I really wish somebody (or a lot of people) would write a hit movie/book where an innocent person on the run from a stasi-like state in 2035 has to face an interrogator who could read their whatsapp messages and google searches dating back to 2021.
Without art or literature that draws out the terror I don't think most people can really envisage the danger we're all being put in. Without popular consciousness of the problem, it's all the more likely to happen.
In the 80s we had cyberpunk dripping from everywhere, in the 90s we had movies like The Net from 1995: ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ ), and just recently(ish) we had Black Mirror.
It's a good idea. But I don't think the impact will be as big as you hope. The "it can't happen to me" bias (optimism bias [0]) will make sure of that.
I would expect the impact to be the way in which it would shape conversations afterwards by serving as a cultural touchpoint. Much like 1984 does.
I'd really like to simply reference a classic movie or book as a conversation ender every time this shit cropped up rather than explain abstract risks from scratch in a less than engaging fashion.
Btw, your idea reminds me of "Enemy of the State" movie [0]. I feel it was somewhat similar to your idea, except it dealt with what seemed to be a potentially big issue back then.
Do note that they can already do that now. A stasi-like state just has to force Google/Apple to store/give them the history, and Google/Apple will oblige. They already do so regularly in "non-stasi" states without much fanfare.
That’s genius. The Circle (with Emma Watson and Karen Gillan) started out really promising but ended up drifting in silliness towards the end. Also I seem to recall the movie having a really wooden quality despite the emotional content and having competent actors.
Hunted, a Dutch TV series, is a reality show featuring exactly this kind of investigative resources. A lot of times, the players (the hunted) are tracked down because they used some form of communication that is compromised by the hunters.
I think what is sad is such a movie would literally have to use Google and WhatsApp in the movie as opposed to some fictional search engine or fictional social network for people to make the connection these days.
Honestly, 1984 should be enough as it's not a big jump from 1984 telescreens to Google/Facebook.
Honestly it’s nothing new. Dystopian stories about modern social media (or technology in general) gone wrong? Did I dream that Black Mirror was a thing?
Black Mirror is just an example. And the whole “social media ruined the life of this one unsuspecting person” plotline is pretty boring and on-the-nose by now.
Combining some recent news in which a company is attempting to claim at least common words for their new identity, I would just tweak the story so that the "Web" corporation in 2035 is at some point disclosed to be merely a rebranding of those we know today. One character will mention it to another in a casual side-remark.
"Yeah, I never did feel great about the time that old search engine company renamed themselves "Web", but I guess the name stuck"
The danger is from companies building massive centralized archives of people's interpersonal comunications, behaviors and ideas. The data is already available for nefarious purposes internally. I'd be more interested in knowing how rampant the abuse of the data already is.
The games Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You and Orwell: Ignorance is Strength explore this aspect, the player is an investigator that can read "whatsapp messages and google searches" to prosecute (or, in some cases, protect) people on the run from a stasi-like state.
But at the same time, if a [big-budget Hollywood] film like this were to be made, some might be tempted to think that it was a form of Predictive Programming.
I changed my mind a bit on this issue. of course I still think its better with as little surveillance as possible, but I don't think what you are describing is actually "terror". If you are really an innocent person, there will be nothing in your history. I mean can you give me some examples of things this stati-state will find about you? Your porn history? or random wiki page about explosives? If there is a stasi-like state and they really want to get you, they don't need your history from 2021, its enough to just beat a concession from you about anything. Just see what the current stasi-like states are doing. Otherwise "Enemy of the state" is a pretty good movie.
I want to agree with you... the problem arises because you're applying your values to those items... e.g. "yeah they're embarrassing/bad, but not really that bad"...
However, it becomes scary when the people with access are much less level-headed. There are people who think gay people or watching porn should require treatment. There have been power changes where people with drastically different views have an agenda to push, and your innocuous "not really that bad" is all of a sudden an imprisonable offense because you "think differently" and you might encourage others.
This sounds like the nothing to hide, nothing to fear argument.
The history allows such a state to construct a narrative where everybody else thinks you're guilty, based on your messages and porn history and so on. Cherry-picking, quoting out of context, etc. This allows the state to legitimise their actions, where torture would fail to do so.
> If you are really an innocent person, there will be nothing in your history.
It's only not about things that are incriminating. Suppose you were a witness to something nobody was supposed to know about and now you're to be disposed of.
If they have your message history, they have your full contact list, your relationships with them, who you trust the most, where you like to hang out, who owes you money or favors you could call in. You're completely isolated. For sure you can't use any kind of ATM or credit card or find work anywhere they'd expect you to provide a social security number.
How far can you get if you can't buy gas or travel tickets? What do you do for food?
> I mean can you give me some examples of things this stati-state will find about you?
I think it’s a bit unfair to ask someone to throw away their (assuming American) 5th Amendment rights to make a point.
To paint with a broad and nonspecific brush, the UK government has regular surveys asking about drug use[0] which show that in the year ending March 2020, 7.4% of young adults used a class A drug. Possession of that class carries a maximum penalty of 7 years and an unlimited fine, supply and production up to life and unlimited fine.
Even for more mundane things like road traffic laws, if they were fully enforced then the only people with licenses would be those who didn’t drive.
(And are your memes fully licensed from the original copyright holder?)
Let's see, drone research, bomb research, gunmaking and ammunition possibilities, research on fires, explosions and incendiary devices, quick suicide methods, drugs, legality and punishment for a lot of shit, etc.
I'd rather have the ability to filter what I don't like in my feeds, but having the government do this is totalitarian. Who knows what they will search for, I lived under communism for 15 years, thank you, don't want back to the reign of terror.
It's not even about your feeds. It's about your private messages. Crazy stuff, Gestapo and KGB wouldn't even dream of this level of surveillance of ordinary citizens.
If modern day tech had been available to the stasi they absolutely would have used it. They were already beginning to collect hair samples from people in the late 1980s in anticipation of widespread DNA testing being available 5, 10, 15 years down the road.
Scale makes a whole lot of difference. Even the Stasi, the KGB, or the FBI had to restrict such monitoring to the small fraction of the population they actually suspected. Now they don't only suspect everyone, they also have the tools to monitor everyone.
It's the difference between being able to point a gun at a few inconvenient people, and being able to point it at everybody, all the time. Eventually the temptation presented by this kind of power and control over people will intersect with some Erdogan or Lukashenko type with the finger on the trigger.
IIRC both Stasi and KGB did aim for an almost full coverage of surveillance and informants, not just limiting to a small fraction of the population. Stasi had 500000+ informants (3% or more of population) which had done monitoring, and obviously they wrote reports on much more people than that.
Similarly for KGB; I believe that standard practice was to recruit secret informants e.g. from every course group in universities, so any student activities would be fully covered and you could get a personal report about every student; for 100% of any trips abroad the group had an agent/informant or multiple within the group. So you'd have a small fraction (multiple percent?) of population actively involved in the monitoring, and a majority of people being at least occasionally monitored - as the archives later revealed, an average person should expect that your colleagues, friends and relatives will [have to] write reports on you (corroborated by the fact that any group might include two or more informants, so any omissions would be obvious and cause consequences for the false reporter) and note any expressions of anti-government sentiment.
The aim was to effectively keep a gun aimed at everyone, and they were somewhat successful in achieving that (or at least maintaining that belief) even without modern technologies.
> The aim was to effectively keep a gun aimed at everyone
The aim was to make everyone believe there may be a gun pointed at them even if there wasn't. While that was relatively effective do you know what is even more effective? Actually having a gun pointed at everyone.
Having 500k Stasi informants and spies over its 50 years of existence is a far cry from being able to effectively spy on everyone all the time. And informants are notoriously unreliable due to a whole host of human failings, not least among them being that the people want to gain favor or at least not antagonize the state.
The modern surveillance state would make you inform on yourself via every device or communication channel you use, and at all times, with some human/AI combination making sure very little if anything is missed.
What makes you think people proposing this aren't on level (or even above) with Erdogan or Lukashenko? At this point they are just better at maintaining a good image. I don't believe you can have good intentions and still want to introduce such level of mass surveillance.
I think that quite a few people in power who are pushing for this kind of stuff genuinely believe that their intentions are good, and that targeting child porn / terrorism / ... makes it justifiable.
But that makes it worse, not better - those who believe in their ideology with such zeal are more likely to push it through to the extremes, no matter what.
Why is it always "them" vs "us"? NSA/CIA are doing probably a better job at global surveillance of everything and everyone, simply based on resources available to them. Every powerful enough government spies on the largest scale they can, because just letting someone else to spy on you and not spy yourself (if you can) would be infinitely foolish.
Even at local scale. If citizens could find a way to hold their president on short leash, such president would be more likely to listen to the citizens. But citizens don't have such powers, only presidents do, so they only have to listen to each other.
Thanks to how big IT companies have tighter ties to developed countries, I wouldn't consider only these governments. Remember the list of companies who participated in PRISM were mostly (only) US-based.
> They were doing that exact thing to selected citizens
But they couldn't do it to everyone. Now with computers they can. You might think 1984 was written as a warning, but the powers that be see it as an instruction manual.
I don't see how this won't pass. It's the EU. In the minds of many people the EU can do no wrong. And if they do something wrong it's okay and a small thing. And if it's not a small thing then you're just a conspiracy theorist that hates democracy.
In the past the EU passed a directive that required all ISPs to save what websites you visited. This was overturned years later, but it seems now they're trying again through a different angle.
well now it's child pornography which they use to push such things trough. all people hate child pornography, but I mean, who would use whatsapp for such things? I mean seriously what are they even thinking? making such a thing go trough a official directive probably makes things go worse, way worse.
a lot of people in germany, basically do not care they thing they do not have anything to hide (which is probably right) but there are so many crimes which are just done in front of everybody and nobody did care (cum ex, wirecard, just to name some). it's like once the rich or politicans are involved they start to care.
This is definitely coming down the pipe. I think it's extremely imported to come up with an alternative to the existing centralized systems; which I believe primarily exist in order to mitigate spam.
Some people have been working on an interesting solution called StampChat which has a similar topology to email, but the messages are encrypted by default and the spam mitigation is done via sending tokens to the recipient (ala Hal Finney's RPoW) idea.
> I think it's extremely imported to come up with an alternative to the existing centralized systems; which I believe primarily exist in order to mitigate spam.
I think spam and abuse are definitely significant problems.
The centralized systems are like medieval walled cities.
They exist because, for an average individual, there is no practical way to live outside their walls.
It's difficult to run your own email server. But, while the technical challenge may be difficult, the greater difficulty is in preventing your email server from becoming a bot in a spam network.
As far as I can tell, no EU organ has actually published any actual proposal or recommendation to introduce such mandatory screening as described in the OP.
My guess is that the actual proposal, when it comes, will not include industrywide mandatory screening or breaking end-to-end encryption.
This is really interesting coming from the Pirate Party. While I remember them for the protests against ACTA some 12 years ago, their biggest success - the Czech Pirate party is extremely pro-Brussels and has hardly breathed a word against it.
Otherwise, my opinion is that this would be either impossible to enforce or the cost to do so would outweigh the benefits in a massive way.
> the Czech Pirate party is extremely pro-Brussels and has hardly breathed a word against it.
I find "pro-" or "anti-" Brussels to be a false dichotomy. You can be _for_ the existence of the EU, but be critical of how it works, of the proposals coming from one of its institutions, and actively participate in improving the organisation.
>This is really interesting coming from the Pirate Party. While I remember them for the protests against ACTA some 12 years ago, their biggest success - the Czech Pirate party is extremely pro-Brussels and has hardly breathed a word against it.
Well, Marcel Kolaja, who was voted from the Czech Pirate Party to the european parliament certainly comments on these things - like on an earlier round for this in July:
The Czech pirate party was built on internal democracy without any failsafety and got swathed by hundreds (thousands today) of leftists/statists indifferent to the original ideas.
Basically none of their voting base (young adults, mostly) has any idea about the origin of the party. They were lured to the party because it supports green and social statist politics.
Note: I don't think statism in itself is wrong, but I don't like the particular kind of state they're pushing for. I think their goals could be accomplished by supporting people more directly e. g. by supporting independent social organizations, which I think would be more in line with the original pirate ideas.
However I must say that their latest program (for the parliamentary elections) was acceptable to me. But they're nearly (4/200) out of the parliament now.
A friend of mine was the leader of the Norwegian Pirate Party. He proposed a new way to organize society in a decentralized, professionalized, yet accountable way. His main issue was that politicians would promise a bunch of nonsense, and then get voted in based upon those promises, but after the fact they would never do anything about it. Even after breaking all the promises, most politicians never have to answer for lying or not accomplishing what got them into a position in the first place. One of the concrete tools he alluded to when speaking about these flaws was the FixMyStreet app and website.
While this is true, some of it is because voters are ignorant and prefer politicians who lie to them. Oh sure, they'll say they want honest politicians, but then the ones who promise them the moon are the ones they'll actually vote for. Someone telling them, "sorry but your policy idea is hideously impractical and would be extremely expensive for little benefit" won't get their vote, even if it's true.
I think it's a bit more complex than that. I'm sure most voters have a real hope that their politician is actually speaking the truth. And sometimes the politician is even honest about wanting to make it happen. But then comes the intricacies of parliamentary constellations, horsetrading, lobbyism, and filibustering, and so forth.
My problem with the Pirate Party is that they are part of the Greens group = anti nuclear activists, let alone not being represented at all in my country. I'd probably vote for them even ignoring this, because at least if feels like choosing the lesser of several evils. Voting is like choosing between the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Most Pirate Parties are pro-nuclear. But they are part of the Green group because it's the closes match you'll get.
They would like to form their own group, but they don't have enough pirates elected from enough countries yet to qualify. So they're stuck with going with the best option.
Besides, as long as greens and pirates share the same goal ... the'll work out the rest. This way the greens may move away from the anti nuclear stance quicker.
A technology which requires exceptional people for it to be managed successfully should not be a technology that puts centuries-long commitments on society.
Yes. But 33 seats are gained by the other party due to mechanism known as circling, which allows voters to give up to four preferential votes to specific candidates. The Majors Party is based around this "circling". For example, candidates from 10th place were voted in - in regions with 3/4/5 seats.
The coalition agreement aimed to resolve this issue but failed.
I remember talking about such scenario like decade ago and people were telling me I am a conspiracy theorist and the EU would never do something like this as it breaches human rights. I guess it's too late now. Too much money and powerful people involved.
Technology isn't going to fix corruption, bureaucracy and lack of transparency. Yes, we can play with P2P crypto stuff until they ban it and classify it as firearms.
This likely affects most people world-wide given chat platforms like Discord and Slack allow EU and non-EU citizens to chat with each other. At least they are being up front about it and giving people time to migrate to smaller self contained platforms.
People who use anything but smaller self contained platform are in denial if they think all of their emails and IM's aren't already scanned and logged.
People with knowledge and resources can and should host their own email and IM servers, on their own hardware, on their own properties.
Want my emails or IMs? Get a warrant to enter my property physically and try to decrypt my disks.
>Previously secure end-to-end encrypted messenger services such as Whatsapp or Signal would be forced to install a backdoor. [0]
So as an American, are there any Euros that can enlighten me on whether or not there remain any procedural hurdles left for this to clear? Or is this being implemented in Signal as we speak?
I would like to think Signal would simply not operate in the EU in any official capacity if this were passed as written. WhatsApp would definitely cave though.
I mean, it's not that difficult for them to do this for the EU. The EU can be like "You guys know those back-doors you put in for the CCP so they let you operate in China? Yeah, those, just gives us a fork of exactly that and we're cool.
Maybe we'll also stop fining you every year for privacy violations and such if you play ball. :wink-wink:"
> 1. If Signal does implement something like this, are they under gag orders so wouldn't be able to inform users?
I would guess not. At least if you mean gag-orders as used in the US by NSA etc.
That's because this would be a law, and not a "friendly favor" asked for by the police. A law is at least under public scrutiny in contrast to fisa orders etc.
Another question is whether EU police already is issuing gag based surveillance orders today. I'd like to know the answer to that too.
> How could side-loading be illegal? It's just software.
Lawmakers have no problem making software illegal [1].
> How would the state prevent vpns or tor users from connecting to Signal servers?
They don’t have to prevent a 100%. They may just decide to police and punish.
> More importantly, what if users just use pgp in emails, etc.?
The same stupid arguments about lawful access (=back doors) [2] come up again and again. But that does not ensure it won’t become law some day. If users continue to use secure tools above policing and punishing applies.
Point taken. But it is beyond me why anyone would let this type of law prevent them from encrypting their hard drives and messages.
I would gladly take on the state to fight for the right to encrypt, but I'm American so I do understand my culture significantly impacts that perspective.
For example, in UK, you can be compelled to surrender your encryption keys to the court. Refusal to comply could result in a prison term of up to 5 years (if the government claims that child porn or "national security" is involved; 2 years otherwise). If you were given that choice, would you fight? Especially knowing that the courts have consistently favored the government on surveillance in the past?
> How could side-loading be illegal? It's just software.
A government could start by demanding that all smartphones sold in their territory disallow side-loading. That's obviously already the case for iPhones, and it would be a small "security update" to Android phones to prevent side-loading.
As apps can detect which firmware version your phone is running, and whether the phone has been rooted, it's possible for phones to send cryptographically secured attestations to a government server that it is compliant with this new rule. Mobile networks can then block the IMEI numbers of phones which have side-loaded apps, or at least limit them to only sending/receiving calls and texts.
That won't stop people using these chat services on laptops, for example, but within a few years it will be feasible to enforce a similar "trusted platform" condition on those too.
There are still quite some hurdles. The European Comission is set to propose to make it mandatory, but the proposal will only come in December (and has been already postponed a couple of times due to the resistance). Then the European Parliament needs to pass it.
The fight is not over, and resisting legislation like this in the past has provided results. I am hopeful.
The leaders listen to what the people say too. If the only people to speak up are the "we must do everything we can to protect the children" people, and the "we must give the police any tools they ask for", it's easy for the leaders to forget about the rest.
Or the leaders listen to who pays them. The vocabulary of listening or voting has faded away for the vocabulary of “explaining” or “spreading awareness”, in both of which people are told what they should think. But they also listen, to ensure their explanations are “understood”.
The fact that the video is posted using peertube gives me a breath of hope.
Considering how it is currently not very popular, I don't have high hopes that this video will last longer than it could be had it been posted on youtube. Nevertheless, this is a step in the right direction.
Every bill in politics should include a reversion migration to back out of when it fails to achieve the goal of the bill. If this is for child porn protection, 12 months from now it should be reversed when the technology gets used for other purposes.
At some point we'll have to go in Bruxelles & Strasbourg to "have a talk" with those parliamentarians and reclaim our freedom. Is this what they are searching for, to justify even harsher laws if popular revolt fails? Or just harass even more political opponents by finding them automatically? All this crap is not gonna end well...
Maybe a small but growing number of people could deploy NextCloud (open source file sharing, email app). [1][2] Some VPS providers make it easier to deploy. There might be easier ways to deploy nextcloud.
Even if we ignore privacy and effectiveness, the problem with authoritarian methods is that they can (and most likely will) be abused. The justification may be to catch predators and terrorists (which is uncomfortable to argue against lest you be labeled a predator / terrorist sympathizer yourself), but it will in practice be used to surveil political rivals, journalists, activists etc.
We'll have to go back to the days of Echelon in the 90s where everyone stuffed their Usenet posts and emails with keywords intending to render any surveillance useless due to overwhelming number of matches.
Instead of talking about pedophiles, they should talk about racists and far right extremists using chat platforms, that would rally a big part of the press in support:
> White supremacists openly organize racist violence on Telegram, report finds
artificial intelligence is mentioned a few times in the video but that's not even a thing yet. what we have now are just very fancy glorified algorithms
I agree the future proposed here would be totalitarian, but it's important to be clear that today *this is not currently a legislative proposal in the EU*.
It's not been proposed, it's not being voted on, and it's not coming into force any time soon.
There are two things that have been proposed:
1. Adding a temporary exemption ('derogation') within privacy regulations to ensure online service providers can scan user data for CSAM if the provider so chooses without being in breach of GDPR. In the US and elsewhere, providers who wish to do were already doing this. This just provides a quick fix to avoid GDPR from shutting down existing service provider's own child protection programs. More details: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-promo...
2. Asking the EU Commission to investigate and analyze possible proposals for longer-term legislative solutions to this issue, by defining more clearly what service providers options and obligations are with regard to CSAM, and proposing various other ways the EU could protect children from abuse offline & online.
One _possibility_ is that the commission could propose legislation mandating scanning of all messages and AI to automatically search for grooming. Some parts of that legislative option are mentioned as ideas to be considered (see the "Inception impact assessment" PDF in the commissions analysis) alongside various other options. There's nothing suggesting that this is the leading option though. That PDF also makes detailed note of privacy concerns as topics to consider too, and the resulting public consultation on that specific assessment received a huge amount of feedback against such measures.
So far, there is no proposed legislation like what's described in this video. If there were, it's likely that there would be major public outcry, and there is no indication that it would pass.
It's possible the commission could propose this, but it's also very plausible that the commission proposes some other framework of obligations, which makes it clear when and how online services must scan for CSAM, without mandating searching of all private communications. For example, mandating CSAM scanning of publicly accessible content online, and mandating that private message providers include "report this message" tools to allow users to report otherwise inaccessible content by themselves.
Of course, there is always the possibility that the EU could veer away from privacy protections into being a totalitarian state, sure, but nobody is currently proposing legislation along those lines. There's a wide spectrum of reasonable possibilities on the table here that would be genuine improvements. There's no need to panic about the imminent death of privacy quite yet.
Thank you for this clarification. This topic has been previously discussed on HN and sadly the top comments seem to always result in poorly informed pitchfork parties against the EU and its institutions.
I would urge people to read the linked texts in your comment. I think they will see that it is entirely possible to follow the (imperfect) thought process of the EU Commission from these primary sources, since they are quite readable.
>Of course, there is always the possibility that the EU could veer away from privacy protections into being a totalitarian state, sure, but nobody is currently proposing legislation along those lines.
This eventually didn't hold up in court, but it pretty much shows where the Union has been on the privacy scale right from the start when it comes to governments doing the snooping.
He's a politician that I suspect most of us here largely agree with, but he's still a politician. This is best looked at as campaign literature. The pirate party are sensationalising dangers that don't (yet) exist, in large part imo because it boosts their profile.
It's difficult, because I too would be very concerned about this issue, once there's actually a proposal to object to! I'm entirely on their side on this issue, if reality were as presented here, but campaigning against a strawman that might never be proposed whilst disingenuously implying that it's imminent feels a lot like fearmongering to me.
Frustratingly, it would be quite possible & useful to campaign against this with nuance instead: "the commission is considering proposals to better fight CSAM - have your say, make suggestions & help define tech solutions to do this while preserving privacy", rather than "the EU is going to destroy all privacy ASAP". And it's not like we're short on other genuine issues to campaign on either.
Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I would really prefer if less people chose video as the medium to explain things. For me at least it's markedly easier, quicker, and convenient to read things.
I agree that a concise and well-written statement will typically be more efficient than a video of similar quality.
But something about speaking to a camera seems to make it easier for people to express their thoughts in a digestible way. I tend to find that, for many topics, some random 5-10 minute video of a person talking to the camera will tend to be more informative than some random 5-10 paragraph article.
You're being snarky but the rise of video for basic info transmission really bugs me. You even get these clowns making videos of them typing into notepad! Like ffs get a gd blogger account
Yeah i understand you, i hate it when there's a YT video ala "how to setup a webserver" that's stupidity , but for this kind of information i like it more in that format.
The problem is, that we (as in, "not the rich and powerful") are not playing the game of democracy correctly.
Protesting to stop a bill passing is the "you f-ed up, so you're panicking, and maybe you'll stop it" move.
If it keeps happening, it just means you did not learn your lesson.
What you should have been doing is actively fighting to set rules the way you want them. Both by electing the right people and, more importantly, actually, funding lobbying efforts.
Democracy is when the people in general have power. Not when they are allowed (perhaps, begrudgingly) to demonstrate with placards outside of the buildings that house/employ people with power.
Cite any reputable social science that says that democracy is an actual thing implemented in liberal democracies. Then we can take it from there.
> actually, funding lobbying efforts.
Billionaires and multi-millionaires will outspend your gofundme lobbying. It’s simple economics.
No, that's not what democracy is. That's what you want it to be.
And no, the rich can't outspend the population, if the population realized what's happening.
Not only is 10USD/EUR per month times the entire population just an incredible amount of money ... it's way more effective.
Most damage from lobby happens because corporate lobbyist are the only ones there. Just one publicly funded lobbyist there to remind the decisions makers of what is right and prevent their ability to rationalize would make an incredible difference.
> No, that's not what democracy is. That's what you want it to be.
I don’t even know what that means.
Seems that you have no answers.
> Not only is 10USD/EUR per month times the entire population just an incredible amount of money ... it's way more effective.
That’s about 3B USD a month for the entire US population. Not a small amount but the political system is absolutely flush with money.
Plus you need to organize hundreds of millions of people and convince them to spend it towards one cause/pool. Which is orders of magnitude (as we like to say) harder than the billionaire class loosely organizing togheter.
(Not to mention that you have to keep out grifters etc...)
Not to mention many people can’t afford those kinds of “just two starbucks a month” recurring expenses that HN readers scoff at.
> Most damage from lobby happens because corporate lobbyist are the only ones there. Just one publicly funded lobbyist there to remind the decisions makers of what is right and prevent their ability to rationalize would make an incredible difference.
The keywords “right” and “rationalize” tells me that you are idealizing. The decision-makers don’t care about what’s right; they care about money and power. And if they do start to care about what is “right” then they will be replaced with someone else.
The decision makers need money to stay in power. In turn they turn to the biggest pockets. Predictable outcomes.
What you should have been doing is actively fighting to set rules the way you want them.Both by electing the right people and, more importantly, actually, funding lobbying efforts.
Maybe we should actively fight against the existence of lobby groups. The lobby groups in most cases push for legislation that is good for them (companies) and not for the people.
I hear what you are saying, but sadly that's like fighting against democracy. Lobbying is a natural party of a democratic system, just like political parties. You can try and outlaw it, but you'll only make the problem way worse.
And it's not inherently a problem. It's not even slanted against the interests of the population. The only reason we have a problem is because "the rich and powerful" understand that this is how democracy works and everyone else ... wishes it was different.
The solution to just about all our problems is simple: stop wanting democracy to be something it isn't and start "using" it correctly - namely, realize that to HAVE power you need to SPEND money. And no, taxes ain't it.
The great thing is that "the people's" money is way more effective (i.e. it's more expansive to get politicians to do immoral acts than it is for them to do moral acts).
Plus, we have more of it (10EUR/USD per month times the entire population is ... a lot of money).
Not so simple since you only have one vote and politicians have thousands of choices to make during their time in office.
I strongly oppose domestic spying laws like this, AND I oppose uneducated immigration too. There is no party that shares both of these views.
In other words the current system will always boil down to choosing between bad options that will screw you over some way or another. I wish there was an alternative...
Judging by how low the vaccination rate is for rich and developed Switzerland in comparison to poorer countries like Spain or Portugal, I stopped assuming that most of the population there is "highly educated" as you put it. No offense to the Swiss.
Maybe some Swiss can clarify why their population is so anti-vax, as it boggles my mind.
My point is not to say that such a direct democratic system wouldn't be effective, I'm just saying that correlation != causation, as in the case of Switzerland, I attribute its success as a country more to it being a neutral banking heaven for the world elite for decades and being in a very fortunate geo-political location that was spared the destruction of war which helped it attract tons of foreign talent and capital, rather than to its direct democratic system and domestic educated population. I could also be wrong of course.
I'm sorry but you are spreading misinformation. The Swiss are not anti-vax in general and they are not against the Covid vaccine. Switzerland is 63.7% vaccinated.
In any case not getting the vaccine doesn't make someone uneducated. Switzerland has some of the best schools and universities in the world. In 2018, 44% of 25-64 year-olds had completed a tertiary qualification in Switzerland, compared to 39% on average across OECD countries. [1]
Which I said I find it to be very low in comparison to countries like Spain and Portugal where the rate is nearly 100% so having only 64% points to a large number of anti-vaxers similar to Eastern Europe.
>In any case not getting the vaccine doesn't make someone uneducated.
No? Then what does it make the other 36% who refuse to get vaccinated? En-masse refusal of a potentially life saving vaccine that will help end the pandemic doesn't really scream intelligence and education, does it?
creating your own definitions or metrics as to what would qualify someone as educated isn't helpful in a discussion.
you are also making assumptions that those who aren't yet vaccinated are anti-vax, which again isn't always the case they may have their own reasons for delaying or perhaps are perfectly fine with vaccines in general but distrust this particular one for whatever reason.
A person can be educated person can still be an unreasonable one.
>they may have their own reasons for delaying or perhaps are perfectly fine with vaccines in general but distrust this particular one for whatever reason.
So what does the swiss population know that the scientific and medical communities don't?
Switzerland has 64% of its population vaccinated [1]. It's not that low compared to other Western countries. It's as much as the United States [2]. What makes you say that?
> I strongly oppose domestic spying laws like this, AND I oppose uneducated immigration too. There is no party that shares both of these views.
Democracy requires compromise. There will never be a party that perfectly matches your views. You prioritize the ones you care about, find common ground and help those who will advance your interests.
The election to the EU Parliament is a farce. The parliament has no power. It cannot propose laws. It only votes on the laws of the Commission. In the last election, the people could elect the President of the Commission. The person elected did not get the office. They simply put von der Leyen in that position while she was investigated in the German parliament.
Having done a lot of work in politics, I see the same things frequently: how easy it is for even a few people to accomplish things with a little effort (and that's with a level of organization and management that is shockingly low - as in, if you have competent business skills, you'll walk in and think 'this can't possibly be as bad as it looks'), and then on the outside there are a lot of people calling it a 'farce', saying it's hopeless, etc. etc. It's just kind of silly, like people telling me heavier-than-air flight is impossible. OK, if that's what you obviously want to think.
It's like the naysayers for anything, such as startups. 'It doesn't work', 'it can't be done', 'nobody will let you', blah blah blah. And all the time you are doing it. What can you say to them?
> In the last election, the people could elect the President of the Commission.
What are you basing this on? The President of the Commission is, by law, proposed by the European Council and validated or not by the European Parliament. Since there was no single majority party after the election, it's not completely surprising that backroom deals led to a different president than the desire of the party holding the most seats.
> The Spitzenkandidat of the largest party would then have a mandate to assume the Commission Presidency
While this is not de jure, German-speaking media did report on the 2019 election as if the above were consensus.
It is my understanding that this was not the case in all EU countries.
it doesn't depend on time. the parliament can reject it every single time without it ever getting tired.
and since the MEPs represent the same people who elect governments who then delegate to the commission, it's strange if the commission continues to propose regulations that are unpopular.
the commission does what the member states want. obviously it has its own agency in the matters, but members don't send someone who would totally disregard their wishes.
the whole problem with these security-privacy ideas is that the member governments want to reign in the Internet, just as they did with every other phenomena for the past hundreds of years. (with varying degrees of "success".)
CSAM is especially a big red cloth that catches the eye of governments. It's not like there was less child abuse before the Internet, and if there were absolutely no CSAM on it from tomorrow ther wouldn't be less actual abuse... :/
Sometimes it's too late. The best dictator in the western world isn't the one who sends the army down the streets to shoot protesters, but the one who controls information so that people after years of being dazed by the same propaganda will vote him in power without any coercion. Sadly bad rulers sometimes have more resources than good ones, which turns out in more online/tv/radio/newspaper presence used to spread their propaganda.
If we could force somehow politicians to count on the same exact public exposure, from rallies to apparently trivial things such as tweets, that would possibly change something, but to me a similar scenario in this universe is near science fiction.
I personally don't see anything wrong with this. If a private company would do this, sure. But the EU, no. They are non-profit and very unlikely to ever turn rogue.
edit: I even welcome this change. You can dislike how you wish, I stand by my view.
Why not take it to its logical conclusion, and mandate cameras in every home? We'll even pinky swear that they'll only ever be used with a court warrant! And just imagine how much this would cut down on child sexual abuse...
What I don't get is how people growing up in free coutries can have such a distopian view of their governments. You all watched too much black mirror. If you study how the balance of powers are structured in the US/UK/EU you'll find it's nigh impossible for these countries to become totalitarian. The US even under Trump didn't become one, but he was as close to a possible dictator as it gets.
How do you all go about your daily lives with such dark views on the world? Are there seriously so many doomers/preppers/anarchists out there?
You obviously were not alive in the cold war era.
I have to repeat myself your perspective is a very naive one.
Becoming totalitarian is a step by step path.
"Article 13 won't bring upload filters" 2 years later... upload filters.
The basis of the EU is not a democracy and as you can see and will see in future attempts will become so less and less over time.
There will always be people who want to control and spy upon other people.
And without knowing you I'll say you too. If you get the chance to spy on someone's bedroom passing by from outside the window without being noticed and no risk of being caught you will do so.
Opportunity creates crime.
What would be your reaction if there was an American rapper who would rap day and night of say secession of Texas and glorifying a militant group whose goal is to secede Texas out of USA? And say those gangs did kill many hundred innocent people through explosions and so.
Do you think the families of the victims of this militant group think it is okay to sing songs in praise of this group?
That was an additional charge, like evading the cops but getting a charge for not wearing a seatbelt. But everybody acts like he _went to jail for disrespecting the king_. It's a law in Spain. There is a similar law in the UK as well, but it's not enforced that much. Theoretically you can go to jail for defacing money or other stuff in the UK too. (Like drawing a beard on the queen)
FWIW I don't really have a problem with him "glorifying" ETA, either (and wouldn't have a problem with somebody in Texas doing the same for a similarly minded local organization). I was merely pointing out that it's not just that.
And yes, of course, it's a law in Spain - that's the point of this conversation, that such laws exist (or can be introduced), and then selectively enforced against those the government wants to target for whatever reason, even in an ostensibly-liberal democracy.
Let me give you another example. In Russia, there was an "anti-extremism" law passed a few years ago that made it a crime to make public statements that "foment hatred or enmity against identifiable social groups". I can think of quite a few Western progressives who would probably cheer something like that as written. Only it turns out that e.g. police is an "identifiable social group", too, and so are members of the parliament!
The government that replaced it, did so on the promise of democracy and liberalism. It took less than 10 years for that all to go down the drain.
And then we've all seen 9/11 and what happened in liberal democracies after that, when various far-reaching anti-terrorism legislation was rushed through, and then routinely used by law enforcement in completely unrelated matters.
This entire argument - that Western governments are somehow exempt from the curse of corrupting power, and therefore letting them centralize more and more is not a problem - has already been disproven experimentally.
The issue is important and needs to be discussed (both sides - which doesn't mean solving it at the 'chat level' is the right answer, of course). And I'm glad the Pirates "get" the internet. But the fud is getting old
Realistically, targeted chat grooming on a major platform does end with responsibility over the platform. If the system is BS then it should be trivial to get the chat of any of the politicians involved in approving this. But from the past proposals, it doesn't look like that is "too trivial".
While technical folks think the tech world is untouchable by laws the legislative folks think everything is "perfectly" amenable to legislation and of course they're both wrong and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
The most likely end result is that messaging for minors might have the monitoring (but remember Google, FB, etc already do this in a way). And of course even if it passes this is amenable to ECJ appeals, etc.
Without art or literature that draws out the terror I don't think most people can really envisage the danger we're all being put in. Without popular consciousness of the problem, it's all the more likely to happen.