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Comment by miohtama | Hacker News Reader

> 17. The Commission representatives noted that many companies, which participate in the EUIF, are concerned about their security and public image. In addition, the topics discussed in the EUIF are often of a sensitive, operational nature and disclosure could be exploited by malicious actors to circumvent detection mechanisms and moderation efforts by companies. Revealing some of the strategies and tactics of companies, or specific technical approaches also carries a risk of informing offenders on ways to avoid detection. The Commission representatives provided additional confidential information during the meeting with the Ombudsman inquiry team on why the list of experts could not be disclosed.

If the goal of your company is to promote and get a wiretap on every single device and messenger app, IN SECRET, you should be concerned about your public image. I also suggest you should be also concerned human rights and your personal moral compass.

Time to drag out these bastards to the light.

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I suspect the bastards are already well known and accepted bastards.

What is going on here is the EU doesn't want to look like it consulted bastards and is coming up with arbitrary reasons to hide that.

Well, they are now. But honestly, it was surprising for me to discover that the people pushing for the wiretrap were actually only the ones selling wiretraps. I really expected some larger conspiracy.

Maybe you should try Occam’s Razor for conspiracies: the most straightforward conspiracy is likely to be the right one :)

For example, one might imagine that eIDAS 2 isn’t backed by a consortium of would-be spies but is more likely backed by a small consortium of crappy CAs that are sick of being forced to comply with CA/B Forum rules and want regulation to override the rules.

(The CA/B rules are very specific and extremely aggressively enforced. It’s not like the GDPR where you can apparently get away with messing around for quite a while. Multiple fairly large companies have had their CA operations effectively shut down by the CA/B Forum for noncompliance.)

I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor isn't a perfectly clear guide.

A 1984-like law for wiretraping every citizen looking for double-plus-ungood speech is way too evil to come from a motivation of selling more wiretraps.

The people pushing it are societal vandals. That kind of thing should be persecuted as treason. You don't do treason just to increase your workplace bottom line, it's absurd.

> You don't do treason just to increase your workplace bottom line, it's absurd.

Did you not hear about the Russian tanks that fell apart on their way to Ukraine because Russian soldiers had been looting parts of them to sell for vodka?

Most treason isn't called out with a big neon sign and a confirm dialog reminding the actor that they're committing treason. From the inside, most treason just feels like workplace fraud/embezzlement, or like laziness, or like "office politicking" where your office happens to be "the state legislature." It's almost always just petty crime, that happens to have big consequences.

Does this mean because we've become accustomed to ignoring the petty crime treason, when the treason with a giant neon sign and an alert popup that says "THIS IS TREASON" shows up, we're too numb to take action on it?

The petty crime isn't treason, generally. The poster is wrong.

We're used to ignoring the pop-ups because of the steady escalation and increasing exhaustion. We're being frog boiled.

Treason (in the US) has a specific meaning, which is knowingly aiding a (formal) enemy of the country you are a Citizen of - or explicitly committing acts of war against said country.

Those soldiers selling tank parks for vodka weren't committing treason, they were corruptly selling military parts (to presumably NOT the enemy) to get drunk. Which is pretty terrible, and would likely get you shot or imprisoned in most armies. But isn't treason.

Aiding a known spy of the enemy? Yes. Sending military supplies to the enemy? Yes. Working on behalf of the enemy (knowingly?) Yes, maybe. Depends on what you do.

That might be Espionage, or being an unregistered agent of a foreign power. Both with serious penalties on their own.

Knowingly sabotaging your own war-fighting capability when in a state of declared battle readiness, isn't treason?

I'm pretty sure intentional friendly fire is treason (or am I wrong?) You're "doing the enemy's job."

This is just that, without it happening during a battle, and without there being soldiers in the tank.

Stealing equipment (and selling it) to get drunk is not knowingly sabotaging your countries war effort.

It’s theft. In the military. To get drunk.

It’s far too short sighted and self serving to intentionally help the enemy, it’s just plain criminality. Not treason. Likely to still get one shot or sent to the Gulag of course. But no one sane is writing ‘treason’ on any of the paperwork.

Or is it treason if a woman refuses to have a child because she is ‘sabotaging the future war effort’? Or a car thief who steals a truck, because that truck ‘could be used to transport supplies’?

And where did this ‘intentional friendly fire’ come from?

Telling classified secrets to spies for self-serving reasons (e.g. because the spy will sleep with you or give you money) is treason. We can agree on that, right? People have been executed "for treason" for doing that, many many times throughout history.

The crime of treason doesn't involve/imply a mens rea of being an insurrectionist / working toward an enemy nation's goals. It instead implies a much more limited mens rea: that you knew that what you're doing would help an enemy nation win a war against your nation, and you did it anyway.

> Or is it treason if a woman refuses to have a child because she is ‘sabotaging the future war effort’? Or a car thief who steals a truck, because that truck ‘could be used to transport supplies’?

No, because (among other reasons) in both of those cases, those are hypothetical gains lost, rather than concrete losses realized. The military didn't already own the child, or the truck.

If you steal a truck that's actually transporting supplies to the front — and thereby also steal the supplies — then yes, that is treason!

And, slightly more niche — if this is a monarchy, and the child would become king, and the mother bears the child but then kills it — then yes, that's treason too. At the moment that the child becomes an important state asset, killing them becomes a treasonous act.

Though, focusing on the truck, another reason this could be "not treason", is that a civilian stealing a random truck (presumably not a military-painted supply truck) isn't aware that it's a military asset.

Likewise, if someone hears a classified secret and repeats it, that's usually not considered treason.

In both cases, that's because civilians haven't been told that this truck, or that information, is important to the state. To them, it's just a truck, it's just gossip, etc. So they're just punished for whatever common-law crime they committed, if any.

But soldiers are told these things. They know that the truck is carrying supplies; they know that the info is classified. And so when they steal the truck/leak the info anyway, that's considered a betrayal of their country: treason.

It's so disappointing, how very little it takes to get so many to sell out. Murder for hire for a couple hundred. Selling votes for a thousand. Betrayal for a little nookie.

People are so much more venal than we give them credit for.

It's a numbers game. A leader can find people poor/greedy enough to do nasty things for money, and then same leader can go find people who want nasty things done for hire. In an unequal society, there's always going to be people 'available' for this side of the system.

The CA/B rules are - as the name suggests - largely written by CAs themselves.

We are living in a global society that has been structured around the singular principle of individual enrichment, and have been for about 230 years, depending on where you live. The answer to almost all modern mysteries of human behavior will lie in that incentive structure one way or another.

Why do people steal of defraud? The potential individual enrichment is higher. Why engage in corrupt short-termerisms like accepting bribes? individual enrichment.

This is all the result of "greed is good" ^1 and its not sustainable.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/greed-i...

It's not "greed is good", it's "specialisation is an n-way mutual win".

Who is the winner in this case?

Is it good when people specialize in destructive things? There are people who specialize in human trafficing, different types of fraud, etc. Is that an n-way mutual losss?

Not exactly, I'd say. It is a mutual win for the people involved in the transactional aspect, but a tragedy for the victims. Having the ability to charge the prices you want for what you offer is a superb self-organising principle; it just isn't sufficient to describe everything we want. In this case: we should agree on certain common rules on what is off limits, but other than that we should get out of people's way so they can create value for each other.

People love to bemoan greed but it is by far the best economic optimization algorithm humanity has managed to come up with[1].

[0]An AGI-led command economy is certainly interesting though.

What would the motivation be, for the rest of the actors in this conspiracy?

If anything, I'd say the "conspiracy" — or at least, the tacit collusion — is on the other side of this battle.

What few demographic studies we've done on the prevalence of pedophilia, say that something like 10% of men express some level of attraction toward children. (With almost none of them ever acting on this attraction, or mentioning it to anyone other than a psychiatrist.)

So potentially 10% of men everywhere — scattered all throughout industry and government — have clear motivation to push back against the creation of laws that would see their proclivities discovered and persecuted.

Of course, such people wouldn't out themselves by just defending the "rights of pedophiles" in any direct way. But they would act on any opportunity to ensure that mechanisms for "complete privacy" exist; and they would also stand behind others when they see them doing the same; and they would also learn all the rhetoric used by privacy advocates, and use it.

(Yes, there are other people on the side of "no wiretaps" besides pedophiles. I'm not saying "we can ignore the people against wiretaps because they're all just pedophiles anyway." What I'm saying is more that, insofar as "10% of men" is an accurate measure, that's a big implicit voting interest bloc! Probably one larger than all the world's egalitarian "privacy advocates" put together! And so there has always — and will always — be this group with their thumb on the scale, tipping any democratic action in society away from panopticons, for that group's own protection.)

This doesn't seem correct. Someone who has these desires but never acted on them wouldn't need privacy because they never did or intend to violate a law.

Or, it assumes that the only reason they didn’t act on this inclination is due to the fear of punishment. Which omits the possibility that they don’t do it because they know it’s wrong.

Edit: typo

There's a very obvious anti-wiretap argument that also happens to be very anti-pedophile: Children don't like to be watched. A panopticon would be the perfect device for a pedophile to abuse.

"consulted bastards"? you mean that's why EU web is Big Tech only? Or you have to fill in dynamic PDF forms to get access to some critical services?

You know the EU digital regulator should have been an US citizen from Big Tech...

I can't help but wonder what it would take for Europeans to develop a sense of mistrust in top-down governance.

For most of the time, the Commission seemed to be a reasonable (as in "voice of reason") counterweight to regional governments and their insanities. Having said that, the EU appears to be wearing off in weird directions, lately…

Um, no. The EU parliament has occasionally been a counterweight to insanity. The EU commission has always shown its innate authoritarian tendencies. Wannabe little dictators, they are.

Now that lobbiests have more effectively gotten their teeth into the parliament, I am honestly pessimistic about EU governance.

The commission isn't even "wannabe dictators", it's just where national governments policy-launder all their unpopular bills to. If something is going to piss off their citizens[0], they make the Commission make them do it, then blame the EU.

The specific reason why policy laundering is possible is because international organizations are only accountable to their member states and not citizens. Making them accountable to citizens means getting rid of those member state vetos and having direct elected Commissioners instead - i.e. moving closer to a federal model of Europe.

In America, we used to appoint Senators rather than electing them, as a vestige of pre-federal America where states were supposed to actually be co-sovereigns. The result was that - once Americans figured out how to use their political power effectively - every state gubernatorial race became a proxy vote for Senate anyway. I suspect we need something like this to happen in the EU, where politicians precommit to specific Commissioner appointments, until this becomes enough of a problem that the EU decides to make Commissioners elected.

[0] And, more generally, all EU citizens

I beg to differ, but that's also missing the point. The more important point is how profoundly undemocratic the EU is as an institution, and how you'd expect a continent with recent experience of totalitarianism to be very careful with such things.

Have we already forgotten that a fair few countries rejected the EU constitution by referendum, only to have it shoved down their throats? Have we forgotten that Europe managed to produce some of the most brutal totalitarian states, and this within living memory? Are we really going to write this off as mere "maladministration"? Have we learned nothing?

I can already hear the objections. "But omginternets, this time the government is enforcing the right ideas!"

We're going to end up proving the Americans right. Let that sink in.

Yeah but the EU is relatively progressive & promotes immigration & multiculturalism, so they can't be totalitarian.

The sad, awkward and near-unspeakable problem is that totalitarianism flourished in 20th century Europe partly because the culture was tolerant of it. That culture wasn't totally erased by the Allies at the end of WW2, which is why the EU's history is full of WTF moments like when Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled a giant statue of Karl Marx and then gave a speech defending him, claiming communism wasn't his fault [1]. Were European national leaders up in arms about this? No, not really :( The primary objections came from the Brits, some Hungarian MEPs, and, um, US Congress, three members of whom wrote to Mr Juncker reminding him that Marxist ideology led to extreme violence and the oppression of eastern Europe.

I think many Americans don't realize what the EU's history actually is. Juncker's honoring of Marx wasn't unexpected. The original proposal for the EU was made by communists imprisoned on an island during WW2. The Ventotene Manifesto specifically called for a socialist federation [2]. Spinelli devoted his life to the construction of the EU and spent 6 years as a member of the Commission, during which time he was actually a member of the Italian Communist Party! There is a major building in Brussels named after him, in his honor.

This attitude can be seen in the many disturbing quotes from major EU figures, like these from [3].

Juncker:

- "When it becomes serious, you have to lie"

- "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back."

- "Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"

Vivian Reding (a VP of the Commission)

- "We must now embark on the road to a United States of Europe."

- "When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself.

Helmut Kohl, former German Chancellor

- “The process of Union is like the Rhine flowing into the sea. Anyone who stands in its way is crushed”

Guy Verhofstadt, MEP chosen to represent the EP in Brexit negotiations

- “The world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires.”

Jean-Luc Dehaene, former Belgian PM and VP of the EU Convention

- "More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes."

Raymond Barre, former French PM

- "I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account."

etc etc.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/eu-chief-defends-marx-controv...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventotene_Manifesto

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutCampaign/comments/36ofm0/quotes_...

Opposing origin narrative: The prewar, Christian "Paneuropa" movement. (There's even an obscure arguement over the matter, whether the 12 golden stars emblem on blue background is an emblem of Mother Mary or not.)

Please do not see "Marxists" everywhere, where it's not solely about unregulated capitalism. In actuality, the EU has been criticised quite a bit in the past for being the very spearhead of deregulation and denationalisation in Europe (compare the Maastricht agreement), which is probably not that Marxist, at all.

You may also check your "Marxists":

- Jean-Claude Junckers: Christian Social People's Party

- Vivian Reding: Christian Social People's Party

- Helmut Kohl: Christian Social People's Party (CDU)

- Guy Verhofstadt: Liberal Democrat (moved from neoliberalism more closely to centrisism)

- Jean-Luc Dehaene: Christian Social People's Party

- Raymond Barre: UDF (center right policies)

These are all conservatives, mostly Christian conservatives!

PS, regarding Spinelli: The PCI was actually a mix of communists and social-democrats, was a prominent proponent of Eurocommunism, which opposed the USSR, and Italy's second strongest party after WWII. Arguably, they were the only ones not in bed with mafiotic structures and/or Gladio-style stay-behind organisations. Not every person adhering to Marxist theory is automatically bad and evil. Most are actually idealists (somewhat at odds with their materialist viewpoints).

I'm not aware of any alt origin story given the very clear and direct line between the EU and the Ventotene Manifesto. The EU's own diplomatic service tells the story the exact same way:

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/ventotene-manifesto-and-futu...

The Manifesto spread like wildfire through all the circles of the European resistance. This resulted in the founding of the movements for a European federation in several countries, the decisive Hague Congress of 1948. It resulted ultimately in the Schuman Declaration of 1950, which proposed the European Coal and Steel Community, the first step on our integration process, based on the supranational principle. Later on, in a career that included being Commissioner and Member of the European Parliament, Spinelli promoted the Treaty of the European Union of 1984, which was approved by the European Parliament. Originally rejected by the Council, it became a major influence in the writing of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that launched the monetary union and created the foreign and security pillar, of intergovernmental nature.

The EU was founded by communists, there's no real way around it.

Still, you are totally right that the EU is not specifically Marxist today, even though it has its origins in that world. But that doesn't mean there's no problem. Marxism is just one turn of the wheel, an iteration of the same underlying ideology that constantly shapeshifts whilst retaining its basic idealistic core. By the end of the 20th century Marxist economics was discredited. The working classes failed to rise up and revolt against their capitalist masters, turning out to be actually quite conservative and OK with capitalism. The places where "professional revolutionaries" did it for them trashed their economies and wrecked their societies.

So no longer would people who shared Marx's basic intuitions focus their energies on organizing the working classes. They adopted standard capitalist orthodoxy instead, which is why the old left tend to describe the EU as "neoliberal". And they are indeed to some extent New Liberals economically, albeit their love for capitalism is half-hearted at best. They are reluctant converts. But the same underlying intuitions about human nature didn't go away. The principles that there are big gaps between the best and worst people, that society should be united under a dictatorship of the best people, and that it's OK to bend or break the rules to get that outcome, well, unfortunately these ideas somehow did not get discredited.

And so the people who would once have been Marxists shed the idea of fully planned economies and violent revolution, replacing it with a new form of subtle diplomatic revolution. The outcomes would be the same: people are still forced into a trans-national dictatorship of "professional revolutionaries" against their will, but now the mechanisms have altered. The mechanism would be a steady accumulation of international treaties erasing differences between nations, exploiting a loophole in many countries constitutions that allows governments to sign treaties without needing the consent of representatives, and by linking all those apparently separate treaties via carefully disguised "guillotine clauses" in which an attempt to back out of one causes the immediate revocation of all of them.

This focus on subterfuge is why so many quotes from EU elites are on the theme of backroom dealings, misleading the public about what they're doing, hiding things from the public, ensuring countries can't back out when it's too late and so on. It's why the EU has a culture of intense secrecy about everything, reflected in the article this thread is about, but it's not unique to CSAM expert lists. The way von der Leyen was selected is a secret, even the way EU law is made is itself a secret:

https://euobserver.com/eu-political/136630

And often even things that are stated publicly are manipulative propaganda, which is why HN has so many posters convinced of things that aren't true, like the supposedly democratic nature of how the Commission is appointed (not true, Juncker has said in the past he vetoed any Commissioner he didn't like, which is not how it's supposed to work and not how people usually claim it works).

So the EU is fundamentally still engaged in the same old tricks. It is in some sense progress that they do it via the pen now and not the sword, but that's relatively small consolation given that the desired end state is so similar.

Mind that planned economy was not a Marxist institution or invention, rather, it was a carbon copy of the economic system of the (conservative) Germany empire in WW1, which had shown some impressive production rates. (In fact, these have never been achieved again.) There had been several attempts to copy at least some elements from this, all over Europe, in the inter-war years. (The Royal Navy, on the other hands, claims the fame for the first truly standardised and interchangeable product, rigging blocks. Mind that this kind of standardisation requires elements of planned economy, as well, and is also a prerequisite to any fully planned economy.)

Moreover, while John Stuart Mill described some kind of a market place inside factories, the advent of management soon brought the concentration of all manufacturing knowledge in a central representation, where it was dismantled, reassembled and redistributed to the various work stations. As compared to Mill's description, a Fordist factory already represents a planned production process. The idea of extending this beyond individual factories (and at the same time gaining some control over the antagonistic forces that dominated the economy) was somewhat natural and not that revolutionary as we may think. Another root may be the central planning and commissioning of roads, bridges and railways – and thus of economic development along those routes. It is not a coincidence that Charles Joseph Minard (who was quite in alignment to the Second Empire), who's famous charts already remind of the kind of knowledge required for a planned economy, had been General Inspector of Roads and Bridges in France.

(Meaning, while soviet planned economy was radical, it was by no means alien to the general development of economy, it was rather an extension of what we would now call conservative policies. The very idea of policy (as in "Policey" as a means of increasing the efficiency of a national body by general directives), is a conservative one. Therefore, it shouldn't come to much surprise that we find commonalities in both of them. Just because we find an elaborate state of planning in, say, a US manufacturing process, it doesn't mean that this is Marxist, nor does it mean that the EU is a Marxist conspiracy.)

Europe's experiences with untethered capitalism in the 19th century had been generally problematic, and it had waddled from the great crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s directly into the war, now facing enormous efforts in reconstruction and redevelopment. The idea of doing better, this time, wasn't totally unconceivable. Especially, since European powers were also facing a significant loss of power and influence in general, and thus also limited economic prospects. (Even the first program of the German conservative party, after the war, declared untethered capitalism and Marxist economy as failed in equal ways, giving rise to what became the predominant model, social market economy, which met with analog concepts popular among social-democrats.)

Regarding the Maastricht Treaty: Mind that there had been also a plan for a social union as a flanking policy to appease the left, which has never become a reality. Maastricht had been perceived as a major intervention in favour of a more neoliberal course – and I wouldn't call this exactly a smoking gun for any Marxist influences.

The social union happened anyway via the backdoor (as always), when the ECB decided it would do "whatever it takes" to stop bond rates rising on Eurozone countries. That opened the door to arbitrarily large wealth transfers from richer to poorer countries, which were then ploughed directly into the benefits system (Greece is an example of this).

So, where are the common social (minimum) standards?

Regarding Greece, mind that Greece debt was totally covered by German restitution obligations, which is also why banks (among them prominently German banks) rushed to propose credits to Greece, since this was backed by the German economy, supposedly a safe bet. It was only when Germany allowed itself a unilateral haircut that this became problematic. (Also compare the London Agreement on German External Debts, where the payment part has been factually canceled in favour of Germany. As an effect of this, while, e.g., the UK was repaying lend-lease debts right into the 21st century, significantly hampering its economy, Germany came out this without any war-related obligations, even – compare the Greece pension treasuries – taking ultimate possession over some of the war-time "acquisitions", while enjoying recronstruction aids at quite a scale. There's a major imbalance in this.) Moreover, the common currency provides more developed industries access to poorer markets on equal footing, thus providing the means for a transfer from the poorer, mostly Southern economies to the richer, Northern ones. Any attempt at a common control of bond rates just mitigates the effects of the common currency for those countries. (Opposing this is much like wanting to eat the cake and still have it, which isn't prone to work out well.)

The Commission is the governments of the member states.

Which makes it ironically the most corrupt and undemocratic part of the EU, despite being literally made of people elected through national elections. People who say member states are more democratic than the EU tend to have a problem with this one.

Hum, the governments of the member states convene in the European Council, actually. (The Commission is more like a civil servants organisation, second rank to this and in delicate balance with the European Parliament.)

It's funny how these people are so concerned with their reputation. They're using children as political weapons to make citizens accept anything. They drag the reputation of anyone who opposes their total surveilance through the mud by accusing them of supporting heinous criminals.

Security through obscurity has proven time and time again to not work.

The list is now published

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38205743#38205787

Are enough people going to care, though? Apple already pulled off exactly this on iOS and didn't receive much public heat at all.

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