I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.
Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.
I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
The issue is that there is a place where this model ~is working. It's in China and Russia. The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.
The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies. They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for.
We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
Are you seriously trying to suggest that monitoring of all private messages in Russia and China has stopped child abuse images from being shared?
That is preposterous.
We dismiss the suggestion of removing the right to privacy precisely because it doesn’t stop these crimes but it does support political repression.
The crimes go on, only criticism of the government for failing to address them is stopped.
EDIT: the more I reread your post the more I suspect this might be exactly the point you are making. Sorry, too subtle for me first thing in the morning. Need more coffee.
"They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for."
That reads like just stating government perspective.
"We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."
But this says something different to me. Because yes, I do see it as a inherent flaw if governments focus is on things that are mainly good for the government. Government's job should be focusing on what is good for the people.
C'mon, we all know that the main reason for such laws is controlling dissent.
Allegedly, Spanish police is a great supporter of Chat Control, not because of CP, but because of them wanting to spy on Catalan and Basque separatists more effectively.
Is Catalan/Basque separatism still a thing, in the sense of violent outcomes (a la ETA)? I have the impression that it's become a fairly civil process (more along the lines of the Scottish or Bavarian independence movements)
I don't know about China, but in Russia private conversations do not trigger immediate response and they do not control every possible means of communication. They simply do not have capacity to investigate every violation - too many people talk negatively about the government and ongoing events, so use reactive approach. People may get in trouble while being searched on the border crossing or after being reported by someone, but it is hardly different from border searches in USA. Things may change with their new messenger and disruption of WhatsApp and Telegram there (Russia just started blocking SMS verification codes making registration there difficult).
There's literally a white list of permitted sites now, supposedly only to be used when there's a 'drone threat'. Guess what, there are places in Russia where there's a constant 'drone threat' for at least half a year and vk.com is basically all they can use to communicate. Why would they start arresting people for private VK messages now, while their 'max' messenger is still struggling? It could wait until all other messengers are less than 10% market share, that way it won't impede adoption until it's the only option available.
They don’t need to monitor every conversation. Just enough that every conversation is a little risky. It’s the ability to read it all, if they want, that matters.
As far as I know, their biggest problem isn’t reading chats (if device seized and unlocked, not a problem at all regardless of service and encryption level), but listening encrypted calls. This one really bothers them and WhatsApp appears to be threat number one. I don’t know anything about the scale of CSAM distribution there, but I think they don’t need ChatControl-like technology for dealing with it. ChatControl was worse than Russian surveillance state, maybe on par with Chinese tech.
> The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.
Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?
Yes Its an argument for the general public to think of their interests and that the interests of general public says to never do it
But they aren't thinking of our interests, they are thinking of theirs which is what I think that the parent comment wanted to share that their and our interests are fundamentally conflicting and so we must fight for our right I suppose as well.
It is also hard for me to understand this angle. While in Russia at the moment and China the "they" is pretty much constant, it is not the case in EU. Why would be in their interest something that can be used against them the moment the tide turns?
> Why would be in their interest something that can be used against them the moment the tide turns?
They are doing this to prevent tide turn and personally, I feel like if both/many political parties agree to something like chat-control and agree that they make it a bi-partisan issue, then they can fundamentally do it and the "they" would be constant
Also the "they" here also refers to lobbying efforts. The billionaires/millionaires/rich people might like these things solely because it increases the influence of govt. and thus the rich people as well
As an example, Let me present to you the UK censorship act which tries to threaten any and every website with a very large price which is very scary to many people who have thus shut down their services / websites to UK at large if they were a niche project/couldn't do it
Internet as we speak, would continue on to become more centralized. I feel like the idea here is that make internet so centralized that you can control the flow of information itself(I mean it already is but there are still some spots left like hackernews as an example)
Its also one step towards authoritarianism. This could be a stepping stone for something even larger which could have a more constant "they" as well but I have already provided some reasonings as to why they do that, simply because they can and chat control gives them a way to do mass surveillance which is something which to me increases the infleunece of both parties or the whole system massively in a way which feels very threatening to freedom/democracy making it thus dystopian.
But in those countries the intended goal is not just to stop CSAM, but primarily to censor communications and suppress the opposition from voicing their opinion. If you still want to give our politicians the benefit of doubt, then they don't, after all, want to actually censor communications in the same way to destroy democracy.
This is not because I support their mass surveillance proposal, I am strongly against it. I think that the politicians are naive (maybe even to the point of warranting the label stupid) and ignore the huge risks that exists of future governments to start using the mass surveillance platform, once it is in place, to start doing actual censorship. I am also extremely worried about the slow scope creep that will inevitably result from this; today it starts with CSAM and terrorism, next year it is about detecting recruiting of gang members, and in a couple of years it is about detecting small-scale drug transactions.
That just sounds like advocating for these policies is inherently undemocratic, in a Western understanding of democracy. Which is even worse than the policies simply being ineffective at their stated goals. Leadership being challenged is an essential part of our (stated) government system
EDIT: I improved my comprehension, and it looks like I agree actually, not disagree.
I agree, it's a great, proven tool to do away with political enemies, and to selectively enforce the law, for whatever motivation.
I just don't understand what you mean by
>We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
We (as in, "the people") don't do any disservice for us by opposing such an effort. Specifically because we are also looking at what goes on in Russia and China to name a few. Authoritarian regimes do "work", but don't, generally, want that kind of working over here in Europe for example.
I think they meant it's a disservice to act like these panopticons are inefficient/ineffective and thus not a real threat. Even current-gen AI plus mass surveillance would make it trivially easy to build dossiers and trawl communications for specific ideas.
Thanks for the clarification, it went over my head. Re-reading the comment chain multiple times it's now clear that OP was alluding to the ulterior motive, and the ulterior motive being effective, which I agree with. Again, thanks for taking the time to clarify.
You're responding to a completely different thing:
>many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to (total surveillance)
It's not about the malicious elites. These societal problems surveillance keeps being pushed for never get fixed in either China or Russia. Yet people (not just politicians) keep pushing for it or at the very least ignoring the push. A decade+ after the push, things like KYC/AML regulations are not even controversial anymore, and never even were for most people. Oh, these are banks! Of course they need the info on your entire life because how else would you stop money laundering, child molesters, or shudders those North Koreans? What, are you a criminal?
And of course you somehow manage to blame the usual bad guys for something that happens in your society, because of course they're inherently evil and are always the reason for your problems. Guess what, the same often happens there and they copy your practices. Don't you have your own agency?
The reality is that the majority in any place in the world doesn't see privacy, or most of their or others' rights for that matter, worth fighting for. Having the abundancy and convenience is enough.
That last point is even enough as demonstrated by the swiss people voting for the eID, democratically paving the way for future mass surveillance and total dependency to our iOS and Android locked bootloaders overlords. As stated further down this is all stemming from education.
Yes it had a great impact on political opposition. Such a weird coincidence that the politicians who want to keep their unlimited power indefinietly supporting a way of catching opposition early.
I guess this is what we need in the West too. Lets just cement the current ruling class in for decades.
Why do you think that the Chinese "value" having political opposition? They're the largest developing economy in the world.
What is your sales pitch? "Hey, you guys should try having a less stable government, in exchange you'll get some abstract platitudes about freedom and privacy."
Really? It’s working? No crime, no abuse, it has stopped perfectly or near so compared to other countries all of the things, like CSAM, that proponents want it to?
Your comment is precisely what I mean when I said people end up fixating on #1 to the exclusion of #2.
No, you have talked past my actual comment, inserted your own "control dissent, remain in power" purpose for this instead of what I actually said in my comment.
I didn't claim "there are no problems that can be solved or goals achieved by means of mass/total surveillance". My topic was societal problems. The political dilemma "how do I retain power and curtail disagreement?" isn't in this category.
This is simply not true, this is Western paranoid fantasy. It's also the kind of fantasy that allows escalation of surveillance and censorship. You should look up the "missile gap."
Also, Russian and especially Chinese leadership doesn't go unchallenged. Chinese leadership has had many transitions. While Putin has squatted on the leadership of Russia for a very long time now, it isn't because he's not popular, and he's forced to do a lot of things he'd rather not do because of pressure on his leadership.
How do the neoliberal rulers in the West stay on top with extreme minorities of popular support, like in France or the UK? Why does popular opinion have no effect on the politics of the US*, and why are its politics completely run by two private clubs with the same billionaire financial supporters (that also finance politics all over the rest of the West)? How do they do it without massive surveillance, censorship and information control? Or a better question: how can we be given the evidence of massive surveillance efforts and huge operations dedicated to censorship and information control, over and over again, and still point to the East when we talk about the subject? Isn't that "whataboutism"?
Chinese Communist Party leadership had many transitions before Xi Jinping purged all rivals and alternative power centers, and personally took control of all key decision making. It will be "interesting" to see what happens when he finally dies.
In the 2000s a law was passed in Denmark that allowed for extensive logging of internet traffic.
But the ISPs couldn't implement it in a practical way and essentially refused until they were given something doable. That ended up, in some cases, being "register every 500th TCP package" (or similar; it might've been DNS lookup).
At the same time, if the police wanted actual digital surveillance, they'd just contact the ISP and say "Hey, can we get ALL the traffic for this one person who is under suspicion?" and the ISPs would, in some cases I'm familiar with, comply without a court order. So there was a clear path of execution for actual surveillance while at the same time this political circus made no sense.
Imagine you're surveilling a place for criminal activity and you're recording one second of audio every 8 minutes. Surely gold nuggets are gonna leak out of that.
I think a lot of this is rooted in the basic world view people have. Those with a conservative mindset will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path, which they are naturally inclined to; while those with a liberal mindset consider humans to be inherently kind and only misguided by circumstances and their environment.
Most people can pretty clearly relate to one of these perspectives over the other, and it’s pretty clear what actions follow from that.
I think that's a little simplistic, I have liberal (in the British English sense) views specifically because I think humanity is fundamentally flawed. If we are all flawed particularly when it comes to wielding power over others, it's self-evident in my opinion that governments should be limited and the total power any individual or institution can amass should have a hard ceiling. I see explicit anti-authoritarianism as a necessary counterweight to our flawed nature, every exercise of political power is potentially harmful but through the ideas developed in the Enlightenment it can at least be contained and controlled.
Humans are inherently flawed and they're inherently kind. We're evolutionarily primed for competition and cooperation. Antisocial behaviour can be both inherent and environmental. I feel you might be setting up a false dichotomy when the motivations for political beliefs are often pretty complex and varied.
That is at best simplistic, and at worst completely inaccurate.
It is common for "liberal" governments, as in the UK at the moment, who are inclined to pass censorship, surveillance and control (of people's lives) laws. It is also common for "conservative" governments to do the same.
What is very common is for people to think themselves and people like themselves to be naturally kind and people unlike themselves as fundamentally flawed.
You’re talking about parties, while I was referring to ideology. And in ideological terms, while a HN comment isn’t scientific, I think I represented the ideology of conservatism and liberalism correctly here, so call out the social sciences over that.
That's absurd. “Conservatives think people are bad, liberals think people are good” is primary-school-level reductionism.
Conservatives generally see people as capable of self-direction and argue for minimal interference because virtue needs room to act.
Progressives also tend to see people as capable of good, but assume outcomes depend on systems, so they push for more state involvement to improve those conditions.
Neither thinks humans are irredeemable. Both generally believe humans are inherently kind. The difference is whether you trust individuals or bureaucracies to manage human weakness.
Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general. Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them. So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.
> Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general.
I’m neither American nor using US partisan definitions. I’m using the terms as they’re broadly understood in political theory and history.
> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them.
That’s a paternalist or technocratic premise, not a conservative one. Classical conservatism accepts human fallibility but trusts evolved social norms not bureaucracy to contain it. The belief that people must be centrally guided is the antithesis of that tradition.
> So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.
You might try the same. Hobbes wasn’t a conservative - he was an absolutist. Quoting him to define conservatism is like citing Marx to define capitalism.
> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them
Who made this definition, left wing scholars? I doubt many conservative persons would say this.
You could just as well say that this is the central pillar of communism, that people need to be controlled since they are too evil if they are free to form companies and structure themselves. Or that this is the central pillar of social democracy, that without big taxes and central institutions to spend peoples money on things that benefits them they will make bad choices and not get the things they need.
Every government is about taking control from the people, I don't get what you mean that conservatives would do this more than any other group.
I feel the entire philosophical distinction is tainted to the point where it should be retired and no longer discussed. It was useful as a thought experiment but folks in general have shown they are completely unable to understand this and instead treat it as some tribal dogma to which they must choose allegiance. It's become harmful.
I say it should be kept in the university library under lock and key, something philosophy professors can sit and debate in their spare time behind closed doors. /s
Parties are associated with ideologies and supported by people who share their ideologies.
> I think I represented the ideology of conservatism and liberalism correctly here, so call out the social sciences over that.
If you are saying that you there is a correct definition within the social sciences, can you cite an authoritative source for that?
In any case you were talking about "the world view people have" and I think your definition correlates very poorly with those of people one would normally describe as "liberal" or "conservative". I am not even sure which mindset you associate with the "monitor and control" mentality. I think you mean its a conservative mindset, but a lot of the people I know who most strongly oppose it are conservative or Conservative (as in members of the party that has the word in its name).
This might be a US vs UK difference, of course. These are not words that are really used very consistently within societies, let alone between them.
> If you are saying that you there is a correct definition within the social sciences, can you cite an authoritative source for that?
You can start at Wikipedia, for example, which quotes Thomas Hobbes:
> the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralized authority with royal sovereignty to guarantee law and order.
And further:
> Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by political scientist Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative view of human nature and pessimism of the potential to improve it through 'utopian' schemes.
I don’t mean to insinuate "conservatives are evil and want to spy on citizens", but merely that they are generally more inclined to believe people are inherently incapable of behaving well, so they need to be nudged towards the right thing. Really believing this makes it far more likely to view government monitoring as a plausible solution to the problem they see. And again, I’m saying this without implying any judgement.
> will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures
I do.
> that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path
No. When people are misguided that will even more apply to those in power and with weapons. The fact that I view everyone as likely misguided means nobody should have any say over the other.
The modern trend to frame conservatism and authoritarianism as "the same thing" is very bad and leads to the normalization of authoritarianism.
>Those with a conservative mindset will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path, which they are naturally inclined to; while those with a liberal mindset consider humans to be inherently kind and only misguided by circumstances and their environment.
It is also this mindset of wanting to micromanage things/people in hope for better performance. Those are the usually the ones pushing for scanning people's private messages. People like Stalin and Mao would love stuff like that. The urge to micro-manage is a very band-aid type of solution and not dealing with complexity of the situation.
These are American boxes. Skewed by American culture. Simplistic to the absurd extent where it can mean the tail leads the dog i.e. people will adopt some viewpoint they're actually at odds with deep down. More tribalism than any fundamental ground truth.
> As though it would 1) be a practical possibility
Well that's kind of the thing. With AI it is. In theory, they can now monitor all of us at the same time on a scale never before thought possible. The time of "big brother has better things to do than monitor you specifically" is over.
Then are able to record everything now, they are able to add "AI" to it. The "AI" will tell them some result. They will prosecute based on that. The fact that "AI" isn't something that can reliable "monitor" people is something they won't care about.
I have always felt like what these services would do is to push towards things like matrix/signal etc. and matrix is decentralized as an example so they can't really do chat control there but my idea of chat control was always similar to UK in the sense that they are gonna scare a lot of people to host services like this which bypass intentionally or unintentionally this because if they bypass it, they would have to pay some hefty fees and that possibility itself scares people similar to what is happening in the UK itself.
VPN's are a good model maybe except that once they get on the chopping block, they might break the internet even further similar to chinese censorship really. Maybe even fragmenting the internet but it would definitely both scare and scar the internet for sure.
The real root cause of many societal problems is that a significant portion of the population everywhere across the world is either unable or unwilling to think more than one step ahead. This why I believe most dumb decisions are voted for. One immigrant was bad? Lets ban all immigrants. One criminal slipped the police? Lets allow spying on his chat and catch him. Etc.
Countries like Denmark are civilised and do spend literally billions on trying to protect and nourish children.
And it is a credit to these nations and the people who dwell in them.
But the reality is that there will always be a scumbag dad who decides to molest his daughter.
HN assumes evil but this is a "road paved with good intentions" kind of deal.
In this particular case it is obviously evil and misguided. There is no "iron wall" around EU phones or EU computers, a criminal can install literally anything on their PC and almost anything on their phones. So the real actual criminal won't be affected by the change at all, they will use software without backdoors for their shady stuff. This is obvious to everyone really, so this leads to a conclusion that the real reason for the enforced breaking of encryption is to spy on the political opposition, on the business competitors and in general promote a healthy fear and paranoia in society. Just what we need, in the age when EU enemies are acquiring more and more collaborators and tools inside EU, to disrupt and hopefully destroy the union.
> HN assumes evil but this is a "road paved with good intentions" kind of deal.
They are the same picture. Every evil person thinks they have good intentions. The Nazis were literally thinking and saying they resurrect the German nation and lead Germany to the eternal, "thousand year long" empire.
"...talking 5 minutes with the average voter" and all that. Ironically, lots of these people are meanwhile fine with "AI glasses" being used everywhere. They just haven't thought it through. What if a pedophile wears them?
It's like surveillance logic eats itself in the end. What really gets me is how often these proposals skip over the part where we ask whether they actually work
Funny thing is that people are all ok with reading chats but as soon as you touch their mail they go apeshit. (Note: it is officially illegal to open mail not addressed to you, even for law enforcement unless they have a very specific court order)
> I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
.. and stored! Which is the worst part, IMO, because once you have a record it's only a matter of time until it reaches the wrong hands.
The mass-surveillance proponents will always exist in small numbers, but it gets revived every other month because the number of ignorant politicians receptive to the idea is a function of their ignorance and malformed understanding of reality.
But that isn't their fault.
It's the magic tech companies are selling - and it's knowledgeable individuals who have to effectively communicate and explain bullshit.
There is a different problem at play behind this.
There are strong lobbying efforts that want this tech/system, for their own reasons which are not being advocated to the public.
At the same time, the lobbying forces behind this are pushing a random assortment of "popular" reasons to implement it - "think of the children/vegetables/climate".
All this crap is not being driven by grassroots movements. To the extent those are involved, they are being manipulated and sheepherded.
A lot of politics, if not all of it, are driven by real reasons separated from the methods used to push it through. See Brexit, MAGA, and a lot of other crap :-/.
As happens in other countries, I see the politicians in my own country implementing a lot of random policies that have no popular support, but is quite relevant to some inner circle and network of policitians and their friends.
I agree, the ghost of Stalin is right behind the curtain waiting for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th chance at making it work ("oh, no but this time we will REALLY get it right and eliminate only all the REAL enemies of the people")
>It's because European socialist heritage, Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."
Have you ever heard of the Red Scare "McCarthyism" or the Patriot Act? The EU is the opposite of East Germany, nothing was inherited; they were robbed and left behind.
Just last year, France used similar argument of "exporting illegal encryption against Telegram" to get the master keys to decrypt all end-to-end encrypted messages:
The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did. The secret legacy police is still going strong in countries like Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, as we have seen from the cases where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.
>The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did.
And what has that to do with "socialist heritage"? IF East Germany had a proper purge then nothing was inherited into the EU right?
>where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.
Yes and then there was Watergate...but again what has Nixon in common with socialism? And maybe have a look at "Merkelphone" when "Friends spy on Friends"
Hell even the German police can "access" Whats-Up/Facebook.
>>German security forces can access personal Whatsapp messages of any user even without installing spyware, several German media institutions reported.
>>attains the information of suspects via "Whatsapp Web."
No, German police cannot access encrypted WhatsApp messages.
They specifically state in the introduction of Chat Control act that the reason for the banning end-to-end encrypted communications is that criminals use WhatsApp and police cannot crack the message, hence the Chat Control act. The police cannot crack these messages and they want to read everyone's messages and that's the whole point of making encryption illegal.
If you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can read more about Chat Control and encryption here:
i dont want to be the guy but the law is not about police having acces to private messages. As far as I understood they want to scan content for csam material by hashing. and if positive police geta involved. Or am I wrong? Maybe I misunderstood something.
> The last chance for an agreement under Danish leadership is in December; the government in Copenhagen apparently preferred a compromise without chat control to no agreement at all. The current regulation, which allows the large platform providers to voluntarily and actively search for potential depictions of abuse, expires next spring after extension. It is precisely this voluntariness that Denmark's Minister of Justice now wants to codify within the framework of the future CSA regulation, which also contains a multitude of other, less controversial projects. [1]
Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
Wait, so people who maintain strong beliefs that disagree with you long enough to ‘win’ are acting in bad faith (brexit), but working for 10 years to re-enter the EU wouldn’t be?
It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them.
We, the UK, will never be able to rejoin the EU on the same sweetheart terms as we had previously. That’s gone and can’t be replicated.
In much the same way as those campaigning for Scottish independence continue to campaign forever no matter how many referendums they loose, no one will be able to recreate the UK if they succeed.
You need the thinest majority to win and you can keep campaigning forever.
Which is why there was so much outside interference and breaking of the Brexit campaign rules. No matter the cost it can’t be reversed.
> It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them
No such rule exists. Historically, it's been almost impossible to remove any piece of regulation or bureaucracy once it has taken root. Radical dismantling of institutions is a rare thing. That's the same for public services or, say, chat control. I did not expect Brexit to succeed: in fact it only happened because David Cameron had a whimsical moment of fairness and respected a referendum result, against general expectations since he had nothing to gain.
Looking back up the thread, we're equating nagging to construct something (chat control) with nagging to dismantle something (UK EU membership). And I suppose Scottish independence would have aspects of both construction and destruction. The pernicious things that are hard to change are attractive-sounding policy ideas, whether they build up edifices or tear them down.
The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.
When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.
This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.
An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
You’re right. That aspect of how Brexit was carried through was not acting in bad faith. The anti-European faction has been fighting since we joined to reverse it. Many other aspects of the process were in bad faith but people must be allowed to change their minds, disagree, pursue their faith.
The real problem here is that it should be easier to take powers away from them government than to grant them.
If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.
The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.
The first one mostly works but it generally has two problems. First, they just put "re-pass all the old junk that was about to expire" into this year's omnibus and then there's so much of it at once that the bad stuff gets re-enacted by default. That's better than the status quo but only a little. And second, you don't really want constraints on the government to expire. To some extent you can put those in the constitution, but a lot of this is things like anti-corruption laws that, if the current government is corrupt, they're not going to want to re-enact.
The second one is great. Direct democracy but you can only use it to repeal things. Let the general population veto the omnibus and make them go back and split it out.
As a EU citizen I'd ask for at least a 2/3 majority to let the UK back into the EU, maybe 3/4. They came, they were always skeptical, they left, they want to come back? Please demonstrate that you made up your mind and won't start thinking about another Brexit in less than 10 years.
Brexit can't just be undone. The UK would have to go through the full accession procedure. This would be much easier for the UK than for countries like Georgia, since the UK system hasn't diverged much, but the special agreements and exceptions the UK had would have be renegotiated from scratch.
Adding a new member state always requires unanimous consent from existing member states, for good and ill.
> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.
1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation.
2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.
> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized
Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.
The problem is the asymmetry. If the choices were «yes, but we can re-evaluate later» and «no, but we can re-evaluate later» then there wouldn’t be an issue. But especially with laws implemented at the EU level and not national level, it’s extremely difficult to get out of it after it’s been implemented. The choices are in practice, «yes, for the next foreseeable decades» and «no, for the next year».
As this very news item shows, it's not particularly easy to pass laws either; GDPR took over four years from the commission proposal to a final negotiated text.
We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.
Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated
Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.
And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
Well yeah, it's exploiting a problem in representative democracy. That doesn't work unless people become single issue voters on specifically that matter, and in that case, you can just screw over the public with something else.
It's not a flaw in representative democracy, it's a flaw in America as a whole. Most recently the public looked at the options before them, and chose to send in a slate of absolute lunatics in.
When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.
It is, but the sub thread is for whinging about the Patriot act and why a representative democracy never gets the chance to repeal it. (Wherein I argue that it has plenty of chances, it just isn't an important political issue compared to, well, everything.)
The problem is that for government power expansions/individual rights reductions, "Yes" can in fact be taken to mean "Yes forever, without ever revisiting the question". (The mechanism needn't be that there is literally no formal revisiting; it can be sufficient that weakening government power is politically untenable because whoever proposed it will be held accountable for every subsequent bad event that could hypothetically have been prevented with some unknown additional amount of government power.)
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.
It was an allusion to the tech industry's disrespect for users, when they don't give an option to say no, and please stop asking me, because the company really really wants you to say yes, and what they care about is more important than what the user cares about.
I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.
Well yes but even a no forever would be revisited under the right circumstances.
But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.
What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
Yes, and (at least in the US) we're seeing this in other contexts too. Tons and tons of rehashes of laws restricting abortion, voting rights, or just executive actions that are slightly different from ones previously ruled invalid. The question is "yes" or "no" to what, exactly.
This doesn't fit at all with how governance and politics works in reality. Rapid changes to society or a crisis can suddenly make deeply unpopular ideas very popular.
Great. Now, define how we can determine if two bills are the same 'your law' (Who decides? Lifetime-appointed partisan judges? The old legislature? The new legislature? The executive god-king?).
... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.
Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
I don't think you understand how legislatures around the world work, if you think this wouldn't be gamed to absurdity.
Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.
Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.
This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.
You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).
Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).
There's a big difference between hammering something down over and over again until protesters and opposition gives up and "situation has changed, lets revisit this".
That's why sites like this are so powerful. They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time.
This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time
I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.
We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.
I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.
I know in the US, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is highly involved in Net Neutrality and tech. I once had a long conversation with his aid who specialized in tech issues and was quite happy with what they were trying to do. I'd recommend reaching out to his team. I'd expect that they would be happy to work with you all and help you navigate the space.
> This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)
It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.
Both things I'm citing can work on a large scale with some effort, through the power of mass-deletion and auto-replying. I'm just not seeing how pushing some text towards a government representative compels them to act at all, especially when money and power are what's on the other end of the scale.
Well, maybe take a look at how this worked out? Because you're saying that all they have to do is delete the emails, but clearly that isn't what happened here.
The biggest difference is that there's little effort involved here. One click to send mass emails out to all relevant politicians. No they can not ignore a constant stream of emails from the electorate. Frankly, it doesn't seem like you understand why this site was different or effective.
I'm confused. The context here is talking about new legal developments. Has the UK passed something that justifies or makes getting away with the things you mentioned easier?
The job of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution, not pass laws. "Interpreting" the Constitution and concluding that it contains a right to abortion, when the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion, was an absurdly "creative" interpretation. The left was undermining the constitution long before Donald Trump started to do so.
The US Supreme Court has engaged in "creative interpretations" for a very, very long time, considering that amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible. There's been no meaningful changes in over half a century. So, the flawed system in the country has led to probably over a hundred years of picking apart largely arcane documents that are utterly disconnected from modern life in attempts to map brand new concepts and ideas to those old documents, no matter what. Hell, the current leading school of thought of conservative-aligned law is that interpreting the constitution should be done by imagining what people surely must've thought all those centuries ago. Oddly enough, doing so allows you to make those imaginary historical figures think in whatever way you like!
So, "the left" hasn't done it first, it's a practice that's much older than Roe v. Wade. Just see all the fun games that have long been played with using the Commerce Clause. And besides, your equation isn't fair in the slightest, where one of your sides undeniably grants people rights (even if on shaky grounds), while the other consolidates power and takes those rights away. But oddly enough, only the transgressions of the left have been mercifully corrected by the court, while some other new developments are to be left undisturbed for the foreseeable future. I wonder why?
I think you are unnecessarily dismissive about the past and its lessons. Human nature and nature of power hasn't changed that much since the 18th century.
In Continental Europe, the tradition is even longer and students of law start by studying Ancient Roman law, precisely in order to understand on which principles modern laws are built.
>amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible.
Amending the US constitution is not supposed to be easy. You are supposed to accomplish most tasks through legislation. I see no reason why the legality of abortion should not be accomplished through legislation. In any case, the constitution has been amended 17 times, most recently in 1992. I don't see any slam-dunk amendments which are in need of ratification. If amendments aren't being ratified, maybe it's because we don't have broad consensus on changes which should be made. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
With regard to the rest of your comment, you appear to be responding to something I didn't write. I didn't claim all transgressions were equivalent in magnitude, nor that "new developments" should be "left undisturbed". I think Trump is generally a terrible president. However, I see ways in which the left laid the foundations for Trump's transgressions by undermining the social contract in the US in a lot of different ways, and I want to persuade people that maintaining the social contract is inherently valuable in and of itself, the same way maintaining cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma is valuable.
It should definitely be difficult, the bar for changing a constitution is high in almost any functioning democracy. However, would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either? Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written, it seems undeniable that the rate has slowed dramatically, and the expansion of the country combined with the culture surrounding the constitution has effectively locked it. I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them. No justifications are needed, since the way the American public is taught, the US founders are almost demigods who foresaw every permutation of history centuries into the future, so any explanation that leans on their writing, no matter how contrived, is correct.
(Though, the difficulty of even passing laws is something I also noted, but omitted from the original comment. Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years? Why is the judicial branch the main arm of enacting changes for the current changes, with the legislature largely choosing to do increasingly fewer things as time goes on?)
Sorry about my snarky last paragraph - the last sentence of your original comment read as partisan for me, because the unspoken implication in it, at least to my ear, was that Trump's administration was the first on the right to meaningfully engage in judicial games (after the left had been doing it for a long time), and therefore that they're getting their fair comeuppance and making the score even.
>would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either?
I agree it shouldn't be impossible.
>Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written
I don't think that's a fair comparison since those initial "amendments" are more like changes to the first draft, and didn't go through the usual amendment process.
>I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them.
Agreed. Although, in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
>the US founders are almost demigods
They aren't demigods. But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results. (Keep in mind that right before the US Constitution was written, the union was on the verge of falling apart, and the main objective was simply to stabilize it.) My [non-expert!] view is something like: The founders' thinking about democracy was more lucid than, say, 90% of conversations about democracy today, but less lucid than, say, the top 1% of conversations about democracy today. I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid. (For example, many people think the President should be chosen based on the popular vote instead of the electoral college, and neglect several important advantages the electoral college has which make it a superior method in my view.)
As a concrete illustration of the "90% of conversations are less lucid" point: Voting systems theorists generally agree that ranked choice voting is inferior to plurality voting, but state ballot initiatives to replace plurality with ranked choice tend to fail. I expect if we rewrote the constitution, decisions would get made in this sort of manner. Perhaps one could handpick a team of experts to write a constitution that's actually better, but that would lack democratic legitimacy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ultimately, the path to improving the constitution lies in small-scale trial runs of better methods, and educating the public about e.g. the advantages of ranked choice over plurality.
>Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years?
They have done so, in many states. (I'm very pro-federalism.)
> in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
In a cynical way, I think that them being dysfunctional could actually be better at this point. On one hand, new pressing issues might not be seen, but on the other, no more new damage can be done.
> But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results.
I agree, the results are undeniable in some ways. My intention wasn't necessarily to berate the US founders, but point out the culture that has emerged surrounding them. It's not that they didn't have some good ideas, it's that people often tend to see them as universally infallible. If one can tie their proposal to something the founders thought (no matter how tenuous the connection is), the idea immediately gains merit just based on that alone.
While a nation like the US going on for so long without major reforms in its democracy is a commendable thing, the often-unquestioning reverence for anything from the period of its inception has prevented and will prevent people from patching any cracks that show up in the system with age. A government shouldn't ideally rock the boat too much, but it can't stagnate either, history has plenty of examples of both.
> I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid.
I think the modern understanding of most of these systems is unquestionably better, the issue that would prevent a better system from being formed isn't just the variety of conversations, but conflicting interests with overwhelming power. The US as it is today was founded by a fairly cohesive and tightly-knit bunch of people (at least, as far as I can understand), in an extremely different world. If the US was given a shot at complete reform today, you would have every major corporation and foreign government jumping in at the opportunity to pull any levers they could reach to ensure an outcome that's favorable to them. It would be a disaster. Hell, even with your example about people voting against ranked choice systems, it's not like all voters are actually informed (or even know anything) about either system. And every time these proposals crop up internationally, there's always lots of marketing in either direction from entities who would really like one outcome. Hence, the people tend to stay conservative and vote against changes.
If we got a panel of experts (or even just any sane people with a cohesive and compatible set of ideas) together, I think that today we have enough information to create systems that are vastly superior to either. The EC was created to address certain problems, but to me it seems to have interrupt the natural power of a vote too much and make the election system too prone to swings led by immensely tiny margins. But yeah, it wouldn't be strictly democratic in the sense that anyone could offer input - but neither was really the inception of the US, most people just chose what they perceived as the roughly better option as a package.
It's interesting that Peter Hummelgaard's former party comrade Henrik Sass Larsen recently got 4 months of prison for possession of child porn; 6200 pictures and 2200 videos.
So we are to believe Hummelgaard wants to protect children by enabling vast surveillance, so all the bad offenders out there can get ... 4 months in prison.
Its not really adding up. And he still hasn't presented any argument for the thing except that you are pro child abuse if you don't agree with him. I'm at the point where I hope he's corrupt and its not just all about power for him.
Yeah, when the punishment for thousands of images and videos is just four months, it really puts the whole "we need mass surveillance to protect kids" narrative under a harsh light
What’s really laughable about this is that they wanted politicians to be exempt from Chat Control regulation. As if politicians never do anything wrong.
If CC were ever implemented it should have a x year trial period where ONLY policymakers should be monitored.
As a Dane I am ashamed of the current government, but I didn't vote for them. Hopefully we'll get a more liberal government next year. But a lot of people seems to think that more surveillance means less crime. Problem is that this has not been proven.
The judge noted that given the publicity of the case, Henriks true penalty would be living in a country of 6 million people that all know his face and that he is a pedophile.
You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again. This isn’t the US after all…
No one with evidence of that quality would ever be elected in national politics in the US again. Say what you will about Trump but there is no evidence that he possesses CP.
Moreover, nobody with that quality of evidence against them would be sentenced to only 4 months - laxity for CSAM possessors is a european phenomenon and most pro-pedophilia activist groups are based in Europe. The average sentence for CSAM possession in the US is 70 months.
US also has the highest rate of imprisoned people in the world, I wouldn't follow them on sentencing. If revictivism is lower for short sentences then there is no reason to have long sentences, it isn't about punishing people it is about reducing problems for the rest of society.
> Henriks true penalty would be living in a country of 6 million people that all know his face and that he is a pedophile.
This is what I object to, not really your comment. Is this factored into the sentencing? If he weren't a public figure would he have a harsher sentence?
> You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again
Sure, if everyone in Denmark remembers this guy then he won't be popular. But really we don't have to worry about him? 4 months later is he just free to go back to collecting CP, maybe leave Denmark, etc?
I’m not sure how punishments are calculated, but surely a former politician pedophile remains dangerous - even if they don’t abuse children directly they will have residual power that they can use to harm children. Or maybe the low sentence is because of his existing power.
Its just not that illegal in Denmark. Something I would think minister of justice Hummelgaard should spend his time working on first, before pushing mass surveillance at the european level.
Directive 2011/92/EU article 5.2 would suggest no less than 1 year of imprisonment. Depending on how kindly you read the other articles, and given how much pornography instances he had, I'd argue for more.
Even ignoring all this, Directives do not themselves automatically become enforceable in member State's legal systems either - "Regulations" do, and this is not one, the trial will be conducted subject to Danish criminal law.
From first person experience, once a society creates a surveillance state, to protect whatever, an inevitable avalanche starts.
A new game will emerge in which the best players are the ones who excel at finding secrets of others and use them as leverage. We had a president on national TV threating a challenging candidate that he will reveal their secrets... Think about that for a moment and you'll find so many wrong things that this implicitly admits to.
The disease was a blessing compared to the complications of the cure.
I don't think a surveillance state is the root cause of authoritarianism, in that sense I believe it is a slippery slope fallacy. I am still very much against this kind of mass surveillance, simply I think this rhetoric is doing everyone a disservice.
We don't get authoritarianism without an actual will from a group of people with enough power and support to achieve it. Mass surveillance is simply a milestone on their path to oppression.
Care to provide an example? Just trying to be objective.
Historically, nearly all states have been surveillance states (including early America). all that has changed in the last ~30 years is technology (capability), and public attitude.
Mail snooping has been around as long as mail has been around. Warrantless wiretaps on telphone lines were around in just about every country that started having telephones, including the US. AT&T's NSA listening room (the company that invented telephones) isn't unique or special. Book ciphers were invented because snooping courier's messages was so common.
The NSA didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason either.
I'm not disagreeing with your view, I'm just saying that the anti-surveillance sentiment is particularly unique to the cultural "West", and to the post-WW2 generations.
This is disingenuous as a counter-argument because it's never been possible at this scale — perhaps excepting the Stasi. The sentiment has arisen because:
1) yes, people are more likely to fight it.
2) it's being done at an unprecedented and very intrusive scale.
Wiretapping required more labor on all fronts. Mail snooping the same.
If the "East" isn't fighting this, it might simply be because they see no recourse with their less democratic institutions. (I'm borrowing from you for this last point, I'd never presume the West to be as democratic as we'd like to believe.)
I can't speak for Europe, but in the west, a vast majority of people already accept that the government is doing mass surveillance, and they think it's a good thing. It is similar in China, India,etc.. from what I understand. I don't know enough about europe.
This scale has been possible since at least the mid 00's (20 years now , technically a historical fact). consider that most of the files in snowden's leak were from around '08.
for example ones porn history could be used against that person if he she wants to go for public office. So there is a chilling effect for watching porn.
Politics are dirty allready but the way down is deep.
Maybe they should "own it" instead? I don't think these days legal porn use would be all that harmful. but i don't disagree with your point.
But look at it this way, surveillance already exists, all major governments are hacking into people's phone and spying on them, and forcing telco's to do dragnet surveillance. chat control is about doing it at a greater scale and formalizing it for normal law enforcement use instead of things like counter-terrorism.
yes and I understand the benefit but i doubt the real world consequenzes. It would only filter the criminals
who are good at opsec and those who arent. imho elevating a more proffesional type of criminals.
Honestly most major crimes are money related. Get rid of papermoney and make digital payments traceable for law enforcement. I know there is something like gold bitcoin etc but at the end knowing how
money moves is more power then knowing what people are writing
I don’t trust Peter Hummelgaard at all. The way he is pushing for this law seems suspicious and I am wondering if there is a third party nudging him to pursue it. Maybe promising some position in the EU parlament.
His own party has a history of totalitarian initiatives. This is the "surveillance is freedom" party. He was surely getting pressured, but from within.
Its like a ocean wave, crashing against the cliff, year in, year out, proposal after proposal, waiting for that final atrocity, justifying pushing it through.
The white cliffs of Dover, with no plan on how to regain one day that land, once the crisis subsides. And no mechanism to prevent a permanent crisis, because the controls justify the manufacturing of endless crisis.
Unfortunately the ECJ’s orders aren’t strictly followed and they recently pretty much indicated they could support an atrocious law like ProtectEU. Perhaps to save face.
Courts are always the last line of defense, there is no way of avoiding that. Rights are never absolute, but have to be balanced against each other, and the courts are the arbiter of that.
Aside from that, raising public awareness like the Chat Control initiative did is the way to go. And voting in the EU Parliament elections.
Yes it is the way to go but politicians get fatigued because they keep pushing the same thing so often. Also the lobbyists have big bags of money to throw at it.
If you do not tax cooperate income away, or at least force them by law to bind it in investments, it will attack the surrounding containment vessel of laws and culture.
Protecting children is critically important, but turning every citizen into a potential suspect by default? That's not justice, that’s just lazy policy design. Honestly, this feels like one of those rare moments where political pressure and public backlash actually worked...
“Protecting children” is a red herring anyway. It’s never actually about the children, as they are more protected than ever and statistically it’s the safest ever in human history. I’d actually argue that children need less protection and more freedom.
Consideration of the proposal was moved to the 25th of November. So no it didn't reach a point where it could have any impact. I don't remember a single borgerforslag managing to have any impact though. Even if they made it to parliament in time.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I might think that the ruling class who so desperately want these kinds of powers are intentionally dividing nations and breaking down social cohesion so the populace must turn to the governments for protection. They're hoping to create societies where the people will beg them to scan private messages rather than to demand rights.
Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
> Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
I'm giving it 10 months or less. The rate at which things are worsening (in most aspects, not just this) seems to be rapidly climbing from my point of view.
The main purpose is to identify any nascent organization of political opposition to the status quo so it can be destroyed in its infancy with a minimum amount of resources. It will be used to solve some crimes too but solving crimes still involves a lot of manpower (expensive) and if they solved crime people would be less supportive of expanding surveillance powers even further so you don't really want to do a great job at that.
a) wanting to soon expand this scheme to catch criminal gang communication (violent narco-related crime is exploding in e.g. some northern EU countries) [center-right goal]
b) wanting to make people more nervous about what they post online (immigration vs crime etc is a hot topic that many want to cool down). [center-left goal]
I suppose that there might also be some naive idealists that primarily care about the stated goal.
In practice it is entirely about wanting to expand the power of the state and cement its supremacy over the rights of the individual.
Those other things are a means to this end. They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.
What country is where the state's primary purpose is to perpetuate the power of the state, and where the ruling class desperately want to take more power and rights from the people? Lots of them. Denmark, for one.
Yes I am right. And now allow me to observe and suggest: It sounds like you're having a bad day. Why don't you try again tomorrow if you feel better then?
what people dont get about mass surveilance is that big systeme are easy corrupted. for example if I want privat data about peoplw from police or assurance or state office there is a way to get them with money and connections.
So if mass surveilance is
implemented it would be missused for personal benefit of whoever has the money and the possibility
>>Nordic Waste is owned by the family of Torben Østergaard-Nielsen, reported to be the sixth richest person in Denmark. Last week, the Danish Ministry of the Environment issued an injunction against Nordic waste, and yesterday (22 January 2024) the company was declared bankrupt. The company has declared that this ends Nordic Waste’s liabilities.
It sounds like they're like the Dutch. The government is trusted because they've been shown to be trustworthy, but they are always accountable. If something dodgy happens, people are quick to point it out and demand action.
So it's not blind trust. I understand why Americans are so mistrusting of their government, it's because they are untrustworthy. The mistake is thinking everywhere in the world is like that.
Hummelgaard and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that they believe a backdoor can be made that would only be used occasionally only by the right authorities. Even some of the opposition seems to believe this.
When discussing politics in foreign countries, consider how much context you are missing. Those of us that live in the country and speak the language have consumed its news for years.
HN discussions about politics in foreign countries are bizarre
>Hummelgaard and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that they believe a backdoor can be made that would only be used occasionally only by the right authorities.
That's what every politician would say about restricting privacy, it's for the kids, it's in the right hands, we would never betray your trust.
>HN discussions about politics in foreign countries are bizarre
No really bizarre is your believe that 42yo -->justice<-- minister Hummelgaard is just a naive child who knows nothing about "Internet stuff"
In his own words: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services"
Jup the guy who was probably killed by his own military because talking with the USSR is against Nato strategy [1] funny how history repeats itself [2]
If you are so sure about that why wouldn’t they make it a domestic law instead of an EU wide law? I’m not American nor Danish and I certainly do not trust my government. Kind of naive - no one should trust their government in this day and age.
It’s also convenient that Denmark is essentially the US’ eyes and ears in Europe, who even spied on other nations for them.
Having a largely non corrupt government that enjoys the trust of the general population yields benefits on all levels of society. Its a big part of the reason these countries are the happiest and healthiest.
I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.
Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.
I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
The issue is that there is a place where this model ~is working. It's in China and Russia. The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.
The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies. They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for.
We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
Are you seriously trying to suggest that monitoring of all private messages in Russia and China has stopped child abuse images from being shared?
That is preposterous.
We dismiss the suggestion of removing the right to privacy precisely because it doesn’t stop these crimes but it does support political repression.
The crimes go on, only criticism of the government for failing to address them is stopped.
EDIT: the more I reread your post the more I suspect this might be exactly the point you are making. Sorry, too subtle for me first thing in the morning. Need more coffee.
That's not what they're saying. They're talking about how digital surveillance from governments leads to these governments staying in power
I think it is not clear.
"They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for."
That reads like just stating government perspective.
"We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."
But this says something different to me. Because yes, I do see it as a inherent flaw if governments focus is on things that are mainly good for the government. Government's job should be focusing on what is good for the people.
C'mon, we all know that the main reason for such laws is controlling dissent.
Allegedly, Spanish police is a great supporter of Chat Control, not because of CP, but because of them wanting to spy on Catalan and Basque separatists more effectively.
Is Catalan/Basque separatism still a thing, in the sense of violent outcomes (a la ETA)? I have the impression that it's become a fairly civil process (more along the lines of the Scottish or Bavarian independence movements)
Catalan separatism was never violent and the Basques concluded peace with Madrid, which holds. So it is all political.
Several Catalan politicians were prosecuted for holding an "illegal referendum" and had to hide in Belgium for some time.
I think when we want to get rid of violence to change borders (war), we must allow borders to be changed peacefully.
I don't know about China, but in Russia private conversations do not trigger immediate response and they do not control every possible means of communication. They simply do not have capacity to investigate every violation - too many people talk negatively about the government and ongoing events, so use reactive approach. People may get in trouble while being searched on the border crossing or after being reported by someone, but it is hardly different from border searches in USA. Things may change with their new messenger and disruption of WhatsApp and Telegram there (Russia just started blocking SMS verification codes making registration there difficult).
There's literally a white list of permitted sites now, supposedly only to be used when there's a 'drone threat'. Guess what, there are places in Russia where there's a constant 'drone threat' for at least half a year and vk.com is basically all they can use to communicate. Why would they start arresting people for private VK messages now, while their 'max' messenger is still struggling? It could wait until all other messengers are less than 10% market share, that way it won't impede adoption until it's the only option available.
They don’t need to monitor every conversation. Just enough that every conversation is a little risky. It’s the ability to read it all, if they want, that matters.
As far as I know, their biggest problem isn’t reading chats (if device seized and unlocked, not a problem at all regardless of service and encryption level), but listening encrypted calls. This one really bothers them and WhatsApp appears to be threat number one. I don’t know anything about the scale of CSAM distribution there, but I think they don’t need ChatControl-like technology for dealing with it. ChatControl was worse than Russian surveillance state, maybe on par with Chinese tech.
> The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.
Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?
Yes Its an argument for the general public to think of their interests and that the interests of general public says to never do it
But they aren't thinking of our interests, they are thinking of theirs which is what I think that the parent comment wanted to share that their and our interests are fundamentally conflicting and so we must fight for our right I suppose as well.
It is also hard for me to understand this angle. While in Russia at the moment and China the "they" is pretty much constant, it is not the case in EU. Why would be in their interest something that can be used against them the moment the tide turns?
> Why would be in their interest something that can be used against them the moment the tide turns?
They are doing this to prevent tide turn and personally, I feel like if both/many political parties agree to something like chat-control and agree that they make it a bi-partisan issue, then they can fundamentally do it and the "they" would be constant
Also the "they" here also refers to lobbying efforts. The billionaires/millionaires/rich people might like these things solely because it increases the influence of govt. and thus the rich people as well
As an example, Let me present to you the UK censorship act which tries to threaten any and every website with a very large price which is very scary to many people who have thus shut down their services / websites to UK at large if they were a niche project/couldn't do it
Internet as we speak, would continue on to become more centralized. I feel like the idea here is that make internet so centralized that you can control the flow of information itself(I mean it already is but there are still some spots left like hackernews as an example)
Its also one step towards authoritarianism. This could be a stepping stone for something even larger which could have a more constant "they" as well but I have already provided some reasonings as to why they do that, simply because they can and chat control gives them a way to do mass surveillance which is something which to me increases the infleunece of both parties or the whole system massively in a way which feels very threatening to freedom/democracy making it thus dystopian.
But in those countries the intended goal is not just to stop CSAM, but primarily to censor communications and suppress the opposition from voicing their opinion. If you still want to give our politicians the benefit of doubt, then they don't, after all, want to actually censor communications in the same way to destroy democracy.
This is not because I support their mass surveillance proposal, I am strongly against it. I think that the politicians are naive (maybe even to the point of warranting the label stupid) and ignore the huge risks that exists of future governments to start using the mass surveillance platform, once it is in place, to start doing actual censorship. I am also extremely worried about the slow scope creep that will inevitably result from this; today it starts with CSAM and terrorism, next year it is about detecting recruiting of gang members, and in a couple of years it is about detecting small-scale drug transactions.
It is barely relevant to even think about the personal opinions of politicians, if the systemic outcome is the same.
> The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies
I know that. The problem it is evil, not that it is stupid and silly.
The whole point is that I do not want to give government power over me like it happened in China and Russia.
With "think about children" as smokescreen.
> We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
The inherent flaw is: It is despotic and only serves despots and their minions, at the cost of oppressing the majority of people.
That just sounds like advocating for these policies is inherently undemocratic, in a Western understanding of democracy. Which is even worse than the policies simply being ineffective at their stated goals. Leadership being challenged is an essential part of our (stated) government system
EDIT: I improved my comprehension, and it looks like I agree actually, not disagree.
I agree, it's a great, proven tool to do away with political enemies, and to selectively enforce the law, for whatever motivation.
I just don't understand what you mean by
>We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
We (as in, "the people") don't do any disservice for us by opposing such an effort. Specifically because we are also looking at what goes on in Russia and China to name a few. Authoritarian regimes do "work", but don't, generally, want that kind of working over here in Europe for example.
I think they meant it's a disservice to act like these panopticons are inefficient/ineffective and thus not a real threat. Even current-gen AI plus mass surveillance would make it trivially easy to build dossiers and trawl communications for specific ideas.
Thanks for the clarification, it went over my head. Re-reading the comment chain multiple times it's now clear that OP was alluding to the ulterior motive, and the ulterior motive being effective, which I agree with. Again, thanks for taking the time to clarify.
those are not democracies. thats why unchallanged. if chalanged you might fly out of the window or disappear for some years for "re-education".
You're responding to a completely different thing:
>many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to (total surveillance)
It's not about the malicious elites. These societal problems surveillance keeps being pushed for never get fixed in either China or Russia. Yet people (not just politicians) keep pushing for it or at the very least ignoring the push. A decade+ after the push, things like KYC/AML regulations are not even controversial anymore, and never even were for most people. Oh, these are banks! Of course they need the info on your entire life because how else would you stop money laundering, child molesters, or shudders those North Koreans? What, are you a criminal?
And of course you somehow manage to blame the usual bad guys for something that happens in your society, because of course they're inherently evil and are always the reason for your problems. Guess what, the same often happens there and they copy your practices. Don't you have your own agency?
The reality is that the majority in any place in the world doesn't see privacy, or most of their or others' rights for that matter, worth fighting for. Having the abundancy and convenience is enough.
That last point is even enough as demonstrated by the swiss people voting for the eID, democratically paving the way for future mass surveillance and total dependency to our iOS and Android locked bootloaders overlords. As stated further down this is all stemming from education.
>As stated further down this is all stemming from education.
This is the downside of public education: the state isn't incentivised to teach you things that could undermine its power.
It's working. But that's at the expense of individuals. Unless you consider people are just meat working for the all powerful state.
How ~is it working there though? Is there less CSAM going around in these places?
Literally the end of the same sentence says how it's working:
> do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.
Yes it had a great impact on political opposition. Such a weird coincidence that the politicians who want to keep their unlimited power indefinietly supporting a way of catching opposition early.
I guess this is what we need in the West too. Lets just cement the current ruling class in for decades.
Why do you think that the Chinese "value" having political opposition? They're the largest developing economy in the world.
What is your sales pitch? "Hey, you guys should try having a less stable government, in exchange you'll get some abstract platitudes about freedom and privacy."
Really? It’s working? No crime, no abuse, it has stopped perfectly or near so compared to other countries all of the things, like CSAM, that proponents want it to?
Your comment is precisely what I mean when I said people end up fixating on #1 to the exclusion of #2.
Yes - it is working exactly towards the goals of the governments that are using it (which is not "stopping CSAM")
No, you have talked past my actual comment, inserted your own "control dissent, remain in power" purpose for this instead of what I actually said in my comment.
I didn't claim "there are no problems that can be solved or goals achieved by means of mass/total surveillance". My topic was societal problems. The political dilemma "how do I retain power and curtail disagreement?" isn't in this category.
Right there are no pedos or child abuse in Russia and China? I kinda doubt it.
"proven effective model" -- lol what?
This is simply not true, this is Western paranoid fantasy. It's also the kind of fantasy that allows escalation of surveillance and censorship. You should look up the "missile gap."
Also, Russian and especially Chinese leadership doesn't go unchallenged. Chinese leadership has had many transitions. While Putin has squatted on the leadership of Russia for a very long time now, it isn't because he's not popular, and he's forced to do a lot of things he'd rather not do because of pressure on his leadership.
How do the neoliberal rulers in the West stay on top with extreme minorities of popular support, like in France or the UK? Why does popular opinion have no effect on the politics of the US*, and why are its politics completely run by two private clubs with the same billionaire financial supporters (that also finance politics all over the rest of the West)? How do they do it without massive surveillance, censorship and information control? Or a better question: how can we be given the evidence of massive surveillance efforts and huge operations dedicated to censorship and information control, over and over again, and still point to the East when we talk about the subject? Isn't that "whataboutism"?
* "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595
Chinese Communist Party leadership had many transitions before Xi Jinping purged all rivals and alternative power centers, and personally took control of all key decision making. It will be "interesting" to see what happens when he finally dies.
In the 2000s a law was passed in Denmark that allowed for extensive logging of internet traffic.
But the ISPs couldn't implement it in a practical way and essentially refused until they were given something doable. That ended up, in some cases, being "register every 500th TCP package" (or similar; it might've been DNS lookup).
At the same time, if the police wanted actual digital surveillance, they'd just contact the ISP and say "Hey, can we get ALL the traffic for this one person who is under suspicion?" and the ISPs would, in some cases I'm familiar with, comply without a court order. So there was a clear path of execution for actual surveillance while at the same time this political circus made no sense.
Imagine you're surveilling a place for criminal activity and you're recording one second of audio every 8 minutes. Surely gold nuggets are gonna leak out of that.
I think a lot of this is rooted in the basic world view people have. Those with a conservative mindset will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path, which they are naturally inclined to; while those with a liberal mindset consider humans to be inherently kind and only misguided by circumstances and their environment.
Most people can pretty clearly relate to one of these perspectives over the other, and it’s pretty clear what actions follow from that.
I think that's a little simplistic, I have liberal (in the British English sense) views specifically because I think humanity is fundamentally flawed. If we are all flawed particularly when it comes to wielding power over others, it's self-evident in my opinion that governments should be limited and the total power any individual or institution can amass should have a hard ceiling. I see explicit anti-authoritarianism as a necessary counterweight to our flawed nature, every exercise of political power is potentially harmful but through the ideas developed in the Enlightenment it can at least be contained and controlled.
Humans are inherently flawed and they're inherently kind. We're evolutionarily primed for competition and cooperation. Antisocial behaviour can be both inherent and environmental. I feel you might be setting up a false dichotomy when the motivations for political beliefs are often pretty complex and varied.
That is at best simplistic, and at worst completely inaccurate.
It is common for "liberal" governments, as in the UK at the moment, who are inclined to pass censorship, surveillance and control (of people's lives) laws. It is also common for "conservative" governments to do the same.
What is very common is for people to think themselves and people like themselves to be naturally kind and people unlike themselves as fundamentally flawed.
You’re talking about parties, while I was referring to ideology. And in ideological terms, while a HN comment isn’t scientific, I think I represented the ideology of conservatism and liberalism correctly here, so call out the social sciences over that.
That's absurd. “Conservatives think people are bad, liberals think people are good” is primary-school-level reductionism.
Conservatives generally see people as capable of self-direction and argue for minimal interference because virtue needs room to act.
Progressives also tend to see people as capable of good, but assume outcomes depend on systems, so they push for more state involvement to improve those conditions.
Neither thinks humans are irredeemable. Both generally believe humans are inherently kind. The difference is whether you trust individuals or bureaucracies to manage human weakness.
Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general. Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them. So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.
This is an even more absurd reply.
> Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general.
I’m neither American nor using US partisan definitions. I’m using the terms as they’re broadly understood in political theory and history.
> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them.
That’s a paternalist or technocratic premise, not a conservative one. Classical conservatism accepts human fallibility but trusts evolved social norms not bureaucracy to contain it. The belief that people must be centrally guided is the antithesis of that tradition.
> So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.
You might try the same. Hobbes wasn’t a conservative - he was an absolutist. Quoting him to define conservatism is like citing Marx to define capitalism.
> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them
Who made this definition, left wing scholars? I doubt many conservative persons would say this.
You could just as well say that this is the central pillar of communism, that people need to be controlled since they are too evil if they are free to form companies and structure themselves. Or that this is the central pillar of social democracy, that without big taxes and central institutions to spend peoples money on things that benefits them they will make bad choices and not get the things they need.
Every government is about taking control from the people, I don't get what you mean that conservatives would do this more than any other group.
I feel the entire philosophical distinction is tainted to the point where it should be retired and no longer discussed. It was useful as a thought experiment but folks in general have shown they are completely unable to understand this and instead treat it as some tribal dogma to which they must choose allegiance. It's become harmful.
I say it should be kept in the university library under lock and key, something philosophy professors can sit and debate in their spare time behind closed doors. /s
Parties are associated with ideologies and supported by people who share their ideologies.
> I think I represented the ideology of conservatism and liberalism correctly here, so call out the social sciences over that.
If you are saying that you there is a correct definition within the social sciences, can you cite an authoritative source for that?
In any case you were talking about "the world view people have" and I think your definition correlates very poorly with those of people one would normally describe as "liberal" or "conservative". I am not even sure which mindset you associate with the "monitor and control" mentality. I think you mean its a conservative mindset, but a lot of the people I know who most strongly oppose it are conservative or Conservative (as in members of the party that has the word in its name).
This might be a US vs UK difference, of course. These are not words that are really used very consistently within societies, let alone between them.
> so call out the social sciences over that.
Happy to do so if that is what they say!
> If you are saying that you there is a correct definition within the social sciences, can you cite an authoritative source for that?
You can start at Wikipedia, for example, which quotes Thomas Hobbes:
> the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralized authority with royal sovereignty to guarantee law and order.
And further:
> Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by political scientist Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative view of human nature and pessimism of the potential to improve it through 'utopian' schemes.
I don’t mean to insinuate "conservatives are evil and want to spy on citizens", but merely that they are generally more inclined to believe people are inherently incapable of behaving well, so they need to be nudged towards the right thing. Really believing this makes it far more likely to view government monitoring as a plausible solution to the problem they see. And again, I’m saying this without implying any judgement.
> Those with a conservative mindset
I have.
> will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures
I do.
> that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path
No. When people are misguided that will even more apply to those in power and with weapons. The fact that I view everyone as likely misguided means nobody should have any say over the other.
The modern trend to frame conservatism and authoritarianism as "the same thing" is very bad and leads to the normalization of authoritarianism.
>Those with a conservative mindset will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path, which they are naturally inclined to; while those with a liberal mindset consider humans to be inherently kind and only misguided by circumstances and their environment.
It is also this mindset of wanting to micromanage things/people in hope for better performance. Those are the usually the ones pushing for scanning people's private messages. People like Stalin and Mao would love stuff like that. The urge to micro-manage is a very band-aid type of solution and not dealing with complexity of the situation.
These are American boxes. Skewed by American culture. Simplistic to the absurd extent where it can mean the tail leads the dog i.e. people will adopt some viewpoint they're actually at odds with deep down. More tribalism than any fundamental ground truth.
Poe's law strikes again. This has to be satire, right?
> As though it would 1) be a practical possibility
Well that's kind of the thing. With AI it is. In theory, they can now monitor all of us at the same time on a scale never before thought possible. The time of "big brother has better things to do than monitor you specifically" is over.
I think the O^n problem of attention & memory means that with AI it still really isn’t all that possible either.
Then are able to record everything now, they are able to add "AI" to it. The "AI" will tell them some result. They will prosecute based on that. The fact that "AI" isn't something that can reliable "monitor" people is something they won't care about.
Regarding #2 Be effective:
I have always felt like what these services would do is to push towards things like matrix/signal etc. and matrix is decentralized as an example so they can't really do chat control there but my idea of chat control was always similar to UK in the sense that they are gonna scare a lot of people to host services like this which bypass intentionally or unintentionally this because if they bypass it, they would have to pay some hefty fees and that possibility itself scares people similar to what is happening in the UK itself.
VPN's are a good model maybe except that once they get on the chopping block, they might break the internet even further similar to chinese censorship really. Maybe even fragmenting the internet but it would definitely both scare and scar the internet for sure.
> wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again
"Ideas are bulletproof, Mr Creedy". It's valid for good and bad ideas.
The real root cause of many societal problems is that a significant portion of the population everywhere across the world is either unable or unwilling to think more than one step ahead. This why I believe most dumb decisions are voted for. One immigrant was bad? Lets ban all immigrants. One criminal slipped the police? Lets allow spying on his chat and catch him. Etc.
People refuse to think ahead, or simply can't.
Countries like Denmark are civilised and do spend literally billions on trying to protect and nourish children. And it is a credit to these nations and the people who dwell in them.
But the reality is that there will always be a scumbag dad who decides to molest his daughter.
HN assumes evil but this is a "road paved with good intentions" kind of deal.
In this particular case it is obviously evil and misguided. There is no "iron wall" around EU phones or EU computers, a criminal can install literally anything on their PC and almost anything on their phones. So the real actual criminal won't be affected by the change at all, they will use software without backdoors for their shady stuff. This is obvious to everyone really, so this leads to a conclusion that the real reason for the enforced breaking of encryption is to spy on the political opposition, on the business competitors and in general promote a healthy fear and paranoia in society. Just what we need, in the age when EU enemies are acquiring more and more collaborators and tools inside EU, to disrupt and hopefully destroy the union.
> HN assumes evil but this is a "road paved with good intentions" kind of deal.
They are the same picture. Every evil person thinks they have good intentions. The Nazis were literally thinking and saying they resurrect the German nation and lead Germany to the eternal, "thousand year long" empire.
"...talking 5 minutes with the average voter" and all that. Ironically, lots of these people are meanwhile fine with "AI glasses" being used everywhere. They just haven't thought it through. What if a pedophile wears them?
It's like surveillance logic eats itself in the end. What really gets me is how often these proposals skip over the part where we ask whether they actually work
Funny thing is that people are all ok with reading chats but as soon as you touch their mail they go apeshit. (Note: it is officially illegal to open mail not addressed to you, even for law enforcement unless they have a very specific court order)
>people are all ok with reading chats
Eh, no?
> I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
.. and stored! Which is the worst part, IMO, because once you have a record it's only a matter of time until it reaches the wrong hands.
There is a way to once and for all prevent this.
More IT people in politics.
The mass-surveillance proponents will always exist in small numbers, but it gets revived every other month because the number of ignorant politicians receptive to the idea is a function of their ignorance and malformed understanding of reality.
But that isn't their fault.
It's the magic tech companies are selling - and it's knowledgeable individuals who have to effectively communicate and explain bullshit.
Right the IT people who work for Google and Facebook and would sell their own mother for stock options.
Luckily people who spend all day looking at screens make for notoriously bad politicians.
No silly, politicians specifically will exempt from such monitoring. So duh, not every single person will be monitored.
There is a different problem at play behind this. There are strong lobbying efforts that want this tech/system, for their own reasons which are not being advocated to the public. At the same time, the lobbying forces behind this are pushing a random assortment of "popular" reasons to implement it - "think of the children/vegetables/climate". All this crap is not being driven by grassroots movements. To the extent those are involved, they are being manipulated and sheepherded. A lot of politics, if not all of it, are driven by real reasons separated from the methods used to push it through. See Brexit, MAGA, and a lot of other crap :-/. As happens in other countries, I see the politicians in my own country implementing a lot of random policies that have no popular support, but is quite relevant to some inner circle and network of policitians and their friends.
I agree, the ghost of Stalin is right behind the curtain waiting for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th chance at making it work ("oh, no but this time we will REALLY get it right and eliminate only all the REAL enemies of the people")
It's because European socialist heritage.
Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."
"Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy."
There were less social problems back then. Better times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Now we just do the same, more efficiently, with AI spies.
>It's because European socialist heritage, Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."
Have you ever heard of the Red Scare "McCarthyism" or the Patriot Act? The EU is the opposite of East Germany, nothing was inherited; they were robbed and left behind.
The US already fought over this in 90s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_wars
Just last year, France used similar argument of "exporting illegal encryption against Telegram" to get the master keys to decrypt all end-to-end encrypted messages:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41359745
The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did. The secret legacy police is still going strong in countries like Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, as we have seen from the cases where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.
>The US already fought over this in 90s:
Patriot Act was in 2001, you dont have to break encryption when the NSA can sniff at the source, but let's not just stop there have a look at this:
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeli...
>The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did.
And what has that to do with "socialist heritage"? IF East Germany had a proper purge then nothing was inherited into the EU right?
>where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.
Yes and then there was Watergate...but again what has Nixon in common with socialism? And maybe have a look at "Merkelphone" when "Friends spy on Friends"
https://theconversation.com/merkelphone-scandal-shocks-europ...
You contradict yourself.
> when the NSA can sniff at the source
That's not how end-to-end encryption works.
Are there for example cases where NSA is sniffing Signal app, or even WhatsApp "at source"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
>That's not how end-to-end encryption works.
Hell even the German police can "access" Whats-Up/Facebook.
>>German security forces can access personal Whatsapp messages of any user even without installing spyware, several German media institutions reported.
>>attains the information of suspects via "Whatsapp Web."
https://www.dailysabah.com/world/europe/german-police-can-ac...
And btw the NSA for example is "at first" more interested in metadata, if interesting, cracking of data will begin sometimes talk with big business.
I stop here have a good day.
No, German police cannot access encrypted WhatsApp messages.
They specifically state in the introduction of Chat Control act that the reason for the banning end-to-end encrypted communications is that criminals use WhatsApp and police cannot crack the message, hence the Chat Control act. The police cannot crack these messages and they want to read everyone's messages and that's the whole point of making encryption illegal.
If you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can read more about Chat Control and encryption here:
https://edri.org/our-work/chat-control-what-is-actually-goin...
i dont want to be the guy but the law is not about police having acces to private messages. As far as I understood they want to scan content for csam material by hashing. and if positive police geta involved. Or am I wrong? Maybe I misunderstood something.
but this is still somehow breaking encryption.
> The last chance for an agreement under Danish leadership is in December; the government in Copenhagen apparently preferred a compromise without chat control to no agreement at all. The current regulation, which allows the large platform providers to voluntarily and actively search for potential depictions of abuse, expires next spring after extension. It is precisely this voluntariness that Denmark's Minister of Justice now wants to codify within the framework of the future CSA regulation, which also contains a multitude of other, less controversial projects. [1]
Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Denmark-surprisingly-abandons-p...
The "Yes"/"Maybe Later" school of governance.
Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
Wait, so people who maintain strong beliefs that disagree with you long enough to ‘win’ are acting in bad faith (brexit), but working for 10 years to re-enter the EU wouldn’t be?
That’s a tough bar to get past…
There’s an entropy factor involved though.
It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them.
We, the UK, will never be able to rejoin the EU on the same sweetheart terms as we had previously. That’s gone and can’t be replicated.
In much the same way as those campaigning for Scottish independence continue to campaign forever no matter how many referendums they loose, no one will be able to recreate the UK if they succeed.
You need the thinest majority to win and you can keep campaigning forever.
Which is why there was so much outside interference and breaking of the Brexit campaign rules. No matter the cost it can’t be reversed.
> It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them
No such rule exists. Historically, it's been almost impossible to remove any piece of regulation or bureaucracy once it has taken root. Radical dismantling of institutions is a rare thing. That's the same for public services or, say, chat control. I did not expect Brexit to succeed: in fact it only happened because David Cameron had a whimsical moment of fairness and respected a referendum result, against general expectations since he had nothing to gain.
Looking back up the thread, we're equating nagging to construct something (chat control) with nagging to dismantle something (UK EU membership). And I suppose Scottish independence would have aspects of both construction and destruction. The pernicious things that are hard to change are attractive-sounding policy ideas, whether they build up edifices or tear them down.
The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.
When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.
This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.
An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
You’re right. That aspect of how Brexit was carried through was not acting in bad faith. The anti-European faction has been fighting since we joined to reverse it. Many other aspects of the process were in bad faith but people must be allowed to change their minds, disagree, pursue their faith.
The real problem here is that it should be easier to take powers away from them government than to grant them.
If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.
The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.
Constitutional clause that mandates sunsetting of laws could work for that.
Also, any sort of "vetoing direct democracy", where voters can repeal a law.
The first one mostly works but it generally has two problems. First, they just put "re-pass all the old junk that was about to expire" into this year's omnibus and then there's so much of it at once that the bad stuff gets re-enacted by default. That's better than the status quo but only a little. And second, you don't really want constraints on the government to expire. To some extent you can put those in the constitution, but a lot of this is things like anti-corruption laws that, if the current government is corrupt, they're not going to want to re-enact.
The second one is great. Direct democracy but you can only use it to repeal things. Let the general population veto the omnibus and make them go back and split it out.
As a EU citizen I'd ask for at least a 2/3 majority to let the UK back into the EU, maybe 3/4. They came, they were always skeptical, they left, they want to come back? Please demonstrate that you made up your mind and won't start thinking about another Brexit in less than 10 years.
Brexit can't just be undone. The UK would have to go through the full accession procedure. This would be much easier for the UK than for countries like Georgia, since the UK system hasn't diverged much, but the special agreements and exceptions the UK had would have be renegotiated from scratch.
Adding a new member state always requires unanimous consent from existing member states, for good and ill.
I was an EU citizen. Then I wasn't. Being an EU citizen means nothing.
> Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%)
So like France and Germany?
> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.
1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation. 2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.
> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized
Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.
That is the only way to run a government.
Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
We aren't at the end of history.
The problem is the asymmetry. If the choices were «yes, but we can re-evaluate later» and «no, but we can re-evaluate later» then there wouldn’t be an issue. But especially with laws implemented at the EU level and not national level, it’s extremely difficult to get out of it after it’s been implemented. The choices are in practice, «yes, for the next foreseeable decades» and «no, for the next year».
As this very news item shows, it's not particularly easy to pass laws either; GDPR took over four years from the commission proposal to a final negotiated text.
We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.
Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated
[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/PIN/?uri=CELEX:52...
Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.
And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
The US public reconsiders it every time it sends a new congress in. Congress can repeal it in any session, they don't need to wait for it to expire.
Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.
Well yeah, it's exploiting a problem in representative democracy. That doesn't work unless people become single issue voters on specifically that matter, and in that case, you can just screw over the public with something else.
The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.
It's not a flaw in representative democracy, it's a flaw in America as a whole. Most recently the public looked at the options before them, and chose to send in a slate of absolute lunatics in.
When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.
This thread is literally about Denmark and the European Union.
It is, but the sub thread is for whinging about the Patriot act and why a representative democracy never gets the chance to repeal it. (Wherein I argue that it has plenty of chances, it just isn't an important political issue compared to, well, everything.)
The problem is that for government power expansions/individual rights reductions, "Yes" can in fact be taken to mean "Yes forever, without ever revisiting the question". (The mechanism needn't be that there is literally no formal revisiting; it can be sufficient that weakening government power is politically untenable because whoever proposed it will be held accountable for every subsequent bad event that could hypothetically have been prevented with some unknown additional amount of government power.)
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.
It was an allusion to the tech industry's disrespect for users, when they don't give an option to say no, and please stop asking me, because the company really really wants you to say yes, and what they care about is more important than what the user cares about.
I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.
Well yes but even a no forever would be revisited under the right circumstances.
But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.
What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
Yes, and (at least in the US) we're seeing this in other contexts too. Tons and tons of rehashes of laws restricting abortion, voting rights, or just executive actions that are slightly different from ones previously ruled invalid. The question is "yes" or "no" to what, exactly.
Politics should follow the exponential backoff model xD
Every time your law fails to pass you cannot revisit it for a longer period of time.
1year 5years 10years Etc
Means that laws with enough political will get passed, but bad laws can be more easily blocked.
This doesn't fit at all with how governance and politics works in reality. Rapid changes to society or a crisis can suddenly make deeply unpopular ideas very popular.
Great. Now, define how we can determine if two bills are the same 'your law' (Who decides? Lifetime-appointed partisan judges? The old legislature? The new legislature? The executive god-king?).
... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.
Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
I don't think you understand how legislatures around the world work, if you think this wouldn't be gamed to absurdity.
Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.
Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.
This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.
You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).
Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).
If it was that simple then no legislature anywhere would ever pass any bill already. Evidently there are countermeasures to these things.
>Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
That's pretty much what the US constitution is. Once something's in it, it doesn't realistically get out of it.
The bar for adding something to it is the same bar for removing something from it. It's not 50%.
There's a big difference between hammering something down over and over again until protesters and opposition gives up and "situation has changed, lets revisit this".
That's why sites like this are so powerful. They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time.
This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time
I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.
We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.
I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.
I know in the US, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is highly involved in Net Neutrality and tech. I once had a long conversation with his aid who specialized in tech issues and was quite happy with what they were trying to do. I'd recommend reaching out to his team. I'd expect that they would be happy to work with you all and help you navigate the space.
> This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)
It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.
Mass emailing is effective because it's en masse. Hence the success in this situation. The things you're citing are the opposite of this approach.
Both things I'm citing can work on a large scale with some effort, through the power of mass-deletion and auto-replying. I'm just not seeing how pushing some text towards a government representative compels them to act at all, especially when money and power are what's on the other end of the scale.
Well, maybe take a look at how this worked out? Because you're saying that all they have to do is delete the emails, but clearly that isn't what happened here.
The biggest difference is that there's little effort involved here. One click to send mass emails out to all relevant politicians. No they can not ignore a constant stream of emails from the electorate. Frankly, it doesn't seem like you understand why this site was different or effective.
> Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.
Politicians never step back. They only pause.
Definitely feels like something to keep watching closely
As always...
[flagged]
Or the UK, or Saudi Arabia, or…
What's happening to women in the UK? I genuinely haven't heard of anything going on there, so I'm just asking for clarification.
Stalking, harassment, rape.
I'm confused. The context here is talking about new legal developments. Has the UK passed something that justifies or makes getting away with the things you mentioned easier?
I was just replying to your comment as-is.
The job of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution, not pass laws. "Interpreting" the Constitution and concluding that it contains a right to abortion, when the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion, was an absurdly "creative" interpretation. The left was undermining the constitution long before Donald Trump started to do so.
The US Supreme Court has engaged in "creative interpretations" for a very, very long time, considering that amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible. There's been no meaningful changes in over half a century. So, the flawed system in the country has led to probably over a hundred years of picking apart largely arcane documents that are utterly disconnected from modern life in attempts to map brand new concepts and ideas to those old documents, no matter what. Hell, the current leading school of thought of conservative-aligned law is that interpreting the constitution should be done by imagining what people surely must've thought all those centuries ago. Oddly enough, doing so allows you to make those imaginary historical figures think in whatever way you like!
So, "the left" hasn't done it first, it's a practice that's much older than Roe v. Wade. Just see all the fun games that have long been played with using the Commerce Clause. And besides, your equation isn't fair in the slightest, where one of your sides undeniably grants people rights (even if on shaky grounds), while the other consolidates power and takes those rights away. But oddly enough, only the transgressions of the left have been mercifully corrected by the court, while some other new developments are to be left undisturbed for the foreseeable future. I wonder why?
I think you are unnecessarily dismissive about the past and its lessons. Human nature and nature of power hasn't changed that much since the 18th century.
In Continental Europe, the tradition is even longer and students of law start by studying Ancient Roman law, precisely in order to understand on which principles modern laws are built.
>amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible.
Amending the US constitution is not supposed to be easy. You are supposed to accomplish most tasks through legislation. I see no reason why the legality of abortion should not be accomplished through legislation. In any case, the constitution has been amended 17 times, most recently in 1992. I don't see any slam-dunk amendments which are in need of ratification. If amendments aren't being ratified, maybe it's because we don't have broad consensus on changes which should be made. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
With regard to the rest of your comment, you appear to be responding to something I didn't write. I didn't claim all transgressions were equivalent in magnitude, nor that "new developments" should be "left undisturbed". I think Trump is generally a terrible president. However, I see ways in which the left laid the foundations for Trump's transgressions by undermining the social contract in the US in a lot of different ways, and I want to persuade people that maintaining the social contract is inherently valuable in and of itself, the same way maintaining cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma is valuable.
It should definitely be difficult, the bar for changing a constitution is high in almost any functioning democracy. However, would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either? Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written, it seems undeniable that the rate has slowed dramatically, and the expansion of the country combined with the culture surrounding the constitution has effectively locked it. I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them. No justifications are needed, since the way the American public is taught, the US founders are almost demigods who foresaw every permutation of history centuries into the future, so any explanation that leans on their writing, no matter how contrived, is correct.
(Though, the difficulty of even passing laws is something I also noted, but omitted from the original comment. Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years? Why is the judicial branch the main arm of enacting changes for the current changes, with the legislature largely choosing to do increasingly fewer things as time goes on?)
Sorry about my snarky last paragraph - the last sentence of your original comment read as partisan for me, because the unspoken implication in it, at least to my ear, was that Trump's administration was the first on the right to meaningfully engage in judicial games (after the left had been doing it for a long time), and therefore that they're getting their fair comeuppance and making the score even.
>would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either?
I agree it shouldn't be impossible.
>Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written
I don't think that's a fair comparison since those initial "amendments" are more like changes to the first draft, and didn't go through the usual amendment process.
>I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them.
Agreed. Although, in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
>the US founders are almost demigods
They aren't demigods. But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results. (Keep in mind that right before the US Constitution was written, the union was on the verge of falling apart, and the main objective was simply to stabilize it.) My [non-expert!] view is something like: The founders' thinking about democracy was more lucid than, say, 90% of conversations about democracy today, but less lucid than, say, the top 1% of conversations about democracy today. I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid. (For example, many people think the President should be chosen based on the popular vote instead of the electoral college, and neglect several important advantages the electoral college has which make it a superior method in my view.)
As a concrete illustration of the "90% of conversations are less lucid" point: Voting systems theorists generally agree that ranked choice voting is inferior to plurality voting, but state ballot initiatives to replace plurality with ranked choice tend to fail. I expect if we rewrote the constitution, decisions would get made in this sort of manner. Perhaps one could handpick a team of experts to write a constitution that's actually better, but that would lack democratic legitimacy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ultimately, the path to improving the constitution lies in small-scale trial runs of better methods, and educating the public about e.g. the advantages of ranked choice over plurality.
>Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years?
They have done so, in many states. (I'm very pro-federalism.)
>Sorry about my snarky last paragraph
Apology accepted, respect!
> in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
In a cynical way, I think that them being dysfunctional could actually be better at this point. On one hand, new pressing issues might not be seen, but on the other, no more new damage can be done.
> But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results.
I agree, the results are undeniable in some ways. My intention wasn't necessarily to berate the US founders, but point out the culture that has emerged surrounding them. It's not that they didn't have some good ideas, it's that people often tend to see them as universally infallible. If one can tie their proposal to something the founders thought (no matter how tenuous the connection is), the idea immediately gains merit just based on that alone.
While a nation like the US going on for so long without major reforms in its democracy is a commendable thing, the often-unquestioning reverence for anything from the period of its inception has prevented and will prevent people from patching any cracks that show up in the system with age. A government shouldn't ideally rock the boat too much, but it can't stagnate either, history has plenty of examples of both.
> I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid.
I think the modern understanding of most of these systems is unquestionably better, the issue that would prevent a better system from being formed isn't just the variety of conversations, but conflicting interests with overwhelming power. The US as it is today was founded by a fairly cohesive and tightly-knit bunch of people (at least, as far as I can understand), in an extremely different world. If the US was given a shot at complete reform today, you would have every major corporation and foreign government jumping in at the opportunity to pull any levers they could reach to ensure an outcome that's favorable to them. It would be a disaster. Hell, even with your example about people voting against ranked choice systems, it's not like all voters are actually informed (or even know anything) about either system. And every time these proposals crop up internationally, there's always lots of marketing in either direction from entities who would really like one outcome. Hence, the people tend to stay conservative and vote against changes.
If we got a panel of experts (or even just any sane people with a cohesive and compatible set of ideas) together, I think that today we have enough information to create systems that are vastly superior to either. The EC was created to address certain problems, but to me it seems to have interrupt the natural power of a vote too much and make the election system too prone to swings led by immensely tiny margins. But yeah, it wouldn't be strictly democratic in the sense that anyone could offer input - but neither was really the inception of the US, most people just chose what they perceived as the roughly better option as a package.
I said "nothing's ever over" when it comes to human rights, I did not say please offer me a dimwit's assessment of the role of the Supreme Court.
It's interesting that Peter Hummelgaard's former party comrade Henrik Sass Larsen recently got 4 months of prison for possession of child porn; 6200 pictures and 2200 videos.
So we are to believe Hummelgaard wants to protect children by enabling vast surveillance, so all the bad offenders out there can get ... 4 months in prison.
Its not really adding up. And he still hasn't presented any argument for the thing except that you are pro child abuse if you don't agree with him. I'm at the point where I hope he's corrupt and its not just all about power for him.
As a politician his comrade Henrik Sass Larsen would've been exempt from Chat Control anyway, surely?
Yeah, when the punishment for thousands of images and videos is just four months, it really puts the whole "we need mass surveillance to protect kids" narrative under a harsh light
What’s really laughable about this is that they wanted politicians to be exempt from Chat Control regulation. As if politicians never do anything wrong.
If CC were ever implemented it should have a x year trial period where ONLY policymakers should be monitored.
Jusus, what a shit show from DK government.
As a Dane I am ashamed of the current government, but I didn't vote for them. Hopefully we'll get a more liberal government next year. But a lot of people seems to think that more surveillance means less crime. Problem is that this has not been proven.
Yeah, it's bad. Like convicted rapists not serving their sentences and going on to take political office.
Is that out of line with similar offenses in Denmark?
The judge noted that given the publicity of the case, Henriks true penalty would be living in a country of 6 million people that all know his face and that he is a pedophile.
You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again. This isn’t the US after all…
No one with evidence of that quality would ever be elected in national politics in the US again. Say what you will about Trump but there is no evidence that he possesses CP.
Moreover, nobody with that quality of evidence against them would be sentenced to only 4 months - laxity for CSAM possessors is a european phenomenon and most pro-pedophilia activist groups are based in Europe. The average sentence for CSAM possession in the US is 70 months.
US also has the highest rate of imprisoned people in the world, I wouldn't follow them on sentencing. If revictivism is lower for short sentences then there is no reason to have long sentences, it isn't about punishing people it is about reducing problems for the rest of society.
i agree with you on that, merely thought the suggestion that the US is somehow more permissive of pedophilia to be absurd.
Last I read he's leaving the country and moving to Portugal.
Being exiled is pretty rough, though the weather is better
What an absolutely absurd statement
care to clarify?
> Henriks true penalty would be living in a country of 6 million people that all know his face and that he is a pedophile.
This is what I object to, not really your comment. Is this factored into the sentencing? If he weren't a public figure would he have a harsher sentence?
> You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again
Sure, if everyone in Denmark remembers this guy then he won't be popular. But really we don't have to worry about him? 4 months later is he just free to go back to collecting CP, maybe leave Denmark, etc?
goalpost moved.
I’m not sure how punishments are calculated, but surely a former politician pedophile remains dangerous - even if they don’t abuse children directly they will have residual power that they can use to harm children. Or maybe the low sentence is because of his existing power.
Its just not that illegal in Denmark. Something I would think minister of justice Hummelgaard should spend his time working on first, before pushing mass surveillance at the european level.
Directive 2011/92/EU article 5.2 would suggest no less than 1 year of imprisonment. Depending on how kindly you read the other articles, and given how much pornography instances he had, I'd argue for more.
I'm slightly confused here; the EU Directive you are listing has absolutely no bearing on this discussion or the case at all?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/92/oj/eng
Article 5.2 concerns environmental impact assessments?
Even ignoring all this, Directives do not themselves automatically become enforceable in member State's legal systems either - "Regulations" do, and this is not one, the trial will be conducted subject to Danish criminal law.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_(European_Union)
Chat control is surveillance for plebs but not politicians. They want to hide their cp and shift attention to the lower class.
From first person experience, once a society creates a surveillance state, to protect whatever, an inevitable avalanche starts.
A new game will emerge in which the best players are the ones who excel at finding secrets of others and use them as leverage. We had a president on national TV threating a challenging candidate that he will reveal their secrets... Think about that for a moment and you'll find so many wrong things that this implicitly admits to.
The disease was a blessing compared to the complications of the cure.
Nations like to hope things won't happen to them.
I don't think a surveillance state is the root cause of authoritarianism, in that sense I believe it is a slippery slope fallacy. I am still very much against this kind of mass surveillance, simply I think this rhetoric is doing everyone a disservice.
We don't get authoritarianism without an actual will from a group of people with enough power and support to achieve it. Mass surveillance is simply a milestone on their path to oppression.
Care to provide an example? Just trying to be objective.
Historically, nearly all states have been surveillance states (including early America). all that has changed in the last ~30 years is technology (capability), and public attitude.
Mail snooping has been around as long as mail has been around. Warrantless wiretaps on telphone lines were around in just about every country that started having telephones, including the US. AT&T's NSA listening room (the company that invented telephones) isn't unique or special. Book ciphers were invented because snooping courier's messages was so common.
The NSA didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason either.
I'm not disagreeing with your view, I'm just saying that the anti-surveillance sentiment is particularly unique to the cultural "West", and to the post-WW2 generations.
This is disingenuous as a counter-argument because it's never been possible at this scale — perhaps excepting the Stasi. The sentiment has arisen because:
1) yes, people are more likely to fight it.
2) it's being done at an unprecedented and very intrusive scale.
Wiretapping required more labor on all fronts. Mail snooping the same.
If the "East" isn't fighting this, it might simply be because they see no recourse with their less democratic institutions. (I'm borrowing from you for this last point, I'd never presume the West to be as democratic as we'd like to believe.)
I can't speak for Europe, but in the west, a vast majority of people already accept that the government is doing mass surveillance, and they think it's a good thing. It is similar in China, India,etc.. from what I understand. I don't know enough about europe.
This scale has been possible since at least the mid 00's (20 years now , technically a historical fact). consider that most of the files in snowden's leak were from around '08.
for example ones porn history could be used against that person if he she wants to go for public office. So there is a chilling effect for watching porn. Politics are dirty allready but the way down is deep.
Maybe they should "own it" instead? I don't think these days legal porn use would be all that harmful. but i don't disagree with your point.
But look at it this way, surveillance already exists, all major governments are hacking into people's phone and spying on them, and forcing telco's to do dragnet surveillance. chat control is about doing it at a greater scale and formalizing it for normal law enforcement use instead of things like counter-terrorism.
yes and I understand the benefit but i doubt the real world consequenzes. It would only filter the criminals who are good at opsec and those who arent. imho elevating a more proffesional type of criminals. Honestly most major crimes are money related. Get rid of papermoney and make digital payments traceable for law enforcement. I know there is something like gold bitcoin etc but at the end knowing how money moves is more power then knowing what people are writing
I don’t trust Peter Hummelgaard at all. The way he is pushing for this law seems suspicious and I am wondering if there is a third party nudging him to pursue it. Maybe promising some position in the EU parlament.
His own party has a history of totalitarian initiatives. This is the "surveillance is freedom" party. He was surely getting pressured, but from within.
Its like a ocean wave, crashing against the cliff, year in, year out, proposal after proposal, waiting for that final atrocity, justifying pushing it through. The white cliffs of Dover, with no plan on how to regain one day that land, once the crisis subsides. And no mechanism to prevent a permanent crisis, because the controls justify the manufacturing of endless crisis.
Like labeling "public rejection" as "controversy."
What controversy? People just said no.
Well, we do have the ECJ as a corrective: https://ccdcoe.org/incyder-articles/eu-data-retention-direct...
Not just. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767226
Unfortunately the ECJ’s orders aren’t strictly followed and they recently pretty much indicated they could support an atrocious law like ProtectEU. Perhaps to save face.
Courts are always the last line of defense, there is no way of avoiding that. Rights are never absolute, but have to be balanced against each other, and the courts are the arbiter of that.
Aside from that, raising public awareness like the Chat Control initiative did is the way to go. And voting in the EU Parliament elections.
Yes it is the way to go but politicians get fatigued because they keep pushing the same thing so often. Also the lobbyists have big bags of money to throw at it.
If you do not tax cooperate income away, or at least force them by law to bind it in investments, it will attack the surrounding containment vessel of laws and culture.
This is poetic and painfully accurate
Protecting children is critically important, but turning every citizen into a potential suspect by default? That's not justice, that’s just lazy policy design. Honestly, this feels like one of those rare moments where political pressure and public backlash actually worked...
“Protecting children” is a red herring anyway. It’s never actually about the children, as they are more protected than ever and statistically it’s the safest ever in human history. I’d actually argue that children need less protection and more freedom.
relevant south park clip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGQS1AZus7E
More generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg
Lennart Betrayer - CEO :-D
Let's rebrand and try again!
Does anyone know if the "Borgerforslag" had an impact?
https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-2115...
https://www.ft.dk/da/aktuelt/nyheder/2025/09/borgerforslag-n...
Consideration of the proposal was moved to the 25th of November. So no it didn't reach a point where it could have any impact. I don't remember a single borgerforslag managing to have any impact though. Even if they made it to parliament in time.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I might think that the ruling class who so desperately want these kinds of powers are intentionally dividing nations and breaking down social cohesion so the populace must turn to the governments for protection. They're hoping to create societies where the people will beg them to scan private messages rather than to demand rights.
Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
> Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
I'm giving it 10 months or less. The rate at which things are worsening (in most aspects, not just this) seems to be rapidly climbing from my point of view.
The main purpose is to identify any nascent organization of political opposition to the status quo so it can be destroyed in its infancy with a minimum amount of resources. It will be used to solve some crimes too but solving crimes still involves a lot of manpower (expensive) and if they solved crime people would be less supportive of expanding surveillance powers even further so you don't really want to do a great job at that.
> must turn to the governments for protection.
It's so they can sell you out to corporate interests more effectively. It's a modern day fiefdom.
In practice it's a combination of:
a) wanting to soon expand this scheme to catch criminal gang communication (violent narco-related crime is exploding in e.g. some northern EU countries) [center-right goal]
b) wanting to make people more nervous about what they post online (immigration vs crime etc is a hot topic that many want to cool down). [center-left goal]
I suppose that there might also be some naive idealists that primarily care about the stated goal.
In practice it is entirely about wanting to expand the power of the state and cement its supremacy over the rights of the individual.
Those other things are a means to this end. They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.
> They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.
What country is this? Sounds really bad.
What country is where the state's primary purpose is to perpetuate the power of the state, and where the ruling class desperately want to take more power and rights from the people? Lots of them. Denmark, for one.
It sounds like you are approaching this from a Marxist perspective. Have you tried thinking about this from other perspectives? (Just as an exercise.)
That's not an argument.
You're right - it's an observation and an idea.
Yes I am right. And now allow me to observe and suggest: It sounds like you're having a bad day. Why don't you try again tomorrow if you feel better then?
Okay, I was trying to be constructive. Have a good night.
Deus Ex intro scene has a good line on this... "In the end, they'll beg us to save them".
I don't think sockpuppet, aspiring actor to politician EU governments will be around in 10 years. People are waking up.
Why does the government think it is their job to save people from themselves in the first place?
The weird thing is that even many people (citizens) believe this.
Did they apologize for proposing it in the first place?
They’re just withdrawing it “for now” and not making it “mandatory.” They will try to find a different route.
Good. I was tired of it. Denmark is a great place to live but chat control wtf
what people dont get about mass surveilance is that big systeme are easy corrupted. for example if I want privat data about peoplw from police or assurance or state office there is a way to get them with money and connections.
So if mass surveilance is implemented it would be missused for personal benefit of whoever has the money and the possibility
In Denmark our government don't know shit about anything else. One day they say one thing and next day another.
HN is being affected by the American love of conspiracy once more. In reality:
Danes trust their state - for good reason. But this is obviously taking it too far.
Its not that Peter Hummelgaard is trying to create a spy state. He just doesn’t understand tech.
Simple as that.
>Danes trust their state - for good reason
>>Nordic Waste is owned by the family of Torben Østergaard-Nielsen, reported to be the sixth richest person in Denmark. Last week, the Danish Ministry of the Environment issued an injunction against Nordic waste, and yesterday (22 January 2024) the company was declared bankrupt. The company has declared that this ends Nordic Waste’s liabilities.
https://eos.org/thelandslideblog/nordic-waste-1
Blind trust always gets betrayed, and all the Scandinavian countries have closed their eyes for too long; I want Olof Palme back.
>Its not that Peter Hummelgaard is trying to create a spy state. He just doesn’t understand tech.
Oh nooo that poor little guy, cant even think 5 minutes into the future, he's 42 not 80.
It sounds like they're like the Dutch. The government is trusted because they've been shown to be trustworthy, but they are always accountable. If something dodgy happens, people are quick to point it out and demand action.
So it's not blind trust. I understand why Americans are so mistrusting of their government, it's because they are untrustworthy. The mistake is thinking everywhere in the world is like that.
Denmark often copy policies and implementation from the netherlands. Our societies are quite similar.
Learning about what policies work by looking at other countries is of course a foreign concept to American exceptionalists
It's because both Denmark and the Netherlands have more than 2 political parties.
In the US they basically elect a king who gets all the power for 4 years- including appointing the goddamn Supreme Court!
Nordic Waste and Olof Palme seem like quite random unrelated references. Sweden and Denmark are different countries btw.
The public debate in Denmark clearly shows that it’s difficult for non technical people to understand the limits of tech. Regardless of age.
>Sweden and Denmark are different countries btw.
I was talking about Scandinavian Country's, most of those Country's are called "high trust societies" often with too much trust in their government.
>debate in Denmark clearly shows that it’s difficult for non technical people to understand the limits of tech
Install a system that reads your private messages is absolutely not a technical thing.
Hummelgaard and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that they believe a backdoor can be made that would only be used occasionally only by the right authorities. Even some of the opposition seems to believe this.
When discussing politics in foreign countries, consider how much context you are missing. Those of us that live in the country and speak the language have consumed its news for years.
HN discussions about politics in foreign countries are bizarre
>Hummelgaard and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that they believe a backdoor can be made that would only be used occasionally only by the right authorities.
That's what every politician would say about restricting privacy, it's for the kids, it's in the right hands, we would never betray your trust.
>HN discussions about politics in foreign countries are bizarre
No really bizarre is your believe that 42yo -->justice<-- minister Hummelgaard is just a naive child who knows nothing about "Internet stuff"
In his own words: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services"
He absolutely knows what he's talking about.
Olof Palme? The socialist who squeezed tax payers out like lemons, and a bit more?
Jup the guy who was probably killed by his own military because talking with the USSR is against Nato strategy [1] funny how history repeats itself [2]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Sweden-Submarine/d...
[2] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Provoked-Washington-Started-Catas...
If you are so sure about that why wouldn’t they make it a domestic law instead of an EU wide law? I’m not American nor Danish and I certainly do not trust my government. Kind of naive - no one should trust their government in this day and age.
It’s also convenient that Denmark is essentially the US’ eyes and ears in Europe, who even spied on other nations for them.
Having a largely non corrupt government that enjoys the trust of the general population yields benefits on all levels of society. Its a big part of the reason these countries are the happiest and healthiest.
Withdraws it for now.
For now. It will return unless we end the careers of the politicians who were grasping for such absolute surveillance powers.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]