suffer performance as much as services like jitsi. If more companies follow privacy principles like this in the way they build their products that's only part of the battle, though - it's also important to prevent such things from a legislative perspective.
Didn't Lavabit shutdown because of exactly that [1]?
So pretty sure the US secret courts can very much force companies to do just that and worse (even require them to be silent about it, which clearly is not the case in Germany).
How is they can make a really problematic privacy law that degrades the web in the name of privacy (would love to sue the EU on the basis that those cookie banners cause problems for people w/ disabilities) and an equally problematic law that helps embezzlers re-offend in the name of privacy but can then invade everyone’s privacy with chat control?
Is there some court that can rein it in? Can the EU be made to explode like a computer in an old movie when it is faced with a contradiction? Can the rest of the world make the EU relocate to the moon or mars so we can have some peace?
And perfectly translates to: Better dangerous liberty than quiet servitude.
Not sure why you needed to make such an awkward rough translation when the concepts are clear, the idiom known and the sentence so short in the target language, which is the language of the author as well, thus sharing bias in its latin...
But I think this sentence is itself dangerous in its shortness, it almost makes you believe it's a discrete dichotomy rather than, as usual, a loooong gradient between two extreme, with orthogonal concerns adding to it to make it a zigzag. Better very rich in a quiet dictatorship than middle class in a chaotic old democracy, for instance. Or better poor in a clientelist theocracy than poor in an industrial dictatorship.
It doesn't really make sense in the end, since freedom and servitude are not related to danger or safety. You can have all together, at different time or degree, for different people and geographies, regarding different slice of concern (freedom is so so vague, for instance).
"Better have what you can tolerate for what you can afford, than something unaffordable or untolerable", is probably more interesting to understand the compromises real people make everyday, but I guess, so obvious we prefer to dream of a dichotomy :D
Stupid EU bureaucrats, don't they know you're supposed to put in the work and inject zero days in every consumer product so that you can create your very own spy network?
> every single line that you write in all kinds of messaging apps (including encrypted services), your e-mails — yes, all of this — can be filtered out ...
Probably just an extension to existing ETSI legal interception interfaces[1] that I believe are required to be implemented by all service providers of a certain size in the EU. Your personal email server and private IRC network are probably out of scope.
[1] e.g. for email: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102200_102299/10223202/... - the specs are really boring to read and there are lots and lots of them, if you want to deep dive. From what I can tell it's basically just the service provider implementing an API client that feeds everything they're required to a centralized endpoint.
Network equipment of our ISPs already have this type of surveillance software. And there are number of examples where we have seen that it is being used by the government intel with success, and regardless of the communication chain being encrypted or not.
Perhaps write letters to members of European Parliament explaining our concerns, then ask all our friends to do the same?
To make it a low-cost effort, we could (a) prepare a list of relevant politicians (b) create a template of the letter. Then our non-technical friends need only sign and mail this. And if we put this all up as a one-pager on GitHub pages, it's suitable for sharing on social networks too ;)
Your first link talks about a specific derogation approved by the EU parliament. It provides an exemption to the ePrivacy directive, which allows for (existing) searches for child sexual abuse material by major content providers to remain legal. Without this exemption these searches would apparently be in violation of the ePrivacy directive.
Now we have a pandemic that just won't end, war with associated militarization and hit to the economy, inflation and cost of living crisis and climate change mass migrations to look forward to.
How do people have mental capacity to even think about the potential dangers of mass surveillance in democratic countries?
> In other words, your personal life will be fully exposed to government scrutiny. So, why is it that almost no one is talking about this?
Because it’s coming from the EU Commission, and they are intertwined with media and institutions in all member states.
In the U.K., when we debated leaving the EU, I was struck by how obviously our leading broadcasters, such as the BBC, expressed such a pro-EU bias. Obviously, the mainstream media tends to align with the wealthy metropolitan liberal types who benefit from the EU. But we simply didn’t have a neutral media that we could rely on to report truths about the EU.
That’s still the case today. The media won’t expose the EU for what it is - an ambitious, expansionist, authoritarian political project which benefits a few at the cost of many.
The proposal from the EU is not the first step towards the end of our privacy. In fact, it is the last one. Everyone else does already have our data, they just want what the rest already have.
TBH, I think we've lost every opportunity to correct this. And I'd be happy to be wrong
Its full name is the: Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse
Sometimes I feel that the world is sleepwalking straight into the pages of 1984. Proposals to monitor chats, ban encryption, legitimize location tracking create perfect infrastructure for new dictators. If some day a new Hitler grabs power in a nuclear-capable country, he'll be able to track down and destroy dissenters before they have a chance to protest.
What are some simple and practical actions any EU citizen can take now to stop this from going forward?
Totally agree. Hitler's gestapo, Stalin's NKVD and East German Stasi would have loved the surveillance infrastructure and technology we are building up right now.
It's 1984 for real. I read Edward Snowdens biography a couple weeks ago and one thing that floors me is people's lackadaisical response to the gross violation of laws our government was violating.
I think people are afraid to stand up for there right to privacy, because they feel unpatriotic or that it may make them look like a criminal with something to hide.
I do belive with proper due process and warranting the government should be able to carry out covert surveillance of those suspected of MAJOR terrorism only. But who draws that line? And how do you trust them?
" Therefore, we encourage journalists and citizens in all EU countries to question their governments and urge them to vote no."
How about you go and vote for the -right- government? You can't fix a country with technology.
Also, if you are a telecom operator in my country that means that you automatically allow the equivalent of FBI/CIA to connect directly in the switch with a cable. There is no other way to be a telecom operator.
What you really want is to have a judge agree to listen to somebody or not.
Something in me almost wants to see this law pass, just to see what happens. I am guessing anyone who knows about internet infra / privacy / security, would either stand up and protest it. Though, for some reason, part of me thinks people would just find a way around it, feel like it is fine like that and not protest at all (I sure prefer the first option). Or I guess the third option: mass noncompliance. Which I guess has been the answer to a lot of EU laws.
But GDPR is kind of the opposite in that it protects the right to privacy (in this case from surveillance capitalism), so conflating them seems counterproductive
In a way both are about taking away liberties and chosing what's best for us. But yes, GDPR is not evil, it's just difficult to confidently comply with since it's so broad. Obviously very different to the proposal in the original post.
It's quite ironic how much critics are aimed at China being a surveillance state when the EU train is going full steam ahead in that direction... Dark days ahead.
>"The politicians proposing this legislation claim to be doing it for the sake of the children."
For the sake of those children having an actual future rather than political GULAG I propose to fire those politicians, never let them close to any position of power again and have them monitored 24x7 as offenders.
>>In other words, your personal life will be fully exposed to government scrutiny. So, why is it that almost no one is talking about this?
Personally, I don't give a flying fuck about it. I have nothing to hide and if the proposed surveillance measures help in preventing crimes, I say – go for it, babe.
Excessive authoritarianism is scary but the thing that people should really wake up to is the nuclear combination of authoritarianism and digitization.
As an example, capital controls.
I grew up in the 80s, which was largely cash-based. You got paid in cash, spent in cash, and gift/transact to others in cash. Oversight was severely limited, close to non-existent.
The concept is that you're innocent until proven guilty. It's your money, do with it what you want and it's nobody's business what you do with it. And should you engage in any illegal matters, then it's up to the government to build this case with due diligence: have a probable cause, collect evidence, maybe arrange a warrant, etc.
The important part is the very high barrier to building such a case. It's a huge amount of work just to do this for one case. Because of this, authoritarianism is kept in check. You could say it doesn't "scale".
Now we fast forward to our digital "cash" society. It's questionable if you actually own the money at all, but that's a technicality that is beyond the point.
You have no transaction privacy. Not only is it all on record, the threshold for a flagged transaction gets lower and lower. Buy a car and the bank knows and the IRS knows (in the Netherlands). There's a proposal to do laundering analysis on any transaction > 100 euro. You can't deposit or withdraw sizable money without caps or raising all kinds of flags.
The privacy is eliminated. There is no probable cause or warrant, you're treated as guilty by default and evidence is to be collected that you're innocent. A full reversal of assumptions, rights and freedom.
Which is only the beginning, because my true point is that this scales. A government now has the ability to do whatever the hell they want with your money. They can analyze millions of us and control it with the push of a button.
Wrong photo in iCloud? Money frozen. Political opponent? Assets seized. Spent too much of your money on high energy products? Programmatic tax applied.
You can make that list as long as you want, but let's take even the absolute simplest case of having that wrong photo. Imagine the analog scenario where a government regularly bursts through the door of your home to look at your photo albums. That would be the most absurd thing ever, not to mention ridiculously inefficient. Yet this is digitally happening as we speak, and nobody knows or cares.
This kind of digital insight and power over your life is a power that should not exist. Most people in this world live in authoritarian countries. Quite a few democratic one are edging towards it. Do the math.
This whole act of ignorance, incompetence and "smart stupidity" on politicians side infuriates me so much, I feel seriously sympathetic towards going underground devoting the rest of my life to trolling the shit out of the EU gov'ts.
This and the 14 eyes agreement further demonstrates that the GPRD is really just protectionist legislation for the EU’s tech and media companies. The EU is extremely hypocritical when it comes to the privacy of their citizens.
Dumb question but it sounds like this law would also require EU-based VPNs to mirror all their traffic to governments without a warrant... where (if anywhere) would folks here look for a secure VPN if it passes?
This is really, really scary and what scares me even more is these proposals just seems to keep coming and in time some of them will probably make their way into law.
Used to be for EU but if any regulation like this goes through, I will immedietly vote for any politician willing to exit the EU.
Honestly, I am kind of for leaving the EU anyway since I don't like the large centralized power it has become. There is litterally few who understand how the EU works, there is practically no way of knowing how to change EU politicians minds etc. If I want to change public opinion in my home country, that is way easier than doing it for the majority of the EU countries.
It is barely a question of time until bad stuff happens in my view.
I will immedietly vote for any politician willing to exit the EU
Willing to exit EU might however be completely orthogonal to preferences regarding surveillance laws. I mean, such politician might just as well propose similar laws like Chat Control after the country leaves the EU. And looking at some of the specimens around here that would not even be unlikely.
I don't understand how this is an argument for staying though, even if so many brings it up.
It feels more or less impossible to influence EU-politicians. I don't know who they are, what they do or barely how the EU system works. It is too complicated for laymen to get into in general.
If a local politician proposes a stupid law as this one, I can call them up on my phone while when EU does it you don't even know it's happening.
It is extremely easy to find out. You even had an election where you voted for one of them (if you showed up for the vote). Here you go [0]. Start sending them emails about this.
I don't understand how this is an argument for staying though, even if so many brings it up.
I did not intend to use this as such argument.
Wrt not being able to even reach EU-politicians: that's a bit far fetched, no? Maybe you don't know who they are but it's easy enough to look that up, for my country the first hit is spot on and the second one is a Wikipedia entry saying the same. Likewise for questions like 'how does EU parliament work'.
Be careful what you wish for. Here in the UK since leaving the government have been doing all they can to ensure mass surveilance and repression becomes more and more common, without those "pesky" EU laws stopping them.
> 2. My country of birth, Sweden, has more history of rejecting stuff like that.
You might want to check the article as to Swedes and Sweden's involvement in the drafting of this in the first place. And the NDRE is another thing which the country happily introduced and expanded upon. As far as mass surveillance of populations go, Sweden's not on the side of protecting privacy.
Honestly, I would believe some of them already do it. You're reading the news from a Swedish company anyway so we use to be pretty vigilant on privacy issues.
Sweden is a small player compared to Germany and France, so I am uncertain how much weight our words have.
The article we're commenting on paints a quite different picture:
> When the NDRE law was implemented in 2008, the Director-General (...) wrote that "there is this idea that the NDRE is going to listen to all Swedes' phone calls and read their e-mails and text messages. A disgusting thought. How can so many people believe that a democratically elected parliament would treat its people so badly?"
> However, 13 years later, in May 2021, Sweden was found by the European Court of Human Rights to have violated personal privacy due to the NDRE law. The Swedish government was urged to immediately correct these problems of legal uncertainty. Instead, however, the parliament did the exact opposite: they voted to extend the NDRE law in November 2021.
In fact, it's completely opposite - Swedish government is trying hard to spy on their citizen, and the EU is trying[1] to stop that.
[1] By sending strongly worded letters, and fails to achieve anything. There goes the idea that EU is some kind of a totalitarian dictatorships that forces countries to do what it wants.
> You're reading the news from a Swedish company anyway so we use to be pretty vigilant on privacy issues.
But the issue they're raising is that the issue isn't being reported and examined by others and especially not journalists who are best placed to raise wider awareness of this.
Actually, seems like one of the reasons for Brexit was ability to do even more surveillance and other totalitarian practices without EU interfering. Not surprising given the fact that UK is one of the Five Eyes.
The thing is. Brexit vote was a referendum, not a decision of "deep state" or whatever one might call it.
And if you remember, there were two main topics surrounding Leave campaigns:
1. We pay to the EU more than we get - which was absolutely correct btw.
2. Anti-immigration sentiments - which is sad if that's a synonym for racism. At the same time, the UK has changed extremely in the past 7 decades. From a white Christian country with very distinctive culture became an extremely multicultural country with places where "natives" are a minority. I am pro-immigration and pro-multiculturalism, but I can understand why some people have an issue with such a quick change.
I know OP is stating that as an opinion, but I don't think it is based on a knowledge of the UK reality and there would be very little evidence supporting it.
Don't mistake the purpose of the voters themselves for the purpose of the campaign for their votes, especially not in the eyes of others.
The voters got targeted messaging for what they were most likely to believe, but taken as an aggregate the campaigns were contradictory.
(This also means that most people who say they aren't getting the Brexit they voted for are probably sincere and justified in that, even though people like me did tell them this at the time).
> We pay to the EU more than we get - which was absolutely correct btw.
As with recent claims of progress in nuclear fusion, it depends on where you draw the boundary of the system.
The EU, being a free trade agreement with the unusual extra layer of some democratic self-updating that most FTAs don't bother with, also made it easier to do business and thus create wealth.
I know this isn't important to your point, but I do find it rather bizarre that the EU, which is mostly white and Christian, got the flack from people who say they want a white Christian country.
That said, I saw such nonsense at the time, racists blaming the EU for too many Africans and Middle Easterners.
I would add a third pillar of the Brexit campaign to your two: "take back control", from all the people who didn't like the EU limiting what the UK could do. This included the Human Rights Act and ECHR even though that's technically not the EU.
Do you assume politicians pushing Leave were doing so to be able to limit human rights? People like Daniel Hannan or Nigel Farage would probably oppose that. One of founders of Vote Leave Matthew Elliott founded Big Brother Watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_Watch
I think in this one, you aren't right. Prominent Vote Leave politicians are against state surveillance.
> The EU, being a free trade agreement with the unusual extra layer of some democratic
I think this shift has happened during M.Thatcher. Initially she was for the common market, but later she has learned about the political agenda that wasn't often in the interest of the UK. Honestly, it has started even before, I believe Enoch Powell will have older critical speeches on the same topic. It's nothing new in the British politics.
Which confirms:
> I would add a third pillar of the Brexit campaign to your two: "take back control"
Yes, absolutely. But not for the reason you say. Taking back control might really be based on the fact that many EU countries are way more left-leaning, financially irresponsible, poorer, etc. Taking back control equals decreasing influence of such countries on the reality of ordinary British citizen. But this is something that really goes back for many decades. It isn't something that would be suddenly used by surveillance-favouring people.
> EU, which is mostly white and Christian, got the flack from people who say they want a white Christian country.
People opposing such a quick change (out of racism, ignorance of benefits of immigration or pure conservatism) might see the EU as pro-immigration and pro-multiculturalism (which it openly is for a while now already). And again, leaving the EU might give people more powers to stop this from happening. The fact that it is hurting the UK a lot now is a different topic.
> Do you assume politicians pushing Leave were doing so to be able to limit human rights? People like Daniel Hannan or Nigel Farage would probably oppose that. One of founders of Vote Leave Matthew Elliott founded Big Brother Watch
Some were, some weren't. Broad tent is necessary for anything at this scale.
I'm surprised you list Frage among the supporters of human rights, given:
Hannan is quieter about it, and generally puts a positive hopeful tone through his speeches and writing, but still disfavours the institution and appears to believe that the UK doesn't need an outside court because, to paraphrase, "we're the goodies not the baddies": https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/717100/Conservative-...
(Though with him I will grant you he's so pathologically disconnected from the concept of truth existing in objective reality that it's difficult to say what his goals were beyond self-aggrandisement).
> Taking back control might really be based on the fact that many EU countries are way more left-leaning, financially irresponsible, poorer, etc
Eh, if that was a strong part of it, there wouldn't be so much anti-German sentiment.
And I saw a lot more people going "look how badly Greece was treated" than "Greece is what happens when you mess up, and they got lucky with a massive bailout".
> pro-immigration and pro-multiculturalism
Hmm.
Well, people do put things in a single category when words are similar, let alone identical, so I can believe this error occurred.
But I will still call it an error, as the "pro-immigration and pro-multiculturalism" I see in the EU is between EU countries rather than across the exterior borders. I take the view that, with the post-war meaning of the term, "Fortress Europe" is a thing (and that's bad): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_Europe
Obviously I acknowledge there are people who say that "it's not a thing and that's bad". Since the referendum, three such people have managed to combine holding the position (emphasis on "and that's bad") as the UK Home Secretary while also being the children of migrants from outside the EU.
Yes, but it's easier to influence politicians in your country than in the EU.
It's easier to influence politicians in your county council than in your country.
It's easier to influence politicians in your town hall than in your county council.
> EU commissioners propose laws, they don't vote for them.
The distinction isn't meaningless but it's certainly a generous one when left to stand on its own.
The commissioners hold little allegiance to the spirit of democracy and these proposals are either career boosters or pet projects for them. They're not just going to pass it on to the parliament and leave it at that. They're going to do their best to finagle behind the scenes, horse trade, intimidate and pull from their endless infatuation with coddling the children the most fantastical justifications that, by pure chance I guess, smear any opponents.
> As a brit, let me tell you that leaving the EU will not solve this problem. Your local politicians will just do that anyway.
But it will help. No modern government will pass a law that grants its citizens more privacy. It's better to have a many smaller ones, each with different rates of deterioration (re privacy) than a super government where every little nudge towards the eventual zero-privacy Internet affects us all at once.
Sadly, residing in a region formerly part of the Russian Empire, together with last year's events, kind of kills the glee I felt in the past whenever I fantasized about the EU disintegrating, which is to say voting to leave the EU would only makes sense if online privacy was the only thing you cared about.
Sorry, I should have been more careful. It's a citizen versus a consumer thing; GDPR is about the latter and does not give you any real privacy gains in regards to your government except in areas where your relationship is business like.
Some Menial Low-Stakes Agency is required to handle your email and address details appropriately, sure, but meanwhile Europol was still able to mass collect data and have the Commission cover for them after they were found out.
It's just the same good old EU BAD -> everything coming from there BAD.
There's even a comment under this post on how GDPR "degrades the web in the name of privacy", I guess trackers are just way better then cookie banners after all.
Then you read Utah and California have comparable proposals yet I've seen a single mention of them in the whole comment section.
But it will make responsibility clear. Out of the EU, no domestic government can claim plausible deniability on a directive like this, claiming not to support it yet there being nothing they can do about it - while secretly wanting to implement something like that anyway, but without the political fallout.
Even if the EU parliament passes a neutered bill, it is going to be lose. Some politicians seem to have inane will (and lobby money) to pass these laws no matter what, including in bit by bit in smaller pieces and partial defeats.
I do not think so, Swedens population has a history of rejecting mass surveillance ideas and lot's of privacy advocating stuff has come from Sweden like Mullvad and The Pirate Bay.
Anyway, it is way easier for a citizen to affect your local politician rather than some other random countries politicians that don't care about you.
Sweden has one of the most comprehensive mass surveillance systems in the world. In short, the military is allowed to do mass surveillance on all communications within the borders of the country. Sweden is somewhere near the bottom of the list among countries worldwide when it comes to respecting online privacy of citizens.
> Swedens population has a history of rejecting mass surveillance ideas
What about the Swedish NDRE, which was found by the ECHR to violate personal privacy, and when urged to correct it they instead extended it? (as per the article).
If this goes through I will personally leave EU, and I wouldn't be surprised if others do too. What reason is there to remain in the EU? It being a regulatory superpower [0]? Metaphorical lol.
Any country in the top-50 of GDP (PPP) per capita would likely work well, but I would personally likely go to Hong Kong or one of the Arabic countries.
Governments can only interfere with these rights when it is specifically allowed by law, and done for a good reason – like national security or public safety.
People have been screaming for that since years, but because of the impression that was for a good cause, we accepted. In the beginning was the bad hackers, then the terrorists, then to protect the children, then because of nazis, because of people that dont want be vaxx.. I will post it again, Glenn Greenwald is talking about it in different parts of the world https://rumble.com/v25depn-exclusive-extreme-escalation-of-b..., so either we defend this rights, regardless of who is the victim, or the surveillance will only increase - everywhere in the World.
When the internet became so safe? They push, we push back. They block, we circumvent. That was always about that. We old hackers are used to that. Nothing will work out of the box, and it will be fine. Just embrace and adapt it.
if "we encourage journalists and citizens in all EU countries to question their governments and urge them to vote no." would help then Julian Assange/Snowden would have a different life today. Just get prepared to circumvent e vote better next time.
Which structure would be needed to make mass surveillance acceptable? Would it be possible to make it secure and transparent to the point that a mass surveillance system can be accepted as safe?
Somewhat different in emphasis. Less about a vague "duty of care" and more about detailed, specific spying mandates. Different enforcement structure. Maybe slightly less chaotic in its impact. Still a giant shitshow.
The very purpose of privacy is to break laws. Privacy is the space where laws do not apply.
I don't remember where I heard it, but I really like this definition of privacy. It's a defense against bad laws and there are quite a few of those, including child porn and child abuse laws that actually lead to prosecution of adolescents (sending nudes to each other) and loss of access to medical information for kids (anyone tried to search for "12yo penis" images?).
No, that is wrong. It is the purpose of the laws to protect privacy, which is our right to protect ourselves by prevention of sharing sensitive information with bad actors. Our privacy means that others cannot exploit our weaknesses to get our money or to bully us. It means that rogue cop cannot blackmail us by exposing details of our private life to public. There are many scenarios when too much data landed in the wrong hands.
People may use privacy as an excuse to hide their crimes, but criminals are minority and lawful citizens will be exposed to criminals and police states if privacy shield no longer exists.
As for child abuse, when we have to seek for evidence, the crime has already happened. Solving it is important, but what is more important than that? Prevention.
It's not just a few bad cops. No matter how well the law is written and executed, it is always bad from the point of view of some people. There is no universal agreement about what should be illegal. People who lose the fight over laws can use privacy as a refuge.
privacy is the space where coercion does not apply; law enforcement is necessarily coercive, but not all coercion is legal
not even all police coercion is legal; when the police disappeared tens of thousands of people here during the last dictatorship, the police were breaking the law, and in some cases the disappeared were not
also, privacy can protect people from repercussions from activities that are legal at one time but prohibited later, perhaps after a change of government, such as celebrating passover
No privacy can also be that you vote for measure x but nobody knows that but you, e.g. you can have an opinion/hobby without anyone knowing about it but you and people you trust.
Indeed, privacy protects from social pressure in addition to protecting you from the government. In any case, it's intended for things other people do not approve of.
Let them have it. Complete and absolute control over all citizens. Nothing more, nothing less. Then what? They will finally realise absolute power is an empty pursuit that brings nothing but misery for both the masses and the so called elites.
False leaders have no place leading anyone as they lead through fear and insecurity. Their lack of trust cemented in incompetence, arrogance and hubris leads to a neurotic chase for absolute and utter control over everything and everybody. How empty that path must be... and deemed for nothing but failure.
True leaders inspire through visions for the future and they will eventually rise to lead. A true leader inspires action and trust, unity and purpose. True leaders are instinctually acknowledged by everyone, are accountable to everyone and value responsibility over personal power. Maturity, good character and wisdom is naturally part of their character.
Hardly anything resembling a true leader can be observed in the current political space... and that speaks volumes to the state of our society.
Here comes the change, unexpected and imminent, to sweep away all falsities and reveal the truth.
Entirely the point I am making, albeit indirectly. The majority of rules and regulations nowadays are aimed at more and more control over the people at little to no benefit to them. People get angry and protest such measures. Rinse and repeat, for at least the last decade or two. It’s repetitive and pointless. When does it become clear the once great system which brought us growth and prosperity is no longer fit for purpose? At what point people realise we need to shed the old system and its top crème de la crème in favour of a new one?
We need new leaders capable of creating a vision for our future to inspire 8+ BLN people and to put in place the means to get us there.
The systems we instate adapt based on human evolution. We began living in small groups, then tribes, alliances, principates, republics, nation states, mega states. It is hard to believe we've reached the pentacle of governance systems. All participants are impacted to a certain degree, be it positively or negatively, by change. Digesting the current state of the world leads me to be believe a system change may be around the corner.
First principles, everything is in a continuous state of decay. Every living or non-living being, every system, institution or organisation by-product of a living being. What goes up must come down. Institutions start out with noble goals for society. As they grow and amass power, their values tend shift inwards, creating a fertile ground for hubris, nepotism driven incompetence, corruption and disconnect. Most often then not, given a long enough time span, they crumble over their own incompetence and lack of accountability to the environment around them.
Using the programming analogy, it's not as much of a rewrite as it is a major version upgrade (i.e. from 1.x to 2.x) we need.
Keeping your assets is important. Creating opportunities to gather new assets is also important. We are in need of a vision that brings prosperity and purpose for all of us.
Observing the gluttonous initiatives of outdated institutions to swindle our rights, freedoms and assets is hardly ever inspiring. Things change with time.
One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
Google just added age restriction on blogger. Result is that you need to provide Google with ID information to access some content. If more an more users elect to ID with their Google account you can see where it can lead. Naturally the EU wants to increase such schemes as well.
It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes of said tech companies is either an oversight or something worse. I would think it is the latter and giant tech companies are very glad about the behavior of the commission. Because they too tried get people to use their ID solutions.
Digital tech doesn't really prosper in the EU but certainly surveillance leveraging services of others.
The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible. While Google did many good things for net security, their compliance on topics that serve its self-interest is a danger. Same goes for other large tech companies.
That there is close collaboration between certain political elites and tech companies is pretty much a given. It was decried as a conspiracy theory until it was proven. Although it should be no surprise that there are such connections. Perhaps the influence of the EU commission is smaller, but I would not bet on it. Access to the market is on the hand they can play. Easily a strong enough hand to subject users to surveillance.