I think the best way to get rid of a horrible law like this is indeed to enforce against the people who wrote it. Enforce equitably, and enforce equally: the same misery everyone else already knows. If ministers worry about their private communications being read by strangers—if that makes them feel fearful, paranoid, violated—then let them feel fearful, paranoid, violated, just like the hundreds of millions of other people they would enforce those feelings on.
"Laws are to govern all alike — those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." –Ulysses S. Grant (1869)—often misquoted and misattributed to Lincoln,
When working for a large company, everyone was miserable with bad IT support outsourced to India (not about India). Then I learned, that one level above me, there was special director level IT support inside the country.
When working for a large company, when moving, my boss praised the virtues of the new open office and how our current team rooms were bad. Then we learned, that he had a private office in the new setup.
"Whataboutism". Brushing away hypocrisy is way to easy nowadays. It would be way better for morale if they just said that offices are a benefit then pretending to defend something they don't believe in.
I was going to say this. A real leader that truly believed in this would volunteer to be first in line to have it implemented on them, and be transparent about their experience (how many times did an alert fire? How did the police handle the response? etc).
This is a dog and pony show by people who think they're better than the people they represent, and they must think very lowly of the people they represent indeed if they think no one will notice their shenanigans.
Besides that, there have been a number of stories of politicians abusing children or possessing CSAM. If I were going to order the list of whose PC's get checked for CSAM first, politicians would be pretty high up there. Probably right after Hollywood, and right before the uber-rich.
The silver lining about them clearly trying to exempt themselves is that they at least seem to be aware of the negative consequences of their proposal. So: not the right solution, but at least something that looks like a transition from blissfully ignorant -> aware of problems. Cogs are in motion, learning is happening.
I don't think this stopped anyone before. Things like the US PATRIOT act were not passed because the politicians behind it didn't understand what they were doing.
The incompetence will generally get you stuck in step 1, ignorance: law looks great because designers don't see deficiencies. Step 2 is progress: now you're wittingly incompetent. Step 3 is a misguided solution to 2 but the incompetence is that designers still deeply believe that step 1 was essentially a great plan.
Shielding yourself is a naive, human reaction. It isn't intrinsically malicious. This is where they slowly start realizing their good intentions result in a weapon of mass surveillance. I'm hoping for step 4 where they find a way to mitigate 2 for all people. One way would be: retract 1 altogether.
thats just naive, they shield themselves because they understand enough to know that its bad, and they dont want it.
its sorta like if i began spraying a harmful chemical on the local population because I thought genuinely that it would help reduce mosquito diseases and be a really great thing for everyone. Then I learn its really harmful to humans, so I equip myself with a hazmat suit and carry on with my plan. I do not get to claim "incompetence"
Fair enough, I suppose I'm naive and I like the analogy. You're right in claiming that wearing the hazmat suit has clear signs of competence, appreciation of the dangers.
I'm (naively) hopeful that wearing it day in day out will ultimately make them feel uncomfortable, maybe guilty about their activities, change their act, reconsider spraying a harmful chemicals, etc.
The incompetence I was alluding to lies in proposing these types of laws in first place. Well intended, but harmful. Understanding the dangers forces knee jerk reaction to at least make sure they themselves are safe from harm. Dumb solution, but progress made on learning about the dangers.
But I say dumb as in short sighted, not malicious. If they'd thought this through they'd understand these exemptions don't protect future-thems, their loved ones or whomever else is powerless, yet needy of their (political) support.
The benefit of the doubt works well with personal friends or perhaps even individuals you have a one on one relationship with. It is a really naive approach to
With shenanigans like this, it's easy to forget that the EU is a democratic institution. At least on paper, Europeans wield power over themselves.
It's good to be wary and have a healthy dose of skepticism, but let's not get nihilistic. I'd rather be naive and trust myself and the democratic system I live in, assume good intentions from anonymous strangers and even politicians.
Because what is the alternative? How would you organize society if everyone but personal friends or [..] individuals you have a one on one relationship with deserves distrust?
yes, sure, its a democracy, but remember the politicians are scummy salesmen essentially LYING to get elected. Even with the relaxed attitude towards false marketing for products, they would have been shut down LONG ago if they were selling regular products.
Would they get away with the lies they spout if they were selling medical products? I think not.
So yeah, they WANT to wield power over you, and those who seek to do such, are the least qualified.
They know what power is, and have demonstrated that clearly. If there is a silver lining, it's that they've revealed their knowledge and desire for asymmetry of power.
Obviously, this is about creating the infrastructure for a continent-wide surveillance program, using children pornography as a troy horse.
The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing, at least until said European laws get implemented locally.
> The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing
That's largely because citizens of several countries accept the narrative of their local governing parties that the EU is some "external force" that is outside of anyone's control.
Reality is that the EU is largely formed by members of local political parties sent to EU-institutions. They just send people there which they deem not useful for local campaigning or prefer to become "invisible" to local politics.
Citizens should not accept this narrative, and instead demand more transparency on the activities of the local politicians sent to EU, holding the party accountable for their actions (or non-action) within the EU.
This is similar to the Soviet Union. A lot of factories and utilities got asked to send their best employees to be council representatives. The factory managers naturally sent the most useless workers to become politicians. The rest is history.
But it's also inherent in running an organisation with 24 official languages.
Let's say you had really strong opinions on this, and you wanted to rally voters for a letter-writing campaign. Good luck coordinating the Spanish-speakers, the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers and so on. All of whom also have different TV networks, different newspapers, different radio, presumably different social media and so on.
And politicians have the same problem - maybe you're an amazing public speaker. Maybe you've got the farming subsidy policy equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Clear, succinct, witty, persuasive, honest, passionate - everyone who hears it will be fired up to support your vision. But if you can only deliver that speech in Portuguese? Good luck with that.
Hell, look at this very discussion: I know first-hand about the complex relationship between the EU with the British parliament, press and electorate. But I have no idea what the equivalent situation is in the Czech Republic.
That's all a symptom of the current state of affairs. If citizens would hold their government accountable for their actions on EU-level, the ruling political parties wouldn't send people to the EU who are ill-equipped to communicate/execute.
But it's also an inherent problem of the EU.
In retrospect, they shouldn't have left communication with citizens to the EU-members, expecting that they would communicate based on common interest.
As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".
The EU charter should have included the means for the Union to communicate directly with citizens, i.e. the basis to have their own local news-channels.
I can see improvements in communication nowadays, with EU press-releases and announcement carrying over into local (online) news at least. The fact that none of those messages are already carried by the local government speaks volumes...
> That's all a symptom of the current state of affairs. If citizens would hold their government accountable for their actions on EU-level, the ruling political parties wouldn't send people to the EU who are ill-equipped to communicate/execute.
What I'm saying is that everyone is ill-equipped to communicate, when communications are conducted in 24 languages.
Imagine a Greek newspaper decided to send a team of dedicated EU reporters to Brussels - how are they supposed to talk to the delegates from Sweden and Slovenia and Spain?
(and if you're thinking "they'll just communicate in english" let me remind you that less than 2% of the EU population lives in a country where english is an official language)
> As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".
Truth.
But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.
I get what you're saying but that's a non-issue. At plenary meeting and conferences every country is in the same situation, they communicate via an Armada of interpreters, just like they do at the UN, at the WTO, the WHO, the NATO, and so on. Outside of those they communicate in English and/or French.
If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person. If a local government sends a politician into the EU who can't communicate in English or French they sent the wrong person. Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels. So far not even THAT is happening in a sufficient manner...
> But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.
Every single press-Release of the EU is done in English language. Granted, the EU doesn't invite to press-conferences in London to talk to the local press, that's the job of the local government.
Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European", but as everywhere it is more useful to their narrative to promote "We are Nationalists!"
> they communicate via an Armada of interpreters [...] Outside of those they communicate in English and/or French.
> If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person.
Right - so from the perspective of a Greek person, EU lawmakers are speaking a completely different language. Seems like a pretty big communication problem to me.
> Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels.
But the Greek politicians in Brussels already agree with the Greek government.
If the German faction in Brussels wants to do something that'll be unpopular with Greece, they've got no way to make their case to the Greek people directly.
> Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European"
Did the British government ever agree that was their job?
I mean, in the United States I don't see Biden expecting the Texan government to convince Texans of anything. Luckily for Biden, he can speak to Texans himself. Because they share a language.
> Right - so from the perspective of a Greek person, EU lawmakers are speaking a completely different language. Seems like a pretty big communication problem to me.
It appears you've never checked the publications of the EU. They are published in ALL OFFICIAL LANGUAGES of the member countries, including Greek! [1]
> But the Greek politicians in Brussels already agree with the Greek government.
Sorry, I'm not following. I am talking about local citizens and media surfacing and challenging the actions/non-actions of the politicians that were sent to the EU, by holding their local government accountable for the performance of their representatives in the EU.
> If the German faction in Brussels wants to do something that'll be unpopular with Greece, they've got no way to make their case to the Greek people directly.
They shouldn't. They should make their case towards the designated representatives of Greece in the EU. It is their job to facilitate communication with the Greek government, whose job it should be to communicate with its citizens. This chain is intentionally broken, for the local party to either claim positive outcomes only on themselves or blame negative outcomes to some overlords outside of their control.
You would need a common official language to do that. And even with that, you cannot really build something democratic if a large part of the population has no idea what you are saying.
> You would need a common official language to do that.
Not sure what "that" actually refers to.
The common official language of the European Union is ALL official languages of the member-states. Every major publication of the EU is ALREADY made in all languages of its members.
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Example: Electricity market reform, an ongoing topic. What's the status there?
It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things.
Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc.
Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.
Does this chart [1] for contributions and this [2] for net contributions (direct financial contributions minus direct financial benefits) not answer that question?
Then just figure out which portion of your countries budget comes out of your taxes, and how big the total budget of your country is, and you have your answer. It's not like this is top secret information
I wondered if that might be the case, but they're writing in English which use a comma as a thousands separator; in which case, they definitely have the decimal point in the wrong place, even if it's down to a grammatical error.
I'm not so sure they're separate, or at least that they should be treated as such. Either way, it's a shame that this isn't standardised, regardless of the language spoken. Likewise units of measurement (weight, distance, time etc.).
I can set my language, and separately I can set my regional format which encompasses things like which decimal symbol and which thousands separator to use (both offer the comma, the dot and '), how dates are written, which day is the first of the week, how time is written (12/24h), whether to use Arabian numbers or one of the other digit-based systems, which unit system to use (US or metric) etc.
> it's a shame that this isn't standardised
It kind of is: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures has maintained since 1948 that you shouldn't use dots or commas as thousands separators. ISO 31-0 prescribes the use of small spaces, and so do various other American and international standards organizations. It's just that this is widely ignored.
Let me tell you about the pain of CSV-files that use ; as a delimiter because otherwise you couldn't use decimal numbers.
Or in office documents where MS "translates" commas. That means you also need to replace all , and ; if you translate office scripts from English to a language with other decimal rules.
Nevermind the parsing of numbers in general... That stuff can crashes moon probes.
In school (UK) we were told to use ' as the thousands separator in mathematics as it avoids confusion i.e.
1'234.56
1'234,56
Either of these can be understood no matter which format you're used to. Although, I don't think it's ever caught on really (or whether it's even advisable/sensible).
I'm not anti-EU, on the contrary, but honestly the claim is true in practice. I'm not going to give you any hard data, but I think it's just obvious in plain sight.
At least in my country, almost all the debate in news outlets is about national or local issues. EU regulations do come up, but they are always depicted as something that comes "from above" and not tied to specific parties or people. If there is controversy about a national law, the media will blame things on the government or on the opposition (depending on their bias). If there is controversy about an European law, the media will blame an abstract "Brussels"... or directly the government or the opposition anyway, as they're the ones who implement it.
In the EU elections, most (euphemism for all) people I know just vote to the party they prefer in terms of national or regional politics. Almost no one votes because they want a given European directive to be implemented.
Sometimes I have actually made some effort to find out what each of my country's parties voted in some EU decision, and most of the times I failed. It's not clear what decisions come from the Commission or from Parliament (many come from the Commission which is not even directly elected but elected by local governments, by the way). And even for those from Parliament, it's not clear how to find detailed results of Parliament votes. Mind you, I'm not saying there is no way - probably there is one, if you are very well informed or have a lot of time, but there is definitely no way that I could find in 20 minutes of Googling, and most people won't make a greater investment than that.
Not sure if it's the same in all countries, and not sure how to fix it... but yes, I do have the perception that EU institutions are detached from citizens.
That said, this has its pros. If citizens had more of a say, we'd probably have no low-emmission zones, no or almost no pollution regulations, etc. Many environmental policies that are, IMO, unquestionably good, are pushed to reluctant citizens using the "hey, don't blame me, it comes from Brussels" wildcard, and we are better for it (again, IMO). Sad, but true.
> I'm not anti-EU, on the contrary, but honestly the claim is true in practice
I agree that it's under reported but I don't think it's because the EU is far away or detached from the people. The media simply don't tell us what's going on. There's no regular programmes in my country covering it. There are shows like that for local politics and for national politics, and I can even keep up with US politics if I like. But to know what's happening in the EU I have to very actively choose to search for it.
The US is surely more removed but everyone seems to know every detail of what's going on over there.
In Berlin, the EU has a information shop kind of thing. Its nicely done but is pretty much verbatimin stuff from the EU website. I tried asking a couple of questions to members of staff in there and they didn't seem to have any more knowledge than myself on the inner workings of the EU.
I think its good to have that sort of thing though and I don't think we ever had such a thing in the UK. I would have liked to understood how the EU works better and the interaction between the parliament and the commission.
> The US is surely more removed but everyone seems to know every detail of what's going on over there.
Except for Britain, European nations simply do not have a strong tradition of news publishing and free debate like the United States. In Europe, news mostly came and still comes in the form of dictates from the rulers. That's why it was so important that people had to go to church each Sunday: not to listen to the word of God, but to be told the latest decisions of the king directly from the preacher's pulpit. Later on, non-government affiliated media has mainly been partisan affairs, directly or indirectly controlled by political parties.
With a weak tradition of free speech and press, it is no wonder that European journalists prefer to sit around all day and read reporting on American politics and summarise for their readers, instead of doing some actual investigating, reporting and interviewing.
That's just anglo spin, sorry - and pretty galling coming from a country where Fox News thrives and propaganda is rife (Judith Miller, anyone?). Same for Britain, dominated for decades by agendas set by Rupert Murdoch's properties.
European traditions in terms of journalism are as good as any. The problems of modern media are the same everywhere: nobody wants to pay for quality journalism, so only people with deep pockets end up footing the bill and hence setting the agenda.
I follow news about German, British and US politics, and I can't quite understand what you mean. Clearly there is debate in Germany, both in parliament and in press. The author of the discussed article is a German politician himself.
news media in the USA has become dysfunctional due to the economic changes of the last 20 years. Local news is not available or just so bad that it is obvious.. and national stories have been co-opted into camps promoted on corporate owned channels.. truly, the US news media is only a ghost of what it was forty years ago
Don't blame it on the media, though I agree that they're not doing a good job. If you know they're not doing a good job, don't be complacent. Do the research yourself. It's not like this is a secret law and the Internet doesn't exist.
Yes, people should be more focused on what's going on in their back yard, at least on the social level, than another country "half way" around the world.
I do do the research myself and consider myself a very engaged citizen, but the power of the media to inform poeple shouldn't be overlooked. It's very difficult for someone starting from zero to even know they're missing something never mind what to look for.
The media is demand-driven. What gets attention will generate more coverage, what gets ignored will wither.
If there is no coverage of something it generally means people don’t care. That can be a vicious circle, of course. But as soon as people start paying attention to the small outlets that do cover these things, the bigger ones will adapt their coverage.
> There's no regular programmes in my country covering it.
There are several ones in mine. However, the huge majority of people is not interested in watching them. Unless it is making the headlines/major news programs, most people only hear about it when it is too late to change anything.
It has a proper term for it in political science. I wish I could remember what it is. I think its something like offshoring democracy but I'm really not sure.
>That said, this has its pros. If citizens had more of a say, we'd probably have no low-emmission zones, no or almost no pollution regulations, etc.
Since we would rightly blame corporations for polluting the Earth and not ourselves, we would absolutely do away with low-emission zones, but we would surely crank up pollution regulations for them.
I see your point but it appears that countries prefer keeping their sovereignty and as a result EU doesn’t have any direct impact on people lives. Every now and then countries agree on some standardization and it’s only then when people see an EU impact on their daily lives.
Those two statements are orthogonal. EU elections have little impact on EU institutions. The elections are only for the European Parliament. The European Commission, which controls the institutions and dictates policy, does not get elected by the populace.
There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.
Right, but the other EU officials are not Belgians or Germans or aliens from another dimension but people who are appointed by the elected governments in every country. As a result, these elections define part of the EU and the elections in every country defines the rest.
In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.
You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).
EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.
This is exactly the argument that was used to defang reform of EU Parliament, which gave more power connected directly with voters, and kept the strong but non-transparent EU Commission as the only one with legislative initiative.
Because it's easy to blame "Brussel bureaucrat" when it's hardly visible that said bureaucrat is minister and/or represantive from the party that is now campaigning against "brussel's edict".
I'd argue it would be more democratic like that. If we had pan-European parties with their own pan-European agendas, people would know what they are voting for, and would be much more involved. Instead EU is still rather an international organization where governments of member states set the agenda, so the result is a very indirect way of decision making where an individual voter can hardly understand what impact their vote makes.
> You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).
Can you point me to the parts of the Lisbon treaty that facilitate this please?
Well, for one, many areas now require "qualified majority vote" instead of unanimous decision.
Few key countries (Germany, France and Italy) got their voting weights in both the Council of Ministers and the European Council increased at the expense of everyone else (witch Germany's voting power doubling).
European Central Bank got official recognition.
European Court of Justice got its jurisdiction expanded.
It’s a political process that will or will not happen to a point. Currency it’s not there yet, it’s quite far of it and honestly I don’t believe that it will happen before fixing the Eurozone and that’s a hard one.
The Parliament has veto rights. Nothing gets enacted without parliamentary approval. Which is very good, considering some of the bullshit that comes out of the Commission.
This is a convenient fiction that the EU Council (i.e. the national governments) are very keen to retain, as it insulates them from the consequences of their decisions.
If you really wanted to be tactical about it, one should vote for a disjoint set of parties in the EU vs the national elections, as this would be more likely to lead to effective supervision and assessment of decisions.
Sure, but the commission is proposed by nationally elected representatives (namely the heads of state) and then approved by the elected European Parliament, so the overall process is not too undemocratic.
Of course, direct election of the commission would be more democratic formally, but the fact is there's not really a truly European polity in the first place so its not clear the outcome would be much better in regards to the problem of the commission being composed of random politicians you never heard of.
If you were gonna elect Commissioners/President etc directly, you'd probably end up with something like the US electoral college system.
In fact, given that Ireland (a very small country) would have to have a referendum on it, then I can almost guarantee that such a system would over-weight small countries.
The Commission doesn't "dictate" policy. They are the body that has the power to initiate legislature, but the Parliament (the democratically elected part of the EU orgs) has to vote on them.
Also from my interpretation of TFA, the people that expect intelligence agencies to be exempted are national interior ministers (not named though), there's no such thing as a "European Union minister", which have no influence at the EU level.
European parliament has a democracy-decorative role. All the important institutional decisions are taken by the commission and the european central bank. The parliament at best approves, or works on the less important stuff. EU is a very undemocratic institution, despite all the pro-democracy talking.
The two democratic bodies of the EU, the EU Parliament and Council of Ministers, do not have the power to submit new legislation. Only the appointed Commission has the power to submit documents.
The Commission acts almost exclusively on mandates extended by the EU Council (i.e. national states), which also nominates commissioners. EU Council effectively tells the Commission "Something should be done about X; write a directive to achieve Z, K, and J". Then the Commission sits down with MEPs and national ministers to bang something into shape. It very rarely comes up with original policy suggestions, and when it happens it tends to be big news - like with the daylight savings stuff, which eventually wasn't carried through because the EU Council (i.e. governments) wasn't particularly interested.
Political initiative and agenda-setting, in the EU, are firmly in the hands of national governments - they just hide behind "Bruxelles bureaucrats" as a shield.
When the head of the commission was elected various parties presented their favorites for a direct election as had been done in 2014. When the results came in for 2019 parliament refused to accept them and selected its own favorites from out of nowhere. An election result that can be disregarded at the whim of the current ruling parties does not paint a very democratic picture.
There are elections in most countries in the world. There most likely are in your country. Would you say the people you've elected aren't detached from your way of life and concerns?
The thing about elections is that you don’t elect the detached ones. If they are elected despite what you think about them, it simply means more people think otherwise.
There is usually very little news coverage and public discussion with anything going on at EU-level, unless it's a hot topic or something that concerns a specific number of people in some way, like in this case.
And EU-Elections have usually a pretty low participation, showing how many people it really concerns.
This assumes that the ones who decide to vote in the EU election are a random sample of the ones that vote in the national elections, which is almost definitely not true. One of the parties is likely being over/under represented at the EU election.
>The more local the more people care but half of the population voting is not really drastically different than 2/3 of the population voting.
And I was simply pointing out how the result is different. I thought you were referencing that it was a random sample. Though apparently you just decided it's the same even though you knew it wasn't a random sample.
> I'd call this a failure of the elected officials
You mean, the MEPs? There's very little that MEPs can do to hold the executive (the Commission) to account. Commissioners are appointed by national governments; each government gets a quota. The appointees are generally ex-ministers whose careers in national politics are over, due either to failure or disgrace.
Essentially the only power that MEPs have is to vote down legislative proposals from the Commission. They have approximately no power to remedy administrative failures, corruption, and mistakes in implementation.
> The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states
How exactly is it detached?
The EU parliament is elected.
The EU commission is composed of members appointed by each member state (and every member state is - or should be - a democracy, so the commissioner is s representative of an elected government).
I keep seeing this bullshit being repeated as if it was true, and whenever I ask I never get meaningful answers.
This socially qualifier completely changes the original meaning.
One might argue that even national governments that are directly elected are socially detached from the general population.
That is in my opinion a fault of society rather than fault of governments. If you don't care about politics, you are doomed to be ruled by those that do.
I don't even know what language the Wednesday morning meetings that the commission have are held in. The official minutes are in French; are they conducted in French?
At least this was the case back in 2016 when I was doing as much research as I could before the referendum.
Whenever things like this come up with the non-tech folk I deal with, the conversation tends to turn to "Oh, well, I don't have any of that sort of stuff, so nothing to worry about", or "Good, child abusers should be in jail".
What are people's talking points against these views?
"You also don't do anything illegal in your mail and email, so the government can also read those, right? And you never speed so the government can get a black box in your car, right? And you never download anything illegal so the government can monitor all activity on your PC, right? And you never do anything wrong against your company so your company can also monitor all your activity, right?"
"Would you mind if all your online activity and chat histories were sent to ChatGPT live, with it deciding if you're a suspect or a criminal? If not, why are you okay with a vague system designed by politicians?"
"If you or your partner is short and look young relative to the average Caucasian, for example due to being from certain Asian countries with low average height, would you trust that ChatGPT wouldn't erroneously classify pictures as being of a minor and mark you a criminal?"
People tend to get sensitive when you expand the idea a bit and give them an example of the technical part that they can relate to.
> "You also don't do anything illegal in your mail and email, so the government can also read those, right? And you never speed so the government can get a black box in your car, right? And you never download anything illegal so the government can monitor all activity on your PC, right? And you never do anything wrong against your company so your company can also monitor all your activity, right?"
I know a lot of people who would just go “yes?”. The same people would freak out if there was a camera in their Airbnb. Or if they thought two steps ahead and realized their sexy photos or pictures of their kids would be viewed by some 20 year old moderator-reviewer type. Or would want to make revenge porn criminal, or even deepfake porn. Let alone any type of concern for journalists and their sources.
People for some reason don’t think these laws apply to them, that they would just be ignored by any snooping eyes because of course they look only for real criminals like terrorists and pedos. These proposals should ideally cause the same type of worry as being stopped by a cop even if you didn’t do anything wrong.
The second and third line of arguing, underlining the technical issue rather than privacy, might still work for those individuals.
There will always be people you cannot convince however, either because they have different ideologies or being in a place in life where all arguments wear off and they have no reason to spare it another thought.
We only need a majority in the voting group, not everyone.
The black box one would annoy many people he he, the general driving attitude I've seen is that more people speed than those who don't. And they feel entitled to speed.
Hence why people hate speed cameras "they just trying to make money" Well don't speed then, and you won't have to give em money!
Today I'd add to the list the discussion on Israel using AI to decide who to bomb. AI isn't smart enough to understand that people who just bought a washing machine shouldn't be shown ads for washing machines, but apparently it's good enough for deciding who's a terrorist.
Having said that, I personally know someone who was arrested and mistreated by police forces for being related to a criminal, and yet I've never managed to convince them that maybe the police shouldn't have that kind of power. In those cases I typically consider that the person discussing probably won't change their view, but maybe I can still reach those listening to the conversation.
I doubt ad targeting actually uses AI, at least not in the quite heavy form we currently associate with the term, but the rest of your point stands.
However, I am not sure if using examples of something currently considered crime will work well, especially as people will actively deny anything other than petty violations like speeding. It is valid of course, in particular when combined with inhumane regimes and authorities, or even regular ones that do not see lightly on people airing their dirty laundry, but convincing others takes more than just having a correct argument...
Ad targeting has long offered ML based targeting models. Usually with product names like "audience extension", "predictive segments", "likely X buyers". LLMs have taken over the "AI" term in general discussion, but the strengths and weaknesses are not too different here (just more computationally efficient).
On that last sentence, I wouldn't say "something to hide". I like to think of it in terms of highlighting the difference between secret and private. There are lots of things that I'm not ashamed of, or protective of for the sake of my safety, but still have a totally valid desire to keep private. Going to the bathroom isn't secret, but it's still private.
I think that second retort that everyone says is so weak. People are trading their privacy for services not for nothing. Think how many people would actually give you their phone if you said you'd give them $20 or cleaned their house or something.
Give me your phone so I can make sure there isn't illegal porn on it. There, this is the real example of what's happening, and you're getting something out of it (taking pedos off the streets).
> Some people abuse this and do drugs or hide in toilets, but does that genuinely mean we should have glass doors for all our toilets in society?
For many europeans, US-style toilet cubicles (with large space between floor and wall) feels pretty much like glass doors. I wonder why people tolerate that.
Straight from the article (shortened by me): "The promise that professional secrets should not be affected by chat control is a lie cast in paragraphs. [...] Chat control inevitably threatens to leak intimate photos"
On a more abstract level: in a democracy you need to consider the abuse potential of a law, and you need to leave open ways for peaceful reform if our institutions fail. That's why confidential communication channels between citizens are important, and intercepting private communication has to always come with strong checks and balances
If you're talking to someone on the left, you can say "if the party you don't like gets into power they could use this to track and punish people for getting abortions", and if they're on the right you can say "if the party you don't like gets into power they could use this to track and punish people for owning guns, not getting vaccinated and making politically incorrect jokes".
If you got nothing to hide it means you don't have anything worth protecting or competing for, and you 100% trust the system not to do wrong with your information, no matter who gets the political power. You also don't ever need to protest or demand change against ingrained power.
"Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
“Sure you have nothing to hide from this state. What if <their political extreme opposite> comes to power and starts to <their nightmare image>. Because they will inherit all the powers that the current, good state has”
Jewish Dutch people willingly filled in their religion during a census in the 1930’s. A decade later 95% of them were exterminated. The nazis appreciated the organized nature of the Dutch.
Just ask them for all their passwords or to unlock their phone and hand it over. You just want to take a look, they have nothing to hide. No big deal, right?
"So you are also OK with the government installing a 24/7 hour surveillance camera into your childs room, so they can make sure nothing bad is happening?"
"Nothing to hide, eh? Write a post on a social network of choice detailing when are you not home, a photo of your key to the door, and a credit card details."
There are much better longer argumentations and essays out there which are easy to find.. two badly rephrased prime args for me:
- It is not about you but fundamental rights in our society that are important. Argueing like "I don't have any of that sort of stuff" is like saying "I'm not gay, so what do I care about gay rights" (replace with any disadvantaged group and don't blame me for bad example please).
- Things can quickly change, even when done with nothing bad in mind. You find countless misuses with collected data, prime example is again the Nazis that rolled into Dutch (or Belgium?) and abused the recorded religions. However, today in almost any democracy imagination has not to be taken too far that another worse power comes to real power. Just look at threats Trump, or mostly right wing parties in Europe already made.
"Would you like the people on the far [left|right] to have full access to your communications, and to those of their enemies, in case they end up in a position of power (or access to this data some other way)."
I just mailed my local newspaper about it, asking them to write about this (Süddeutsche Zeitung - basically the German NYT). If you live in the EU, I encourage you to do the same.
The actual proposed regulation [0] is definitely worth having a look at. For example:
5. This Regulation shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent the provision of end-to-end encrypted services.
4a in page 37 is most tellingly crossed out. So I’m going to copy and paste 4a and instead of crossing it out invert its meaning:
This Regulation shall lead to the general obligation to monitor the information
which providers of hosting services transmit or store, to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.
It’s a good summary of the purpose of the law, I should say. Welcome to China… I mean, to the EU.
We are very fast approaching totalitarianism here in Europe. It is really sad to see. There is basically no free speech anymore and now they want to even track and control our private communication.
And what's worse is, everyone is so high on moral superiority over other cultures that they cannot even admit to themselves that this could be happening.
Well Germany is were I live, but if you are any EU citizen you are technically free to come live in Germany, but then you will get your mouth shut and your thoughts policed by the very many German bodies, governmental and otherwise. So in a way even as a non-German you are still affected.
According to Robert Habeck and the post-Merkel clique, criticizing Israel is antisemitism. Ironically the AfD are Israel sympathizers. But Israeli Jews who have the wrong opinions according to the state of Germany, cannot speak in Germany without getting censored or locked up.
> We are very fast approaching totalitarianism here in Europe.
That's false
> There is basically no free speech anymore
That's a far right narrative and that have never been as false as today given how much we are now unfortunately allowing far right bullshit.
> they want to even track and control our private communication.
Some executives wants it yes, but this still have to be voted by the European parliament, which is democratically elected and which already voted this [0] . Friendly reminder that European elections are on 6-9 June 2024.
Like in all capitalist countries: Youre free in Europe as long as you don't pose a risk to the ruling class or oppose the ongoing foreign policy. If you do, there are many ways to repress you.
That is why things like this chat spying thing are dangerous. They increase the amount of surveillance and control. All it takes for it to be used for another purpose than fighting pedophilia is a new administration coming to power in a few years and deciding to do so.
>That's a far right narrative and that have never been as false as today given how much we are now unfortunately allowing far right bullshit.
You say so, but is it true? If it were obvious, it'd be faster to say the explanation of why it were obvious than to describe as you have. You'd instead be able to say something like 'we have the first amendment, and there aren't any exception-- we don't do anything like that fire in a crowded theater stuff from WWI', and then you'd be done, and you'd have done it in a way that's certain.
I don't think it's obvious at all, and it may well be false.
I don't actually say that we don't have free speech but rather that you never gave an argument that it isn't, and then I followed that up with that isn't obvious that we do have freedom of speech in practice.
There was the recent Varoufakis thing, there's all sorts of weird corporate censorship on the web, there's these laws about offensive speech in the UK, there's that weird thing where a politically controversial newspaper run by a Swede in Estonia had its bank account frozen (it was eventually unfrozen after a lawsuit, but that took time, and harassment strategies can harm a publication just as bans can), these arrests of anti-monarchy protestors in the UK-- all that stuff about blank protest signs etc.
There's so much weird stuff that it's not obvious that we have freedom of speech. We might, but I am personally not totally sure of the total situation, taking everything into account.
That's fair enough, and while I think we do have free speech I respect you saying that it's not obvious, and it's very possible I'd think the same on digging into the things you reference.
However, the main point I was making is that a refutation without evidence is a valid response to a statement made without evidence (which is what the comment you replied to was).
Having a higher burden of proof doesn't make sense to me.
[EDIT I just reread your comment, and noticed you said "you". I just wanted to point out it was someone else you were replying to before]
My comment isn't complaining about a refutation without proof, but a refutation which claims something which if it were obvious would be shorter and simpler than the refutation.
An assertion without proof. You can deny it, but you can't respond with any essay about how the assertion is reprehensible.
Makes sense. So that von der Leyen, president of the EU, can just continue deleting her SMS containing secret vaxx purchase deals with BigPharma [0]. SMS is somewhat a chat, too, right? But good that she can be now exempted from ChatControl.
Laws like this don't appear out of thin air, those ideas come from member states and are voted on by politicians from all those member states. So without the EU stuff like this would have to be fought against in each individual state, because of course every government loves surveillance and will sooner or later try to increase it.
The 'problem' with the EU is that even if you live in a country that values privacy, if 51% of the other countries don't, you're out of luck.
It's similar to how in the US you have people complain about the flyover states, though I'd argue that people from Spain don't think of people from Poland as even close to the same. The difference between the two peoples ideologies is fundamentally great.
But at the same time, the 49% did vote to join a union where this could happen so could you argue they must be fine with it? I don't know.
> The 'problem' with the EU is that even if you live in a country that values privacy, if 51% of the other countries don't, you're out of luck.
National governments have veto rights on passed laws. Problem rather is that even when people value privacy, it's normally not on top of their priority list. E.g. in Germany people do value privacy if you ask them - but the two biggest parties don't, and people still vote for them.
Any democracy based on majority votes has the same problem. I don't fee like the disagreements between EU member countries are any bigger than disagreements between the citizens of one state.
IIUC, this is why it's good to have separations of power and slow legislation. EU ministers can keep wanting stuff, courts and the parliament keeps rejecting it and the public keep pushing back.
Pretty much it's what divides the free world from the dictatorships. Its pretty scary when you start seeing politicians attacking courts, judges etc.
Every country that went ahead with steamrolling courts has become a dumpster fire. When politicians start saying that they have mandate to do this one thing but the courts are not allowing it, it's a huge red flag. When institutions or politicians say that something is slowing them down, it's a huge red flag.
It would be great if this was that simple (and in general I agree with you), but Bukele taking over El Salvador was an exception: the whole judicial system was captured by criminals that enabled killing people on a mass scale, he got rid of it all, and crime rate went down significantly.
He also changed the (otherwise unfair) constitution that prohibited him from going for reelection, although at that point I believe a referendum would have been a much better solution.
I'm seeing the same taking over court happening in other countries, so I just don't think there's a simple solution that can be applied in all cases.
I guess this rosy view depends on viewing constant martial law as a positive thing, and not counting the tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests as a downside.
Bukele is not an exception. He's not replacing a functioning democracy. As you describe, the old system had no true separation of power - criminals had already captured it and made it dysfunctional.
As everything in live, just because it says X on the label doesn't mean it has X in it. Same with democracy. To have a functioning democracy, you not only need to have separation of power, you also always have to make sure it is maintained, and a society has to constantly re-educate itself on why that is so important. When we take things for granted, they are up for grabs from people who just want power.
Wow, imagine if governments correctly checked if children were actually psychologically safe and healthy, even once a year. That must be totally different from ChatControl, and a it could be a hard problem, with lots of last mile problems. Doing this for all humans would be nice. I'm reminded of instructions postal delivery people had to check on elderly after it turned out an elderly person was found dead, months after dying if I recall correctly. Maybe it's a human network connectivity mapping problem with a lot of tricky user experience / delivery/ last mile problems. I dream of this being solved. Is anything like this being done in the EU, or elsewhere on a reproducible scale? That and reliability predicting and relieving suffering seem like important projects to me.
The website recommends to contact the permanent representation of my country, and more importantly by phone which is apparently more effective. Not that I'm worried about it but I wonder if anyone here already did this, is it an accepted practice to reach out with such a method ?
The executive becoming legislators, Montesquieu told you so with his principle of "Seperation of Powers", but the EU was built after WW2 as an inter-governmental organisation, critized in the 60s/70s for being a group of Ministers sitting in a closed room, and taking decisions for their own ministries. The European Parliament was born out of those critics (and some German Const Court decisions).
But that does not solve the core problem that the executive should not become legislator.
Lots of doom-speculation here, but I think the whole "ChatControl" controversy could be contained with One Single Measure: "If >X% of messages in a given group contain the term(s) 'Y', auto-report that group, and silently-add verified LE to said group if requested."
Yeah, and then it turns out your chat group was all about breaking into all cars in neighborhood Z, or spearfishing all elderly in e-mail domain D, and you're all like "why didn't the police stop this?"
Well, guess what, the police is the government, and they need some intel to go on... (And, yeah, they also need to be restrained. But that's not what this particular submission, nor your reply, makes a strong point for)
thats an ugly accusation. Whats next, they need assistance installing hidden microphones in EVERYONES home? perhaps we start with yours? maybe cameras? dont think the bedroom or toilet is excluded.
How about police get to doing actual oldfashioned police work?
PS: When it was shot down a few months ago, I told everyone it was only temporary and they will keep trying again and again but people downvoted me for not celebrating :/
"Laws are to govern all alike — those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." –Ulysses S. Grant (1869)—often misquoted and misattributed to Lincoln,
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant#First_Inaugur...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed