The joys of representative democracy. The people are told they are free, but it's the oligarchy in their ivory tower that decide for you.
Every few years you get told you can vote for the next liar to do their bidding in your name, and we, the people, keep the circus alive by telling each other "your vote counts! It's your fault if they're all thieves!"
Government won't stop monitoring each and every citizen, and citizens have stopped any form of resistance, political or technological. Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams. We have lost.
>> Even in tech niches like this, cryptoanarchist ideas get routinely derided as useless and scams.
I agree.
The tendency to over-criticize and deride is part of the self-inflicted helplessness. Every attempt to improve things gets a fair deal of scorn and criticism...which is not exactly good.
Are you saying that most people are likely to support this, or that people actually demanded it?
No one asked for this law, but you can convince the populace a posteriori that this is good for them, certainly. It's all part of the game.
The fact that the hoi polloi can be easily persuaded in any direction is not a reason for the people in power to do whatever the f they want with our rights, hiding beneath the banner of democracy.
Also, whoever says that we, the nerds, should do more to educate the masses is disingenuous when the people in power have massive reach. I can go rant on a blog about what this means for our privacy, while the politician goes on a TV show and on mass media campaigns to claim that this law is to save the children from the baddies.
Call me a silly idealist, but representative democracy is a bloody scam.
Do you believe someone who uses Windows, chats on Discord and posts on Instagram cares about surveillance?
I think there are only two groups of people who still care about this:
- Tech people who are willing to give up QoL to cling to privacy-respecting alternatives. (People like us.) These people are a tiny minority which would be irrelevant in any democratic system.
- Old people who haven't yet arrived in the digital age. These are also a minority, and keep becoming fewer.
I think the vast majority of people have fully accepted constant surveillance of their digital activity by companies (and therefore governments) as simply the way things are.
To these people, this law is a benefit to security with zero tradeoff.
Normal people have no online privacy whatsoever anyway.
And only evil people would use encryption and anonymization, right?
(Tangent 1: Goverments could educate people in a representative democracy, too. People could also use the educational material readily available. But I think most people don't want to be educated on the majority of topics.)
(Tangent 2: I don't think direct democracy is a good system. I think that the vast majority of people (including me) are incapable of making good laws. I believe only a trained professional, aka a politician, is capable of understanding and predicting all the possible long term effects a law, such as e.g. a trade deal, can have. I certainly cannot.)
(ETA: I would go so far as to say that this law being controversially debated is the result of representative democracy working well. I'd claim that in a direct democracy it could easily get passed without much scrutiny.)
Everyone is part of some 1% group. Like imagine how many BS laws e.g. farmers or dentists have to deal with that we don't understand the full lunacy of.
Technically yes, but whether the implementations will work in perpetuity is another matter. Think how much resources are needed to keep legacy infrastructure running in the present day. Will these costs go down significantly once the next round of even more complicated bureaucratic management software comes into effect?
The heavy surveillance states of today will prove an interesting case study of software/data upkeep.
