Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU
mullvad.net
mullvad.net
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not if almost everyone does it at once.
Omnicriminalization is not a good thing for the rule of law, much less for opponents of the people in charge
also dns and the tls ca system, even including let's encrypt
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.
Apple, Google, and Facebook are the 5th, 6th, and 7th largest lobbyists in the EU.
Your statement makes it look like OAuth2 is inherently endangering net freedom.
This isn't true.
If OAuth2 was used ...
- for authentication (versus authorization) only AND
- AND by a select few providers (e.g. Google, Github, Facebook, Twitter) solely AND
- AND NO other privacy-protecting authentication methods (e.g. classic username-password credentials) are available
... THEN your statement has reasonable truth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would be curious about the evolution on ACLU on free speech you referenced. Does this article cover your understanding, or is it something else?
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.
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.
People are definitely at fault.
Source? I can't find any such documents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/zelensky-signs-media-l...
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.
"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.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/nation#etymonline_v_2309
Not in Europe. This poll was in 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine:
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.
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.
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).
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.
We need new journalism that keeps powers in check and hold them accountable, not pander to their readers in an ever resonating echo chambers.
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:
https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation...
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.
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.
“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 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 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.
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?"
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.
> A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement that can search and seize property at will is worse.
> A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president that can deny people their freedom of expression & assembly is worse.
I agree.
(ps. offtopic meta remark, the American enthusiasm for remembering laws by number never ceases to amaze me)
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.
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.
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.
Ensuring that the government has access to everyone's nudes includes children's nudes.
Pedophile police officers is worse than pedophile non-police, since the pedophile police would have the law on their side
I steadfastly refused to use the mm wave scanners for years until DHS went through the proper comment period. I have no love for those things.
Initially, the device produced revealing images. Now the images are more or less anonymous white figures with private areas even more obscured.
If you have data to the contrary, Im interested.
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)
Don't bring feelings to a logic fight.
Something being useful (lack of privacy) does not make it either good or necessary.
No. Police are not psychics. They do not stop theoretical crime. They can only respond after crime has happened.
I think I'm misunderstanding you here, are you implying presently real politicians would have to do that to advocate for privacy laws?
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.
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.
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.
It's proposed by the EU Commission, and such things have been struck down by the Parliament before.
Also: Britain hardly has any leg to stand on regarding privacy (which is something the EU usually has a focus on[0]).
Did you forget the Snoopers Charter[1]? That isn't a proposal. That's law.
[0]: https://gdpr.eu
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
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]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/06/exxonmobil-...
Over and over they start with strong technocrat proposals and then cave in to business lobby.
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.
Like article 13?
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.
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 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.
Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!
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.
More transparency is indeed needed though.
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.
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.
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.
This fantasyland is denifately common falacy many here believe
However it remains to be shown that their plans are what you say they are
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.. ).
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I donate money to the EFF in the hope that they turn out to be this group eventually
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.
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
Thankfully, we don't have to pretend! A cadre of wealthy Americans have a documented history of conspiring against the people of this country.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/u...
Putting aside the distracting CSAM branding, I can think of at least five good ones.
None of which I'd personally value over freedom, but it's disingenuous and a failure of understanding your opponent to pretend benefits don't exist.
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
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).
Never seen any abuse by law enforcement before :|
you cannot guarantee that future institutions, and governments will be benevolent, and with such laws you give them easy access to tools of oppression.
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.
> 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.
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.
that would be the intended outcome: comply or die.
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 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.
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
Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.
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.
If transparency is the norm, governments need to go first.
Since that will never happen, the only solution remains privacy for all, or no government at all.
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
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.
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.
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.
Matrix and XMPP exists, what should we do to make this more popular?
I'm not for more surveillance, but this is the exact argument that people give against gun control
- "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.
http://dubois.com/No-prosecute-announcement.txt
> "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.
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'.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
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.
Now, I have a cryptography library to polish.
Thats the same argument for less gun control.
I believe you where talking about secrecy.
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
https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commissi...
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.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...
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
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.
> That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.
Are you familiar with a country called China?
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil...
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]
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 parentsYour 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.
Our tech book might be a better starting point for this group: https://book.peergos.org
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.
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
EU doesn't pass laws, it passes directives, rulings or recommendations.
If it's not compatible with a member's constitution it will not pass.
And the feedback https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
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).
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.
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?
- Thomas Jefferson
You can't just legislate it!
how exactly will this work?
[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.
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 ;)
You can read the derogation here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... . There is a somewhat helpful first page that provides context.
Personally I think it is quite a reasonable derogation; the pirate party clearly disagrees.
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?
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.
TBH, I think we've lost every opportunity to correct this. And I'd be happy to be wrong
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
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
What are some simple and practical actions any EU citizen can take now to stop this from going forward?
So maybe just don't rely on proprietary messaging clients that claim to be encrypted?
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?
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.
GDPR is one such high stake example where no business can really feel safe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a brit, let me tell you that leaving the EU will not solve this problem. Your local politicians will just do that anyway.
[0]: https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_the_eu_as_a_digital_regul...
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.
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?
EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34608330 - Feb 2023 (190 comments)
Chat Control: The EU’s CSEM scanner proposal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183772 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
EU chat control bill: fundamental rights terrorism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31416599 - May 2022 (5 comments)
Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329368 - May 2022 (323 comments)
The latest EU plan to outlaw encryption and introduce communication surveillance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29308617 - Nov 2021 (251 comments)
EU interior ministers welcome mandatory chat control for all smartphones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200506 - Nov 2021 (59 comments)
EU Chatcontrol 2.0 [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29066894 - Nov 2021 (197 comments)
Messaging and chat control - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115343 - Aug 2021 (317 comments)
EU Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27759814 - July 2021 (11 comments)
European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27753727 - July 2021 (415 comments)
Indiscriminate messaging and chatcontrol: Last chance to protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736435 - July 2021 (104 comments)
IT companies warn in open letter: EU wants to ban encryption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825653 - April 2021 (217 comments)
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?).
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.
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
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.