Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
Well, the impression of speed is mainly in the head of the headline writers.
What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
> Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
While I agree with your point, it's still crucial to raise awareness of Europe's actions. It may be a small step, but it is not insignificant.
This type of legislation should never ever be proposed in a democratic system, so had disagree.
This is an extremely totalitarian-style move from EU - governing bodies are exempt from the law, meanwhile peasants have to be watched 24/7 for wrongthink, all under guise of protecting the children.
While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.
Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
>While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.
I'm thinking like state already, i would never trust ANY state with such powers, even the one that was perfectly aligned with my political views.
It's not issue of state, but dilution of responsibility and the way the votes are counted.
It is also an issue of unelected officials deciding things - the whole system is broken.
Before you say that heads of state were elected - this is highly contentious issue, no one ran on this in internal campaigns, and votes on this issue are counted country-wide(all for or all against), without any regards to distribution of populace's opinion on this subject.
>Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
You're enacting legislation that will actually empower those entities this way!
Criminals - surprise surprise - can just break the law, and use devices/software that just.. does not do content scanning, and uses true E2E encryption. Even over insecure channel by using steganography and key exchange over it.
Espionage can be handled the same way, probably even easier as they can easily use one-time pads and key phrases established beforehand in their country of origin!
Meanwhile only group affected by it are just normal citizens.
I keep seeing this fallacy argument about some bad actors and criminals etc. etc. Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens. I don't understand how someone can be apologetic for totalitarian state.
> Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens.
Indeed, the state doesn't need all of them.
That it's all-or-nothing is due to how the tech works, in that you can't break it *only* for the targets — a point I make when I'm trying to explain the dichotomy to the politicians who want to spy, that this absolutely will be abused to reveal *their own* secrets, too.
The way politicians talk about this stuff, suggests they think computer code is like law, that words may have precise meanings but there's still an element of human judgement and common sense, and at human speed, not cold logic operating on bits faster than us by the degree we are faster than geology, where the potential harm from errors can be irreversable total loss of an entire business due to one single error made one time by one person, nor where mistakes from 20 years ago might be discovered and exploited at any time.
That's why I said "I can't even square the circle". If I thought the government position here was just absolutely fine, it wouldn't be difficult to square the metaphorical circle.
The difficulty is that despite their wrongheadedness about the consequences of what they're trying to do, what they're trying to do is actually necessary.
And that's just the crypto parts of this.
I left the UK for two reasons: The Investigatory Powers Act, and Brexit. Kinda related cause I thought Brexit would make it harder to fight the IP Act. Went to Westminster to talk to my MP to try and convince them to vote against the IP Act. I remain convinced that the British government was straight up lying about its reasons for having that Act.
Organized criminals (especially state actors) will find ways to communicate in the dark regardless, including just continuing to use illegal encryption.
> including just continuing to use illegal encryption.
First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.
Second, what gets talked about in public (the only thing any of us knows for sure, but also definitely not the whole picture) includes foreign governments recruiting locals via normal messenger apps.
More of a problem is that the back-doors can be exploited by both criminals and hostile powers.
The issue is that EU does not control the internet, nor all means of communication. Nor perfect form of monitoring exists so question is moot in itself. Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.
and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.
The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states
enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so.
> Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.
Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send.
"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
> policy/economic problem instead
Instead? Everything about this is about groups wanting to act in secret for their best interests, and other people wanting to ensure that only the interests they share get to do that. This is true when it's me logging into my bank and criminals trying to get access to the same, when it's the Russian government sponsoring arson attacks in Europe and local police trying to stop them, and when it's the CIA promoting Tor for democracy activists in dictatorships and those dictatorships trying to stop them.
We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.
It is possible for unauthorized hardware to exist. People who want to do illegal things to begin with won't mind so much if their methods of communication happen to be illegal.
2) Someone doing this on the public Internet would only get away with it if their encrypted packets *never ever* went through a government licensed router. The moment they go through a public router: instantly detected.
> "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text.
If that seed doesn't generate that particular white noise sequence, or if you can't supply that photo, then you go to jail.
> It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.
It's also economically unfeasible.
Am I using moonspeak without realising it when I say "I can't square this circle"? Is this a phrase that people are unfamiliar with and I just haven't realised?
>"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
Guilty until proven innocent, the burden is on you to prove it.
you are hung up on your pre-made assumption that the EU(state) in this case can have perfect control - which is fallacious in itself - and therefore are just arguing in bad faith. When they have such perfect control this is already a totalitarian state, that requires no such thing as due process.
all of that to push forward your point:
>We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.
Chat messages are tiny. You can easily put the encrypted signal into e.g. the residual portion (i.e. high entropy/looks like noise part) of lossless images/sound that you send unencrypted. "That was just a FLAC of me singing". Or innocuous cat pictures. Or whatever.
And while all this is happening, there are cases were peoples homes get search for comments on twitter. These are often in bad taste, but what tastes even worse is that the judiciary doesn't seem to understand proportionality anymore. Mean tweets carry higher sentences than raping someone, stern look at Germany here.
A judiciary in such a sorry state, that has not adapted to a changed reality, cannot be permitted to read private communications.
'Mean tweets' is such an empty meaning. Come with examples. It is on paper very easy to break the law via speech. If I post something here about how I want to reward a murder on a certain politician (or want to do it myself), I can guarantee you the police would be involved. And rightfully so.
Freedom of speech is about pre-moderation. It doesn't mean your actions do not have consequences. If you yell fire in a theatre while there is none, you should be held liable. See also the case of Gennaro P. (the Damschreeuwer) who at May 4 of 2010 yelled during two minutes of silence of Rememberance of the Dead.
This is an example from UK about a dead military officer: “The only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn,”
Now the rest of Europe has much more freedom of speech than UK, but that is an example of a mean tweet about a government official that got sentenced. We don't want that in the EU.
Note that the guy was convicted even though he almost immediately deleted the tweet and apologized, the law is that bad, you aren't allowed to slip up even a little bit.
>doesn't mean your actions do not have consequences
YES IT DOES THAT IS EXACTLY THE POINT
You obviously do not believe in freedom of speech as defined by US law. You are conflating extremely narrow exceptions with broad politically motivated violations of freedom of political speech
> You obviously do not believe in freedom of speech as defined by US law.
Neither do you. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly held in numerous rulings that freedom of speech and/or freedom of expression is not absolute and you can be sanctioned, prosecuted and/or imprisoned for some forms of speech and/or expression -- i.e. you do have consequences.
- Schenck v. United States (1919) -- Speech that has intent and a clear and present danger of resulting in a crime is not protected under the First Amendment
- Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) -- The First Amendment does not protect fighting words, which are those that inherently cause harm or are likely to result in an immediate disturbance
- Feiner v. New York (1951) -- The police are permitted to take action against those exercising speech that is likely to disturb the peace
- United States v. O'Brien (1968) -- You can be prosecuted for destroying certain property as an act of political speech; the law forbidding this was not unconstitutional
- Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) -- It is permissible to restrict speech that advocates for imminent unlawful violence and is likely to incite people to perform such
- Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton (1973) -- Restrictions on the dissemination of obscene material are not by themselves unconstitutional (see also the ruling immediately below)
- Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc (1991) -- Public indecency laws banning dancing nude are not unconstitutional
- Virginia v. Black (2003) -- Partial reversal: While a broad ban on cross-burning is unconstitutional, banning cross-burning for the express intent to intimidate is not
- Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) -- As a public official, you can be sanctioned by your government employer for speech contrary to employment policy
- Morse v. Frederick (2007) -- Schools can ban students from sharing speech about illegal drug use at school
- Counterman v. Colorado (2023) -- True threats of violence are outside the bounds of the First Amendment, and laws covering stalking and making threats in this manner are not unconstitutional
The US Constitution. What a beautiful piece of paper, such a nice theory. Yet your current president is circumventing Congress. Your president is bullying states. You don't even have a functional popular vote. Your SCOTUS is dysfunctional. And, this 1st amendment, is that why peaceful protestors got shot by rubber bullets when they were protesting against the war in Iraq? Which, as it turned out, was started for dishonest reasons. You folks also were first with DMCA. Yet we don't have BS like filibuster and gerrymandering.
There's a good reason why on every half-serious index about freedom of speech or freedom of press, the best countries are Scandinavian and Switzerland, followed by West-Europe. And that data is from before the current orangutan is in office.
'Being proud that he say' [sic]. You're not even a native English speaker, are you, 'greg'?
First you say freedom of speech is about after the speech (it is about before the speech, as after that the law is applied pragmatic).
Then you come with this KJU joke. North Korea doesn't make these indices. [1] [2] [3]. In each of these, USA is decidedly below the vast majority of the free West, including the very countries I mentioned before, each of which couldn't be further from North Korea. It is also Trump during Trump 1 who was positive about KJU (IIRC before the Rocket Man rhetoric, but still), and who is being a shill for one of North Koreans partners (China by proxy / Russia). Mind you, all of these sources are post-Trump 1 yet pre-Trump 2 (ie. from Biden 1 era).
Yep, in fafs in 2021. Pew 2015: 8th. gsod 2023: 28th.
On all of the freedoms, USA tends to do best on freedom of speech. But how can you say such, when the press has less freedom than in other rich West countries? Isn't that counter interactive?
> There's a good reason why on every half-serious index about freedom of speech or freedom of press, the best countries are Scandinavian and Switzerland, followed by West-Europe. And that data is from before the current orangutan is in office.
The Democracy Index is by The Economist [1]. The USA was #28 there (2024), well below Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and well below Germany, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and various others. That's from 2024, before Trump's attack on the US democracy.
World Press Freedom Index by Reports Without Borders [2]. The USA is #57 in this list (2025), in the yellow color ('problematic').
Also, take note that both of these values are world-wide under threat, and the USA is part of being under this threat.
You also wrote in your previous post:
> By one of your own references USA is in the top 3 for freedom of speech.
But that one has incomplete data. It lacks data from like half the world. Finland, Iceland, The Netherlands, Switzerland (each countries doing well on every other index) aren't included.
> I didn't say it, your sources did.
Yeah, they couldn't know your country would be nearing a constitutional crisis by end of 2025.
An angry, divided population is a lot easier to push to the extremes, enabling such legislation because people are so angry and divided and can't come to a reasonable compromise or solution.
These things shouldn't move forward, indeed. But being angry about it for years at a time when things aren't even remotely set in stone doesn't seem healthy for an individual or society at large.
Anyone can and does say this about their pet favorite bit of legislation. And so journalists are more than happy to pull this shit with every other topic, too.
Nah the first reaction of anyone who cherishes democracy which by necessity should be skeptical of entrenched and liberty abusing policies in the name of "safety" should be "what? are you crazy? what a stupid idea" for any of these encryption banning scams.
That's a bad faith argument, in effect an outright lie, because you're conflating individual instances of bad actors with what would now be a universal policy meant to neuter encryption and 100% of net privacy.
While I disagree with your position for the reasons already given by others, it's quite ironic that in this thread about government censorship that your opinion is in the process of being censored by other HN users.
unless someone tells you to "shutup and get off hackernews or I'll see what I can do about getting <insert name here> to ban you" then they aren't being censored.
It makes the opinion hidden from the vast majority of visitors, except those who go out of their way to both have an account and showdead.
It is in every appreciable way censorship via unaccountable mob. It's censorship in a way that Reddit's downvote isn't, because Reddit allows anonymous users to read downvoted posts - or at least did the last time I checked.
That was an illuminating question. Thank you. I see my parent's point now because no, I don't think that disagreement requires what amounts to censure if it makes it harder for something to be seen.
At the point where tensions rise beyond polite disagreement, HN ceases to be a functional social space and turns into a game of "who can make the other's opinions disappear first."
Doing so is technically against the rules, but either the moderators don't care, aren't doing it on a large enough scale to be an effective deterrent, or are knowingly complicit.
1. this wasn't fast, it took ~5 years and most (but not all) of the problematic parts have been removed
2. It also wasn't "fully rejected" or anything in the decision which gained some awareness of hacker news, just one specific draft was rejected, not the proposal as a whole (but IMHO it should have been).
3. it's not passed just approved by the council, which consists of the various head of states elected in their respective countries (i.e. is the easiest part to pass something controversial), but still needs to pass the European parliament (elected through the EU elections)
4. and then it must not be shot down by the ECJ or ECHR, both might shot it down, the ECJ for it being excessive/disproportional, and the ECHR because privacy is accepted as a human right by it (in general, there are exceptions so not 100% guaranteed). Or shut down by the German supreme court (same reason as ECJ and ECHR) which has somewhat of a veto right (or else Germany wouldn't have been able to legally join the EU), idk. if any other countries supreme courts have similar veto rights, but idk. why they shouldn't have)
EU law has supremacy over national laws. National courts need to disapply local laws in conflict with EU law, so typically any subsequent local disputes in court will just be ruled based on a new EU law/ruling. EU laws in conflict with a local constitution pose more of a challenge: from the EU point of view, EU law is supreme and they might apply infringement procedures for failing to recognize it, but for a country, the constitution is probably more important than a treaty.
Yes however EU has very limited capabilities to enforce that. They can bully smaller countries a bit more but Germany can do more or less whatever it wants
This only applies where countries ceded sovereignty to the EU.
Technically in Germany non of the sovereignty was ceded but transferred based on two different articles in the German Constitution. But that transfer is neither absolute, nor automatic. Practically it means that in most situations it is "as if" it was cede, but just in most situations.
This leads to a situation where if the supreme court rules that some EU regulations or similar are against the German constitution you have a conflict between the constitutional articles which transfer authority and the ones the court ruled to have been infringed one.
But in the German constitution not all articles are equally, the first few have special protections and extra hurdles to amend. And the article which transfers powers to the EU _is not one of them_. This means that for any of the more protected clauses Germany has not at all ceded the authority of their supreme court to do a final judgement on.
In such cases if the German supreme court says no, it's means no for any application of law in German no matter what the EU courts say. And there are only 3 ways to fix that, 1. the EU amends their regulation, 2. Germany amends their constitution (practically impossible in such cases), 3. the rule informally applies to everyone but Germany, 4. Germany leaves the EU which would likely mean it's end.
So while everyone pretends there is no issue (3rd option) can in some situations be viable and given that 2 is non-viable it pretty much always ends with a compromise of amending things just far enough to not longer cause an issue with the German constitution.
Systematic breaches of privacy through mass surveillance fall under that especially protected articles in the German constitution. And option 3 doesn't really work here. So it's one of the rare cases where German Supreme court actually matters on EU level.
Through practically it hardly ever matters outside of very very few cases:
- because of Article 1 (the most protected one you could say), the ECHR has more or less implicitly the same amount of power as the supreme court, only if the ECHR does rulings in conflict with human rights would that not be the case (so in practice never)
- as one of the core founding members and the country with the largest population (and seats in the EU parliament are distributed based on population) Germany can normally make sure such a situation doesn't arise
- and the breach must really be of a constitutional article standing above the one which transfers power to the EU (which most are not)
- you have to propagate things up to the supreme court, while all other courts will rule based on EU law/ECJ decisions
but it doesn't mean that it never happened,
e.g. there had been one case where the German supreme court ruled that a) something is against the constitution and b) that the EU organ which caused this acted unreasonable in a way which isn't covered by the transfer of authority. That case go resolved with compromises, but was neither the first nor will it be the last where "in practice" the German Supreme court overruled EU decisions, even if it on paper doesn't (because it only overrules what happens with law in Germany and overruling an EU decision would affect other countries, too).
One thing to add is that there is no guarantee this is even against the German constitution.
Local devices only scanning which only if there is an issue sends any information to anywhere outside of the device might actually be compatible with the German constitution by the argument that the privacy is only violated if the local validator phones home and that it only does so if there is a reasonable suspicion at which case it isn't baseless mass surveillance anymore... on a technicality iff the local scanner have close to now false positives. It's anyway a bad idea and a lot of the things it claims it's meant to help with have a lot of neglected other solutions which would improve things a lot.
Saying "forced" about this is like if someone offered me a job, me reading the offer and saying "can I do a 4-day week?", the company's response being "yes, here's a new contract for you to sign", and describing that second contract as "forced" on me.
I think you misunderstood his post. It's generally un-British to suggest the UK is better in any regard whatsoever. I've no doubt he thinks the UK is just as bad if not worse but in different ways.
I genuinely think the public sector being a bit hopeless is a major check on tyranny in the UK.
Ofcom (the communications regulator charged with imposing the censorship laws) literally maintains a public list of non-compliant websites that anyone who doesn't want to give their ID to a shady offshore firm can browse for example.
In the UK we've had an authoritarian Conservative government for 14 years, followed by an even more authoritarian Labour government, which we'll have until 2029.
In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government:
Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
America also has a party that always runs on the idea of small government and restoring rights to the people. Every time they get power, they do the exact opposite.
>America also has a party that always runs on the idea of small government and restoring rights to the people. Every time they get power, they do the exact opposite.
You seem to be confused. The Libertarian Party never gets any power. The closest we get is representatives like Ron Paul, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie, who run as Republicans (which are NOT the party of small government, despite what you may have been told) while acting much more like Libertarians.
Thomas Massie in particular is famous for frequently and routinely standing up against Trump, much to Trump's chagrin.
I wonder if your statement was ironic, as the article you posted does not describe Reform as far-right?
From the article:
> In March 2024, the BBC called the party far-right but soon retracted its statement and apologised to Reform UK, writing that describing the party as far-right "fell short of our usual editorial standards".[219] Commenting on the incident, the professor of politics Tim Bale wrote that labelling Reform UK as far-right is unhelpful, and that it "causes too visceral a reaction and at the same time is too broad to be meaningful". Bale noted the importance of distinguishing between the "extreme right" and "populist radical right", and stated that parties described as far right should instead be "more precisely labelled".[220] Reform UK itself rejects the descriptor, and has threatened legal action against media using it.[221] In May 2025, Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator, argued Reform is "now a left-wing party", by attracting disillusioned Labour voters with stances on restoring welfare benefits, nationalising the steel industry with 50% of utilities and increasing government spending (including the NHS).[222]
> Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
A lot of politicians change when they get in power.
I think it’s plausible that the UK electorate are sick of switching between Tories and Labour for the last hundred years, especially as they have become indistinguishable in many respects. They were held back because there wasn’t a plausible alternative that had a hope of being elected. Reform has been leading the polls for nearly all this year, so let’s check in a year to see where they stand. But Labour (especially) and the Tories are not going to see an upswing any time soon. The problems in the country (mostly economic due to policy) continue, and their supporters are doomed to the madness of doing the same thing but expecting different results.
While I'm sure you know much more than I do about UK politics, it seems like some systemic factor pushes both Tories and Labour and whoever else comes close to power, well to the right of their respective voters. In the US, that factor would be campaign contributions and an extremely well-funded conservative propaganda/patronage machine on a war footing.
In the UK, is it all about media ownership or something?
The media plays a big role in election outcomes. The Murdoch empire used to have an oversized influence, but since Murdoch exited Sky UK, that's been on the wane. The Sun (which helped Labour's Tony Blair win his landslide) is still a Murdoch enterprise, but it hasn't really moved with the times, and newer media-savvy outlets are starting to get mindshare.
GBNews launched in 2021 with a strong anti-establishment mandate. The growth in its audience surprised everyone, surpassing both BBC News and Sky in viewership. For four consecutive months (July-October 2025) GBNews has been Britain's number one news channel (Source: BARB).
Crucially it also has 2.5bn views on YouTube since launch.
The establishment try to write off and condescend GBNews, but in doing so they condescend the large and growing section of the UK public that GBNews represents (e.g. for example - people on both the Left and Right who are frustrated with 110,000 undocumented migrants entering the UK over the last three years, many of whom have been put up in hotels at taxpayer expense).
As the elite condescend and push away large swathes of the population, they are creating increasing loyalty toward GBNews, and by extension, the Reform Party.
> But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy.
Well, populist lunacy is how Reform got so popular, so I can see why it would be tempting for the Green party.
Main thing that's weird right now with the UK is that because it's first-past-the-post and the current polling is Reform:~29%, Lib/Lab/Con/Green:~16%, I would not be surprised by any of these parties forming a minority government nor any one of them getting a massive parliamentary majority.
That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.
The numbers don't add up. I think "Removing the 2 child benefit cap" and "Increasing NHS spending" are good things, but they're not free, and the supposed cost-saving measures they're talking about mostly serve to demonstrate they don't know what the government is paying for anyway.
Immigration is always a funny one for the UK especially, given how people tend to look at gross numbers instead of which sectors the immigrants work in, and the discourse about why locals demonstrably do not fill those roles is mostly just insisting that locals can no matter what current unemployment levels actually are. Before I left the UK, the stereotype was all the Poles moving to the UK and building houses: UK should have invited over more builders, then there wouldn't be a shortage of houses.
Immigration is a shared bit of populist lunacy Reform have in common with the Conservatives and Labour: promises to be tough on immigration, then they get power and look at what the consequences would be of doing that, and put all the blame on asylum seekers* that are banned from working and therefore safe to kick out no matter how at risk they are in their countries of origin.
The below are conservative estimates of the money raised by Reform policies:
* £10bn+ per year - Adjusting how the Bank of England (BoE) treats reserves — e.g. stopping interest payments to commercial banks that receive money under quantitative easing (QE)
* £11bn+ per year - Rolling back expensive "net zero" policies
* £9bn+ per year - Alter eligibility for welfare
* £25bn - Scrap HS2
* multiple billions - Reducing foreign aid budget and cost of housing illegal migrants.
It's likely that pro-growth Reform policies such as lowering corporation tax to make the UK more competitive will significantly increase the corporation tax take - as was shown when the Tories entered power in 2010, lowered the corp tax rate and corp tax revenue increased significantly. In general, Reform's tax cuts are aimed at increasing the tax base.
> * £11bn+ per year - Rolling back expensive "net zero" policies
These in particular are fictional. That's an obsolete (due to tech improvements) estimate of the private sector costs.
At this point, with the tech now available, almost everyone gets rich by doing net zero, almost nobody saves money by abandoning it.
> * £9bn+ per year - Alter eligibility for welfare
"Welfare" includes e.g. the child benefit cap. You can save a lot by spending less. Do you want to spend less? OK, fine. But that's the cost: a majority have to agree who gets to be the next scapegoat, and the child benefit cap was itself introduced back when parents with too many kids were the scapegoat.
> * £25bn - Scrap HS2
Scrapping a one off payment to save money in the short term, at the cost of worsening long-term economic benefits by failing to improve national logistics.
> housing illegal migrants.
Do you mean asylum seekers? Reason I ask is that people who are actually in the UK illegally (which is different), don't cost "billions". Asylum seekers are housed because they're banned from working, theory is that if they work they might stay, IMO this is BS and everyone would benefit if they were allowed to get jobs and look after themselves.
Even without that there absolutely are savings to be made on the cost of asylum seekers (who are not "illegal migrants"). They're looked after at a total cost of about £100/person/day, and obviously (even without changing the "banned by law from working" thing) they could be looked after at about half that (or less) given what UK incomes are. But that's a whole one billion per year you might save from not letting UK hotels rip you off, or two if you let these people work and support themselves.
> It's likely that pro-growth Reform policies such as lowering corporation tax to make the UK more competitive will significantly increase the corporation tax take - as was shown when the Tories entered power in 2010, lowered the corp tax rate and corp tax revenue increased significantly. In general, Reform's tax cuts are aimed at increasing the tax base.
Even with the best will in the world, this kind of thing is unlikely to make a dent in comparison to the core Reform policy of hating their nearest and biggest market. Brexit (and consider who owns Reform) has cost the economy an estimated 6-8% GDP by this point, per year, in lost growth opportunities — around £200bn/year.
The biggest thing any government could do to increase the tax base is to get a bigger workforce to tax. Which means more immigrants, which is why Lab and Con don't ever do anything about immigrant workers despite saying so. This was also one of the benefits of the UK being in the EU, in that all of labour, capital, and goods could move around more freely to meet business opportunities, help with growth.
> At this point, with the tech now available, almost everyone gets rich by doing net zero
The likes of Dale Vince (Ecotricity), certainly get rich by doing net zero. Significant levies have been placed on taxpayers and consumers for years, with the money flowing into the companies of politically-connected individuals like Vince.
> the child benefit cap was itself introduced back when parents with too many kids were the scapegoat.
Parents that choose to have more children than they can afford are not "scapegoats." They are breaking the social contract.
The benefit cap was not retro-actively applied. It didn't put any existing children in poverty. It only applied to future births, to parents who were choosing to have children at the expense of taxpayers.
> Scrapping a one off payment to save money in the short term, at the cost of worsening long-term economic benefits by failing to improve national logistics [HS2].
The project cost has ballooned to the point where it will exceed the long term projected economic benefit (benefit-cost ratio of 0.9, as per a 2022 review). It is a white elephant.
> Do you mean asylum seekers?
No, I mean illegal migrants, as I said. Genuine Asylum seekers don't throw their documents overboard and illegally enter the country on a dinghy from France.
Take the war in Ukraine and and the post-war threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan for example - in both cases, the UK government made advance provision for documented, background-checked individuals, including the elderly, women and children (as you'd expect from genuine refugees). And the UK made safe routes available for those people. That's how the system should work.
Those who illegally enter the country via the Channel are 88-90% male, most of whom are fighting-age, and most of whom originate from countries that are not currently at war.
> that's a whole one billion per year you might save from not letting UK hotels rip you off, or two if you let these people work and support themselves.
If these people are allowed to economically benefit from illegally entering our country, it will send completely the wrong message to the third world countries they came from.
I don't want low-skilled/unskilled unvetted immigration that lowers our country's productivity, makes women and girls less safe, impacts public services and housing, divides our finite welfare spend and causes ghettoisation and (eventually) Balkanisation of my own country. Why would I want that?
> Brexit (and consider who owns Reform) has cost the economy an estimated 6-8% GDP by this point, per year, in lost growth opportunities — around £200bn/year.
I've heard various figures bandied around by continuity Remainers. They vary wildly, because at this point, nearly ten years later, it's impossible to scientifically compare a Brexit/non-Brexit scenario.
All we can know are the facts - Brexit gave us a huge opportunity to align our regulation with the precise nature of our economy, and an opportunity to avoid burdensome EU regulation (this is already happening in terms of the EU's hapless AI regulation). It's also an opportunity to avoid paying tens of billions of pounds annually into the EU's black hole unaccounted budget every year (consider the lifetime cost of that expense!)
The fact that the Europhillic Tory and Labour establishment failed to capitalise fully on Brexit is their fault - not the fault of the majority of voters who voted to leave the EU.
Luckily we have a party in 2029 who is unaligned with the Brussels and Strasbourg establishment, and who can make the bold decisions required to capitalise on our new freedoms and sovereignty. I relish this prospect.
You mean replacing it with renewable five year visas that have reasonable salary thresholds and English language criteria, and which still allow the holder to apply for citizenship?
Why is that lunacy?
ILR is the immigration equivalent of "squatters' rights" - completely immoral IMO.
> the small possibility of being a Russian asset of course
The Left tried that with Trump too. It didn't work out for them, and I doubt this tactic will damage Farage either. It smacks of desperation IMO, just like all the silly childhood racism heresay.
> In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government
Haha you're so funny.
If Reform get from, what is it right now, five -- or four, or six, depending on how the wind blows — MPs to 326 MPs, which is enough to secure the majority they think they are getting, then libertarian is not what that government will be.
It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian, because pure tabloid authoritarian thuggery is the only possible strategy that could cause a swing larger than any in history, against two parties (labour and liberal democrat) who currently hold 472 seats and represent a sort of centrist blob between them.
And this is to say nothing of the challenge they will face finding 326 non-crazy, credible candidates for 326 very different parliamentary elections. And to say nothing of the foreign influence scandal that currently engulfs senior Reform figures or the catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent. Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage? And do you think Farage's reputation is going to somehow be improved by the Nathan Gill situation?
I accept they will be the largest minority. But the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily.
Maybe they will get to largest minority and then campaign for PR/AV/STV, and maybe finally people will understand something like it is needed. But Farage will be a lot older in that election.
(It surprises me to see people who are so keen to believe that a council election wave is necessarily predictive of a national election wave because, what, somehow everything is different now? Why is it different?)
How can you be so sure? Why do you assume that everything that the Reform chairman, Zia Yusuf (head of policy) is lies? What, from his history, suggests that he is a liar?
> catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent.
A small number of councillors left, but KCC is still a strong Reform majority. Councillors come and go throughout the year (just look at the constant stream of council by-elections), so to call Kent a "catastrophe" is hyperbole.
> It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian
Populist yes. But I've never understood why popular polices get such a bad rep in a supposed democracy?
White? So what? Although it's rapidly changing thanks to Tory/Labour policies, the UK remains a majority white country. Why is politicians' skin colour an issue in your mind?
"Significantly authoritarian" how? Can you name an "authoritarian" policy in Reform's last manifesto?
> Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage?
Yes. Zia Yusuf is an extraordinary man, and my money would be on him becoming the leader when Farage inevitably steps down. And your concerns about white politicians will hopefully be soothed when a second-generation Sri Lankan is our Reform prime minister.
> the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily.
For that to happen, you need a strong i.e. 30%+ share, and you need numerous opposing parties with similar policies, and all polling at similar levels. That's EXACTLY what's happening, and the electoral calculus puts Reform on a strong majority (low = 325, high = 426)
Nye Bevan was not a populist, and the NHS was not a populist development.
In the context of its time it was a fairly pragmatic, top-down central-government post-war-socialism project. It appears more radical in retrospect, but viewed in the light of decisions in the war effort and the post-war effort, and in a country that still had mandatory rationing for example, the NHS was a solid decision that was actually pretty evidence-based.
There are few people alive now who can tell you what the foundation of the NHS was like in terms of their professional career, but my dad did tell me about that.
In no way would that have been considered "populist"; the UK was severely negative about populists at that time, for one thing. It actually made solid logical/technocratic sense. It definitely came as a huge relief, but in many ways it formalised the resource-sharing schemes in place in various regions, especially London.
I am not sure you understand what populism is, along with not understanding that securing a number of seats is not something that logically follows from projections of numbers of seats, particularly in the context of an entirely new party with divisive leadership. We don't have PR, so aggregate data like that is not easily interpreted, and council election data is not that strongly indicative.
Also pretty interesting to hear someone who is so pro-Reform so confidently talking up the NHS, considering the long-standing positions of many UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform people that it should be privatised. Free at the point of use healthcare is under threat from Reform in a way that no other political party in the UK would risk, as a consequence of that. Presumably you think we should still have an NHS but the state shouldn't own it. Given the international figures who gather around Reform and the hard right in this country, there is no way the NHS would survive Reform intact.
Populism and popular policies is not exactly the same. I would say NHS is a socialist/left policy but not populism.
I don't know an exact definition of a populism but for me it's when political messages are designed to trigger strong emotions, ignore complexity, promise simple solutions to hard problems. All politicians to some extent lie, over-promise and under-deliver but populists tent to take this on a next level.
Right populists tend to promise tax cuts (which unsurprisingly benefit their sponsors the most) and to balance budget they either increase debt or undermine public services (which is bad in a long term). Left populists promise to tax the rich ignoring that it's can be bad for economic growth and taxing alone would not give enough revenue to significantly benefit poor/middle classes.
As long as you are white British. If you're anything else you're probably going to be worse off under Farage.
It's a shame that if you want to vote for someone with different policies to the two main parties, you have to accept that you are also voting for an outspoken racist.
There are plenty of instances of Reform politicians saying things that are just outright racist (e.g. Sarah Pochin) and receiving no real reprimand from the party leadership. The only people not seeing the racism are the people who don’t want to.
Reform is also headed by a guy who regularly used phrases like "Hitler was right", "gas them all", and "go home, Paki" as an 18 year old (confirmed by 20+ former classmates).
Ordinarily we might give him the benefit of the doubt: maybe he's matured and grown up since then. But the fact that he's called all of those classmates liars says that either they are all liars, or he is dishonest about his racism.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for the Jewish community, but I would expect that they feel less threatened by something a child said in a playground during the 1970s, but rather the rampant antisemitism that has risen in our society, spearheaded by the toxic alliance of the hard left and the Islamists. Those are the ones who are assaulting Jewish people on the streets and hanging around Synagogues to “demonstrate”, or rather to intimidate them.
This is because politicians who fill the country with immigrants do so because they don't care in the slightest about the population and it shows in all facets of governance.
IMO, statistical fluke, more likely a few years of delayed migrations post-pandemic got squeezed together and it's now back to the previous trend: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c246ndy63j9o
Net migration is only falling because of record high numbers of British and European people emigrating, against a backdrop of huge (800K+) levels of gross immigration.
Firstly, why do you lump British and European together? Because they are the same "race" in your eyes?
Non-EU net migration has fallen sharply too.
It proves what was always obvious to anyone who looked at it, that high net immigration was temporary, especially the peak post covid and the special scheme for Ukrainians.
Levels of EU vs non-EU immigration has been a particular subject of interest for the UK before and after Brexit.
And note also that the UK and EU share high-quality education systems, Western Judeo-Christian culture and Western-aligned geopolitics.
Recent waves of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa are importing wholly different culture, geopolitics, and crucially, we are importing from countries with measurably lower standard of literacy and numeracy.
These are objective facts, and they are not criticisms or judgements on the character of those who are migrating.
I would make exactly the same choices as our Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean friends, if I were in their position.
Half of Europe's cultural development was initiated by Muslims and the Renaissance started with Muslim scholars in Islamic Spain, which was Islamic for the lion's share of a millennium, leading to the hilarious fact that a state in the New World settled by Spanish-speaking settlers gets the "Calif" in its name from the muslim term for a leader due to it being so totally embedded in culture. But OK, yeah. Judeo-Christian.
The roots of the renaissance were established much, much earlier in Islamic Spain. It is essentially forgotten history (and largely systematically erased history, at that)
Track down a copy of Bettany Hughes’ “When The Moors Ruled In Europe”. I think it is on Youtube. It is long but exceptionally clearly presented.
Put simply, were it not for the Reconquista, what we understand as the renaissance would be very clearly perceived as Islamic in origin.
And maybe don’t trust ChatGPT to do anything but regurgitate the prevailing interpretation of history, which was, in fact, reshaped radically by Catholic propaganda.
Seems you've found a leftwing historian who chooses to endorse the violent Islamic conquest of Southern Europe, re-imagining it as a vibrant exchange of cultures, predicated on extreme timeline distortion.
The Renaissance is defined as follows:
> The Renaissance was a European cultural movement from the 14th to 17th centuries, marking a "rebirth" of classical Greek and Roman learning after the Middle Ages. It was a period of significant innovation in art, literature, science, and philosophy, with key developments like humanism. Notable figures include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and the movement began in Italy before spreading across Europe.
Islam did not even exist in the time of the Classical Greek and Roman periods.
Neither Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael ever met Muslims directly, travelled to the Islamic world, or interacted with Islamic institutions.
Hard disagree on this. Immigration was the only realistic option to shield against demographic collapse and stabilize unskilled labor supply for decades, and it is no suprise that politicians took it.
I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.
I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.
"stabilising unskilled labour" in this context means dumping the salaries of the natives, making it so unskilled sectors no longer provide a living wage.
Sure, but local supply of labor was looking even worse than now back then, and cost of labor intensive stuff like daycare, nursing homes/residential care have gone through the roof, still.
Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation.
As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.
If you are not really subject to public control and re-election, it makes it much easier.
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
For democracy and government [1] to work it has to remain small and localised. The US had the right idea by expressly limiting the reach of the federal government to very explicit narrow things mentioned in the constitution (of course this was expanded by unconstitutional means over many governments over many years now but that is getting off topic).
The EU seems to be taking the opposite approach - countries push any unpopular law into the growing EU layer to prevent local backlash affecting them. As comments around this call it - "political laundering". A great term that I shall be borrowing.
[1] Relatedly, the philosopher Jimmy Carr has a great line about the failing of communism is about scale. It works locally at the family level but it can't scale to the level of a country.
Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of people, who even start looking into this stuff by a factor of 1000 or so.
There is the Parliament's legislative train website [1]. However, it only tracks actual legislative steps, not the intra-Council negotiations, so the proposal's page appears to be have been largely inactive since 2024 [2].
Which ones are unelected - the democratically elected heads of the member state governments? Or the democratically elected members of the EU parliament?
Or the commissioners that are appointed by the democratically elected heads of the member state governments?
I tried the same questions on multiple different threads, to multiple different imbeciles posting the same bullshit.
You will never get an answer from them. But we should keep asking it anyway.
I always wondered if they live on the EU and are genuinely too stupid to understand how the bloc their country joined works or, most likely, live outside of it and the idea of the EU as a political entity offends their sensibilities or heighten their anxiety.
I wouldn't be so sure of that assertion regarding attention span. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance granted, it's about opinion rather than capability but the same bias would explain such a reflexive judgment, and such a judgment will have negative consequences if it is false. (Consensus can be shaped, as can the perception of consensus be.)
Tell me more about that, while here in Germany people again and again vote against their own interest (AfD, CDU, SPD, and all the other corrupt and inept politicians and parties) and the mainstream parties have not managed to improve our situation for some 4-5 election cycles. Tell me more about that, while looking at the US. I am quite sure many other countries can be added to this list.
It's easy to reach for the "people are stupid" argument.
It's harder to ask, "Why are people still voting for this despite it seemingly being against their interests"
But once you do start asking that question, you'll find "they're just stupid" isn't really the only answer. At least 1 other answer would be they're responding to politics of other parties failing them too.
Is it the most rational decision for those people? No, probably not, but ignoring their motivations and chalking it up to stupidity or whatnot is really not going to solve anything - and, in fact, is only going to push those people further into what they believe. You should consider whether that's what you want.
Depends on how you define "stupid". In many cases you could say "unaware" or "forgetful" instead of "stupid". And mind, I did not say "stupid". That's a word you threw into this.
As to why they still vote like they do:
(1) Because every 4 years the mainstream party promise to solve some problems, netting votes of the young, gullible, or inexperienced voters.
(2) Promise pension increase, netting votes of the ever increasing amount of old people, most who don't care about who or what comes after them.
(3) People are too busy, burned out, or lazy (we still have it too good here, it seems), and cannot be arsed to inform themselves before elections. We also have tons of people, who are truly learning-resistant, right out of school or "university".
(4) People think, that SPD, CDU, Greens, etc. are the only way to stop AfD.
I think we are not very high on the democratic-ability scale. Yes, we vote every 4 years, but it is more like collectively we don't really care enough to inform ourselves properly and just check a few boxes, because we want to tell ourselves, that at least we did vote and that we are fine democratic citizen.
And look, I myself am not frequently reading all parties' positions. And I myself inform myself more shortly before an election, rather than all the time. But I do have a feeling for corruption and I don't always forget scandals that happen, when the next engagement-optimized news headline comes in. I still remember Rezo's "Zerstoerung der CDU" video. I remember reading those abgeordnetenwatch newsletters about the lobby register. Or the foodwatch newsletters about Kloeckner and the Lebensmittelampel. That's why I will not vote for mainstream-promise-a-lot-but-no-delivery parties and retired people clubs. And what more I do, is to use the Wahlomat, and actually check which party's position aligns most with my own.
I don't do too much either, but most people do way less to inform themselves. They just check a box out of habit. Why they vote for CDU/SPD? Because that's what they always did. It's real friggin dumb.
I'm not sure what factual basis you have for your optimism. I have plenty for my pessimism about human nature and our ability to competently govern ourselves as well as our general moral fortitude. We've gotten this far because we've been playing life on easy mode with a ridiculously nurturing planet and practically unlimited energy available under the ground, but we aren't smart enough or forward thinking enough to take on the minor pain necessary to avoid the catastrophe we are lumbering towards. We are short-sighted, selfish, self-important, and we haven't earned the regard in which we hold ourselves.
Regarding your specific point about using recent context to inform political opinions, if you spend any amount of time listening to the opinions of people online you'll find that not only do they fail to accurately recall past events, but they don't bother to research what actually happened, and when they do they fail at anything but the most superficial political analysis.
> We've gotten this far because we've been playing life on easy mode with a ridiculously nurturing planet and practically unlimited energy available under the ground, but we aren't smart enough or forward thinking enough to take on the minor pain necessary to avoid the catastrophe we are lumbering towards. We are short-sighted, selfish, self-important, and we haven't earned the regard in which we hold ourselves.
Where's your "factual basis" for such assertions?
> Regarding your specific point about using recent context to inform political opinions, if you spend any amount of time listening to the opinions of people online you'll find that not only do they fail to accurately recall past events, but they don't bother to research what actually happened, and when they do they fail at anything but the most superficial political analysis.
1) People regularly online are a rather specific group
2) People sharing their opinions online are a very specific group
3) Basing your views on society at large on opinions of those groups is a risky strategy, especially given how easy it has become to spread propaganda online
Anyway as for my optimism, it's based on actually interacting with people directly. Having discussions with them. Talking to them about what they believe, and why. They're usually a lot more complex and intelligent than those various descriptors used above.
Now one could counter equally, that people you interact with directly are:
(a) limited in number due to the nature of your interaction with them
(b) will express themselves differently, due to the nature of interaction. (Just like people expressing themselves online act differently.)
(c) are probably also a very specific group or bubble, which is simply the people you get to interact with. Which _might_ be more varied than the other person online, but might also be less varied. Really depends on how you pick the people you interact with.
(d) Anecdote of one person N=1 is not really a good factual basis for other people.
So if you want to show how your view is more based on evidence, then you will have to do better than anecdote and no links to statistics or cases we can peruse.
Maybe so. But between "people are stupid and that's why all these bad things are happening" and "people have complex motivations and rationals for doing what they do", I'm going to lean toward the latter, anecdote or not.
That could still be democratic in principle if it weren’t for lobbyists
If legislative processes are so drawn out and complex that no more than a handful of ordinary citizens could keep track of them, the advantage that paid lobbyists have over the public is enormous
> The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.
It would work if we could elect politicians who were both competent and trustworthy.
Of course that would require successfully electing people who are competent about a broad range of issues, able to see through well funded and clever lobbying, unblinded by ideology, and able to resist pressure.
Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].
The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.
Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure. The Commission have no direct link to the electorate and the your country's (sorry, “state”) Council representatives can hide behind collective consensus.
> the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure
Completely immune is overstating it, and the power to initiate legislation is not that meaningful given that the EC initiates what the council tells it to initiate and can't actually turn it into law without parliament and council
Your link to the Commission and Council is homeopathic democracy, right?
In the UK with a Parliamentary democracy, unpopular policy ideas can be abandoned. Manifestos are not always adhered to, but they typically include ideas that their canvassers can sell on the doorstep and there is robust media criticism when they abandon their promises. We have a strong history of U turns because our politicians are wary of unpopularity. The most recent big backlash was the Winter Fuel Allowance cut which was proposed by the two parties (with the Treasury pushing for it behind the scenes) and abandoned by both due to deep unpopularity in the Country. Even the budget this week had a run-up where various fiscal changes were unofficially floated through the media, to see which ones had the smallest backlash.
This is completely different to the EU, where the Commission and Council arguably get what they want even if it takes several attempts.
Interesting you say that, after the UK already passed the equivalent of Chat Control with cross party support, without the law being part of the mandate of either party.
But my point elsewhere in this thread is that we have the ability for future governments to overturn unpopular legislation, something that is not unusual at all in the UK.
Consider it read/write versus write-only in the EU, which doesn’t give a damn about unpopularity.
You speak as if the Commission and Council are somehow divorced from ne national governments of the member states.
Those are not Lovecraftian entities that came from undersea. Their members are appointed from the national governments. If you dislike how your country position itself on those organs, this should change your view on how the ruling parties in your country took decisions at the EU level.
"The plans for scanning your chats were on display for fifty Earth years at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri"?
Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of.
If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
> I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
Because your puny state is no match for the US, China or soon enough, India. Heck, even Russia in its current incarnation outmatches 80% of the EU countries.
That's it, it's that simple, conceptually.
It's basically the Articles of Confederation vs the Constitution of the United States.
Yes, it's not a pretty process, but the alternative is worse.
We can all live in La-La-Land and pretend we're hobbits living in the Shire ("Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you") until reality comes crashing down.
If the end result is going to be that the EU turns into Russia or China under the pretext of standing up to them (because apparently building an opaque process that civil society can't keep up with to ram through authoritarian laws is what it takes to be competitive?), then I'd rather they cut out the extra steps and let the Russians/Chinese take over. At least then nobody would be telling me that what I got is the outcome of some sacred democratic process I am obliged to respect.
Why, then, is the supposed anti-US/China/India/Russia power bloc trying to pass laws to mandate absolute surveillance of all private communications? If the EU is going to continue attempting to legislate away people's freedoms for purposes that are completely out of scope for the reason it exists, then the natural result is that people will turn on the EU. There is little purpose in staving off the surrendering of independence to US/China if the process entails surrendering even more freedom than they would demand to the EU, all the more so when the EU already rolls over to the US/China on almost everything anyways. I am supportive of a pan-European unification in theory, but if the result looks anything like this, no wonder people are disillusioned with the European project. With friends like the EU, who needs enemies?
I understand that it is not currently law. I also understand that the EU has been dedicated to this road of eroding citizen privacy for decades, constantly trying to pass more and more egregious legislation. For example, the Data Retention Directive of 2006 was abhorrent law. After 8 years in force, it was struck down by the ECJ, which would be somewhat reassuring if not for the fact that the EU appears to consider the ECJ a thorn in its side that it seeks to undermine at every turn. I have very little faith that this will not eventually become abhorrent law given the persistence with which the EU pursues becoming a surveillance state.
> Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
They are not. People just don't bother themselves to spend half a calory in brain power to read even the Wikipedia page about it, and just repeat shit they read in forum posts.
I mean, here on HN, a website where people are supposedly slightly above average in terms of being able to read shit, the amount of times I read how EU is "bureacrats in Brussels" "pushing hard for changes" is weird.
The issue is not with the lack of understanding of "process". But sheer frustration because there's nothing you can do as just a citizen. An unelected council of !notAyatollah has decided, and this thing is being pushed at glacier slow pace.
If EU is a trade union this is a severe overreach, if EU wants to be a federation, there's not enough checks and balances. This is the crux of the problem.
The issue is that this is a legislation that only ones in power want(censorship on communications channel where they themselves are exempt from it), that has been pushed over and over again under different names(it goes so far back - it started with ACTA talks and extreme surveillance proposals to fight copyright violations) and details in implementation and/or excuse(this time we get classic "think of the children")
The Council is a meeting of the heads of state, all of which are elected in their respective countries.
Your problem is with the leadership of countries, not with the EU as an institution. I agree that it is a problem btw, but I think you got the wrong culprit. This isn't pushed on the states by the EU, this is the states using the EU to push it and launder the bad publicity.
My problem is that i as a citizen can vote for my heads of state, but if other parts of EU decided something my vote is null and void, EVEN if majority of EU citizens are against such issue.
Imagine is those issues were campaign promises and part of internal(country's) elections - they aren't in reality but we can set that aside for now. as it was extremely well said by sibling post.
My country is 80% against 20% in favor(in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control!), other EU countries are 51% for, 49% against.
Yet such 'vote' by heads of state counts whole countries in,if you were to count individual votes majority of EU citizens would be against it.
This allows you to pass undesirable or extremely contentious legislation, that would most likely prevent you from being elected in the future in your local elections but you can easily shift the blame too!
This is as far form democracy as possible, it is pure bureaucracy that serves it's own goals.
The irony is that this is all because the EU was specifically designed to not supercede its member states. In other words, they repeated the same mistake[0] the US did. Fixing it - i.e. ditching all the appointed positions that are responsive to nation states only - would amount to federalizing the EU.
"But why can't we just leave the EU to stop this" - too late. Most EU countries have enough intra-EU migration and trade to make leaving unthinkable. The UK was a special case - and, ironically enough, actually responsible for some of the EU's worst decisions.
Furthermore, this isn't exactly an EU exclusive problem. Every supranational organization that is responsive to member states and not individual voters is a policy laundering mechanism. Ask yourself: where's your representation in the WTO, and when did you vote for them? The sum of democracy and democracy is dictatorship. Any governing body that does not respect all of its voters equally is ripe for subsumption by people who do not respect them at all.
[0] Originally, US senators were appointed by state governors. This eventually resulted in everyone voting for whatever governor promised to appoint the senator the voter wanted. Which is sort of like throwing away your gubernatorial vote for a senatorial one. This is why we amended the constitution to allow direct election of senators, and I hold that any sovereign nation that makes the mistake of appointed politicians will inevitably have to either abandon it or fail.
The issue is that EU is stuck in-between federation(which requires more checks and balances), and a trade union - which should concern themselves with just trade regulations.
In the UK all I can do is vote for my member of parliament. The victorious member may or may not get in with a majority of votes (about half get under 50%)
They then in effect elect a Prime Minister, who appoints an executive, who create laws and then put them to parliament
In the US you can vote for the leader of the executive directly. 64% of Vermont voted for Harris, yet they still got Trump.
> in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control
My understanding is that the public as a whole do not want chat control, yet the democratically elected heads of each member government do want it. The problem here is the democratically elected heads of each member government.
Doesn't take many council members to be against it to stop it in its tracks.
The culprit is correct. If the EU exists for political laundering, then it is the organisation which is harmful to the people's interests. Nobody voted for any of these heads of states on a platform of enacting Chat Control. That was not on the ballot or the platform of any party in any individual EU country. If it was, they would not have voted for it. If an individual party tried to initiate a chat control bill in its own country, it would surely face a massive reckoning at the next election[1]. Therefore, an individual party would likely not undertake to enact chat control. It is the existence of the EU which is enabling politicians to force undesirable legislation on their populace. In that environment, it is entirely correct to call the EU an un-democratic process. If it exists to pass legislation nobody would vote for and take the blame, then it will in fact be rightfully at blame and provide a strong motivation for people to exit the EU.
[1] In fact, we have helpfully seen this play out with our friendly early exiter. The remarkably self-destructive Labour party has passed their own absolute nonsense "online safety" bill, and are likely to be utterly destroyed in the next election with repealing the bill being part of the platform of the party that is polling at ~twice the share of the next largest party. With the EU providing blame-as-a-service, though, it is unlikely that anybody will be able to repeal Chat Control once rammed through, without exiting the EU entirely.
You provide your own counterexample. The UK left the EU and all it got for it was a quicker passing of it's "online safety" nonsense with none of the checks and balances (EU parliament, ECHR) that would stop it in the EU.
TFA mentions "european governments" but this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission or the union. In short it tries to depict a group of old farts as an overreaching snooping authority.
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
> this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission
Well, here is the guy from where that comes from, the minister of justice of Denmark. He certainly represents a good part of Denmark, even though he may be irrelevant to any other EU country.
That could be a result of the Parliamentary style system. With multiple parties - each sharing a part of the government - proposals and alliances can shift rapidly. It all depends on how big the pie becomes for each to get a slice
Not usual, but two out of the last 20 governments is not what I would call very rare.
its more likely than it has been in a very long time with multiple smaller parties gaining seats. Nationalists in Scotland and Wales have been around a whole, and NI always had its own parties, but on top of that we now have Reform and the Greens making gains.
"European Council has no legislative power, it is a strategic (and crisis-solving) body that provides the union with general political directions and priorities, and acts as a collective presidency."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
Similar to the Political Bureau in former communist countries, but still an autocracy.
> But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.
It has most certainly started to walk and quack a lot like an autocratic duck, it wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago, or not as visible, to say the least, but the pandemic and this recent war in Ukraine have changed that.
The EU Parliament, that has to vote to pass the law. Let's be better at commenting than Libertatea, circa 2010 (or The Daily Mail, for international readers).
The EU Parliament is a lame-duck thing, we both know that, let’s not pretend that this won’t pass at some point. It’s also not a parliament by definition, as it cannot propose any legislative measure, it can only propose “resolutions”, this is as lame-duck as it gets.
But it can block laws. Which matters. Just like in this case.
And guess what, national governments are the ones blocking the European Parliament from proposing laws, the EP has proposed multiple times that it be allowed to laws.
So EU member states themselves are the ones that don't want the EP to become a full blown parliament.
The UK keeps a register of non-crime hate incidents and invests its scarce police resources into harassing, arresting and punishing people for twitter posts.
And also: silently praying in public near an abortion center. The lady in question should have asked the policeman (as he was) "How would you define praying?". At least he'd maybe have paused for an interesting short discussion on semantics and more before for arresting her - as he did.
https://youtu.be/wXURFRSUS9U
Two years ago and she has received damages however similar attitudes still abound with marked police disapproval of attempts to display the English National flag - in England.
All good, and sorry I'm used to making posts like this on Reddit where people are less aware.
I just did what I always do, edit out the AMP part and check that it still works. Sometimes the URL will go elsewhere or need more fiddling, this time it just worked.
How they're packaging it now? Terrorism? Child porn? Russian agents?
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
It's important to know that the "new" in the title is entirely made up, it's the same draft as last week when they just ran out of time at the meeting, probably because they were fighting about Ukraine stuff.
They've optimized the packaging away. What's left of it now is a recycled paper tag that reads "because", and then if you scrutinize it further, there is poorly printed, barely readable "we're fascists".
This is "Red Queen" concept, constant battle between society and state (Leviathan).
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
Hard to maintain a balance when the State, by definition, has monopoly over violence, and State interests have the propaganda machine of mass-media on their side; the media with their pathetic justification that "we're only reporting the news!" just repeat and perpetuate bullshit rhetoric.
The real problem is that the State tends to grow like a cancer. When it gets to a point that it lords over tens or hundreds of millions of souls, it's already impossible to control and contain.
Until someone implements Jim Bell's ideas using encryption algorithms, distributed networks, and the cryptocurrencies, then there will be no government. Perhaps there won't be one anywhere. Perhaps we'll really miss the good old days.
The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people.
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).
The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.
Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.
I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
Odd, I've never seen a theory of state creation that starts with the benefits of scaling "electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing". Those are quite modern benefits, so seem like odd choices to illustrate your point.
I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.
This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.
I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.
Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.
So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.
Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.
Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.
Sure, but also for y'know, basic civilization and stuff like, idk, food safety, hospitals, roads, disaster preparedness, medicine approvals, building guidelines and all sorts of things that probably end up saving a lot more lives than they cost.
I've always advocated a proliferation of overlapping "states." Let them keep each other in check.
Instead of having a tree with a king at the top and your local police station at the bottom, be a part of the governance for the river that you live near, for the city that surrounds you, for the grocery store in your neighborhood, for your local fire department, and let all of them have codified relationships with each other that are determined by codified processes.
I believe the limitation on this was technological; that we had to get people into a room, get Robert's Rules out, and shout our way into decisions. Those limitations are gone; we all have phones. We should be able to participate in the governance of everything, or if we really don't want to think about that crap, hand our proxy to someone who does, get alerts on what they're doing with it, and revoke or transfer it instantly.
So, the problem with all of these proposed replacement systems (such as IRV, for example) is that "democracy" is a meme. People, en masse, believe in these systems-as-written (for better or worse) - critically - even if that isn't how things actually work on the ground in the real world.
So many people believe that, for example, the stuff written on the paper currency of the United States is legally binding. (It's irrelevant whether it is or not - people believe it, because they hear, believe, repeat, and teach the meme.)
Representative government is the same way. There are much better systems, and anyone can easily think up a few of them. The problem is going from A to B, also known as "the tyranny of the installed base".
No proposed new form of government or representation is worth the paper it's printed on unless it comes with a viable migration path from the status quo.
Well the VCs and tech elite read a lot of Curtis Yarvin and decided the masses are too stupid to have a say in government so in the US we’re getting a CEO/king instead
Let's not fall for the is/aught fallacy: Identifying that something is a certain way doesn't make one in any way shape or form inherently more qualified to say what it SHOULD be like instead.
The state might be comprised of people, but unless everybody is directly involved in the final decision process you'll always have (at least) a principal-agent problem between the people acting as political representatives and everybody else.
Suddenly it has become normal to scan face in 3D, nonchalantly demand copy of ID and passport, freeze people's money and demand full financial statement arbitrarily. Not only there is no push back but things are becoming more and more restrictive.
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
Considering that in concert with all of the above a device has been developed that emulates human speech more convincingly than most humans, I guess it's pretty obvious
The person you’re replying to is saying that in the several years the technological means to impersonate people at scale has become widely available, and because of this financial institutions are having to strengthen their security measures to defend against fraud.
When last time employee of bank or public administration in developed world paid consequences for leaking private or biometric data, copies of documents or documents themselves?
Because now you have kiddos in customer service demanding things like deed of purchase of real estate or inheritance documents.
Yes I experienced this with FastSpring. Had a store with them for 15+ years, then suddenly they froze it and demanded all of the above. Was quite disturbing to say the least.
If you look up comments on fintechs, trading platforms, and even legit banks on reddit and review websites there has been surge of these practices in last maybe 12 months. Basically "all savings and accumulated funds are illegal by default". In the past I only had heard horror stories about Paypal but now this it widespread.
That's the blessing of the KYC/AML laws/regulations for ya.
Moving money needs source of funds, documentation etc... doing any business requires you to doxx yourself to the world and to vendors in the name of transparency.
Luckily though none of this is a problem for large multinationals :) which the EU cares about most in the end
So after you paid income tax, then capital gains tax while accumulating, and about to pay VAT tax while purchasing something, they say "hold on, this money looks illegal!". Savings don't have documentation in form of recent payslip or deed of sale.
The yachts and private jets on European harbors and airports don't look like their owners have any problem with money transfers. Wirecard billions? poof, vanished!
If feels as if elites were in process of cutting off everyone else.
Partly it's because the Danish have the rotating EU presidency at the moment so they have the job of pushing things forward (which also means receiving the most lobbying). In the previous wave earlier in the year, it was the Polish for the same reason.
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
I wonder how aware they are of the damage to the EU's reputation that they're continually creating by repeatedly bringing this back
I think this theme of the EU, this lack of taboo against continually bringing unwanted laws until they pass by fatigue, it may well be the death of the institution as a whole. every time they try, every time people hear about it, more and more think worse of the EU, and unlike most western governments, the existence and function of the EU is actually severely vulnerable to what people think of it. no other major government takes as much reputational damage from laws that don't even pass, and the existence of no other major government is as vulnerable to reputational damage as the EU is right now. all it takes is another 1 or 2 major exits and the whole thing will slowly collapse, which is insanely sad
The UK government laundering unpopular regulations through the EU and then blaming the EU for them even when the UK had proposed and often championed then was definitely a factor in Brexit passing.
Somewhat relevantly, the UK already has their own version of this legislation in the Online Safety Act which lead to a bunch of small-medium UK community sites closing and the likes of Imgur, pixiv and 4chan blocking the UK.
I believe 4chan is taking ofcom to court for trying to restrict their first amendment rights rather than blocking the UK, at least I'm still able to access it without a vpn.
4chan is an American company with no presence whatsoever in the UK. 4chan doesn't even use normal payment processors, relying on crypto instead, so the UK can't even block payments made by UK subjects to 4chan.
In light of this, why would 4chan comply? Contrary to the claim above, 4chan has not actually blocked UK users, and has no reason to do so. They did however get a lawyer to write up a letter telling the redcoats to go fuck themselves.
because 4chan's services are available to people residing in the UK
the OSA is ridiculous and I hope it goes the same way as the last time they tried it, but this idea that US companies should be immune to domestic regulation in countries their services are available to is silly. even if that domestic regulation is silly. because otherwise the utterly encaptured regulatory environment of the US (plus Visa and MC) solely dictates the internet
> because 4chan's services are available to people residing in the UK
I don't understand why 4chan is obligated to be the one to ensure that UK citizens don't access the site when this should be entirely within the UK government's power, no? At the very least, the infrastructure which allows their citizens to access 4chan is on UK soil so it stands to reason that they actually have authority over that.
I feel like making the case that any site which serves an international audience on the Internet has to observe the laws of every single country represented in that audience is bad precedent and has the potential to be incredibly stifling to anyone but the type of multinational corporation which has the sort of legal apparatus that's required to operate in that sort of environment.
Before you answer, substitute the UK with Iran and whatever distasteful content 4chan is hosting this week with "the dictatorship of Iran is harmful to its people, and they should rise up to remove it from power".
first of all, not everything is good or bad. the EU does masses of good and is probably [read: definitely] the most mature and healthy legislative body governing >100m population ever to have existed
chat control has not passed, and undoubtedly will not pass in any deeply unpalatable state. this is the point of the unanimity requirement of the EU. most likely in the end we will get some kind of law giving additional search powers to police, perhaps allowing them to remotely "switch on" chat scanning for a suspect via specific court order, comparably to how they compromised on facial recognition
secondly, to agree with the sibling comment, I look at the results, not the process. the EU has incredible results by anyone's measure, and perhaps their processes need a tweak or two, but this "it must be ultra-democracy or I don't want it" attitude just feels overly simplistic, and likely driven by ideological commitments to other things the EU opposes
A lot of people think democracy is a bad thing - or that too much democracy is a bad thing.
A lot of people support what they want the EU to be rather than what it actually is. Applies in general - people can love their country without supporting its current government or constitution.
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
After reflecting on this a bit earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion; Palantir and maybe other like minded lobbying clueless politicians. It is a considerable weakness in the way laws are formed and voted on.
Palantir sells software for analyzing data, like Excel but on a large scale. If "Chat Control" passes, they will need software to analyze the data they collect, which is exactly what Palantir sells. It is just business.
I don't know about Thorn but it looks like the same: they sell software that may be of use for implementing "Chat Control".
"It is a just a business" is crazy to say if your founder was Peter Thiel and you ostensibly merged already halfway with the operating goverment (US, DoD)
I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish took the territory without permission themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.
This is 1814 we're talking about, right? That's only a decade after Louisiana Purchase just for reference and before the Mexican-American war. I guess we might as well give all that back to the Mexicans? You can play this game to the end of time. There's a reason for statute of limitations in law.
So? The US prior to 1776, those specific colonies that became the US, were British colonies, are you claiming before that those colonies weren't considered British?
Britain lost their claim to those colonies when they lost a war to the Americans. The Inuit had no capacity to fight a war with Denmark. So it's the same situation except now Denmark is on the short-end of the power imbalance, and they're upset about it.
Its not the same situation. Greenland has self-rule, and are masters of planning and executing their own independence. They wouldn't have that if swallowed by the US. Its funny how you appear to be miffed about colonialism, while holding outdated views that paints the Greenlanders as poor natives that don't have any self-determination.
I find it a pointless rabbit hole to go down given the timeframe. I guess we disagree. We're not talking about the independence of the indigenous people at this current point in time, we're talking about Denmark relinquishing it by default because they colonized and annexed it imorrally.
Time is a factor. Taking land is what was done in the past. US wanting to do it now is as if Mexico decided to revive slavery and threatend to capture Afroamericans in USA. It's a touchy subject and I think most of US wouldn't be exactly on board with this idea.
Especially since putin shows us exactly what happens if you try.
> Mexico decided to revive slavery and threatend to capture Afroamericans in USA
It's a bad example because the power balance doesn't make sense. I think you will have a hard time coming up with any example where USA would be on the receiving end of something like this.
the power balance isn't relevant. the original commenter said that they find it funny that Europeans get upset about Trump pretending he'd take Greenland. honestly the comment just seems like deliberately triggering 4chan-esque fare with little to no value to it. the power balance is completely irrelevant. it's one territory not happy with another power coveting its territory. how bizarre and unexpected
The power balance is relevant because USA can just take it if they want it. People in Europe will be upset but that isn't going to change the outcome. USA has offered to purchase it many times.
I think ultimately this will end up being resolved with USA getting rights to something like 80% of the resource value and Denmark getting 20% in exchange for getting to keep the title.
the power balance isn't relevant because "the US could just take it" doesn't make it any more surprising that Europeans aren't happy with the idea. Spain could take Gibraltar if they wanted, that doesn't mean it's hilarious that the British aren't happy about the idea
the original commenter quite obviously doesn't find it surprising or funny, they're just anger baiting
this is an assuaging read. the German government decided it was illegal. reading this featured article, they don't appear to have changed their minds, plus another couple of countries, too. so what are we worried about?
The problem is that it doesnt matter if Germany is against it. If this gets approved in the EU parliament, the countries will have no choice but to agree to it.
That is how the EU works. The time to disagree has come and gone basically.
My conspiracy theory is because they’d probably give a lot of contracts to Palantir (see the UK giving NHS to Palantir on a silver platter), and the US basically threatening to annex Greenland recently
At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?
Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too.
How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen.
All maybe they will not and EU will block signal.
Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
Words are just words as far as I know but the prospect of leaving the EU for Signal would really send a strong message to all those who still believe that the EU is better in terms of privacy than the US.
As far as I am concerned this is the nail in the coffin for the EU privacy advocates/ evangelists.
They have the same jurisdiction problem as Signal. So does Delta Chat, Matrix which were mentioned in another response here.
From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.
Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.
SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.
XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.
On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.
Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.
For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.
Yes I believe one way to see what is happening is in fact our own mistake.
We thought we could prevent those law of being signed but it was very naive.
The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid.
But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades:
- We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet
- We let big tech dominate the mobile OS space
- We embrassed the Cloud and SaaS (not your computer)
These 3 things made us sitting duck to any authoritarian government and now we pretend to be surprised we are getting shot.
Some decentralized platform with federation abilities. Delta Chat seems promising, but does not support forward secrecy. It is quite interestingly based on plain old email!
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
This is the same way the law in many EU countries mandates ISPs to store communication logs for every internet subscriber for months or longer.
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks
Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.
I have been successful in getting non-technical people onto Signal. As far as a technical product goes, Signal is kindof shit (among other things: no support for non-Debian-based Linux forcing users to use sketchy third party repos when they are a massive target for backdoors, really shitty UX for backups), but it gets the job done and seems to have robust encryption from what other people say (I am not qualified to evaluate this myself).
If a P2P solution that solved the aforementioned Signal issues were to have excellent UX, then that could probably work.
Lastly, what counts as "excellent UX" for technical and non-technical people seems to differ. For example, I consider Discord and Slack to be quite intuitive and easy to use, but multiple technical people have expressed to me that they find it to be very confusing and that they prefer other solutions, such as GroupMe in one example. To me, GroupMe shoving the SMS paradigm into something that's fundamentally not SMS is more confusing and poor UX, but to these non-technical people that seems easy. I suspect that Signal's shortcomings that I perceive are an example of this: making UX trade-offs that work great for non-technical people but are less good for technical people. I'm not sure what these specific UX trade-offs are, but I suspect that it's something akin to having a conceptually sound underlying model (like Discord or Slack servers/workspaces and channels), versus having really obvious "CLICK HERE TO NOT FUSS" buttons like GroupMe, while having graceful failures for non-technical users that can't even figure that out (like just pretending to be SMS in GroupMe's case if you can't figure out how to install an app, or don't want to put that effort in, something that many people know how to use).
My (very non-technical) 70 year old mom was actually happy to use Element because it has a nice desktop client, so she can more easily type and see pictures than on her phone screen. Simplex Chat would have worked for her as well.
Whet nerds perpetually don't understand, is that regular people hate the apps that nerds love, which are largely apps made by nerds who hate the apps that normal people love.
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
It is just a saying my dear friend. I added link because I was not sure how known it is in other countries - if at all.
But of course some HN commenter had to do: 'well actually...'. :D
If I would write something like: 'Better late than never' would you be correcting me too? 'Well actually studies shows that it is better never...'
I genuinely didn’t mean to upset you, and apologise for that. I enjoy learning about idioms and their origins, and find it doubly interesting when something is widespread but based on an incorrect notion. My comment was made in good faith, it was in no way intended as a slight on you.
This achieves every goal the original proposal achieved, except the wording is sneakier.
Services are obligated to do risk analysis and take appropriate safety precautions against high risk actions. High risk actions include "anonymous accounts", "uploading media", and of course "encrypted messages".
The moment they catch the next random pedo, every messenger app on their phone will be tasked with explaining why they didn't do enough to stop the pedo. They'd better get their business together next time, because otherwise they might be held liable!
There's no law that says you have to hand over arbitrary data to the police without a warrant but when Telegrams shady owner landed in france, he was locked up until his company pledged to "work together with police better".
Don't be fooled by pretty words, none of this optional stuff is optional for any messenger the government doesn't already have the ability to read along with.
OP is not reading too much into this. You are being naive if you think that this is not the intended goal of this law.
Everyone who has looked at this proposal know that the 'changes" made to the latest draft are not real changes and that voluntary scanning with repercussions is the same exact thing as mandatory.
If a robber walks into your house and ask you to give all your cash and threatens to break your legs if you don't do it, did you give your money voluntarily or was it forced by the threat of violence?
Either something is mandatory and if not done, should be punished accordingly or something is voluntary in which case, then if someone does not do it there are no repercussions.
You can't say that something is voluntary and but that there would be repercussions if that thing is not done. It does not make sense.
Yet that is exactly what this law says. High risk companies should prevent the spread of CSAM but they are not forced to do it, except that if they don't do it then bad things will happen to them but don't worry it's not mandatory.
Those are just weasel words by politicians. Nothing more.
Note how they exclude themselves. No privacy for the you only for them. We will all become lawbreakers in the near future as the voluntary aspect is enforced.
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”
And those politicians there form their own little interest groups across members states and vote accordingly, which is the exact opposite of what we think of democracy.
You'd basically have to rely on magic to know how those politicians you vote in will decide to vote on because they join some sect that lobbies them to vote against your interests.
And we all know no voter aside from the 1% will ever think this far. It's exactly like you called it, the illusion of choice
this is basically how Chinese social media works - liability for 'problematic' user posted content (ambiguously defined by the govt...) is on the technology platforms themselves, so they inevitably have to scan messages / posts, taking a zero risk policy on whatever content type is proscribed.
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
Thank you ChrisArchitect. That story was mysteriously (downranked/downmodded/deranked/downweighted) from the front page.
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. The EU is flawed beyond and possible reform, but I feel the alternative of a segmented Europe is even crazier to think about
> I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe.
I believe that EU countries having trading agreements, sharing technology and sharing intel would be good but what we have now as the EU is not that.
It has become a single point of failure that is too easily gamed by lobbyists.
Before the EU, you needed to have lobbyist in 27 countries to get all of them to agree to something, now you just send them to Brussels and only need to convince 15 countries to agree to something for it to be approved.
We basically made the system easier to game. And now we are paying the price.
So now holding politicians accountable is being an extremist?
If the EU politicians start working against my interests as a citizen, then why shouldn't I penalize them? If the EU as a whole starts working against my interests as a citizen, when why should I keep supporting this system?
The fact that you label me as an extremist for voicing my opinion (which I can only assume is different from yours) is telling. Your view of democracy seems quite skewed and if you were in charge of my country, you can bet I would vote you out too.
This is a forum where everyone is free to participate. If you don't like opinions different from yours, then feel free to skip them instead of insulting other people. This is not high school.
What is also funny is that they are doing that at the same time that they are thinking about relaxing requirements on GDPR and things like that that are really beneficial to the citizens on the pretext to make the regulation easier for "innovation".
This is such a weird sentiment and I see it often when talking about EU politics. Is this just how the European constituency feels? Just like beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about and no control over?
But going off what I said, I acknowledged this sort of legislation is bad and that a right to privacy is needed. How do you arrive at "beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about"?
All I did was point out the reality right now, even without this legislation.
You can imagine what forms most of the the “pressure” from the government will take, on platforms owned & controlled by large corporations. Hint: it will involve their profit motive.
Also it is not just in Europe —
digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
Selfishly, part of me hopes this passes, because it will drive high-IQ people to move out of the EU (I highly recommend Armenia), and the EU is a major economic competitor of my own country.
Of all places in the world, Armenia. A country so afraid of its neighbors they would allow Moscow to tell them to do anything. I hope I'm my IQ is not high enough to be included in this proposal.
I have this feeling that I can’t shake off that this is done as the EU political class’ coping mechanism for being absolutely terrified because their whole worldview was shattered overnight:
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
Don't forget the lobbying. Behind every authoritarian move are a group of companies lobbying for these changes. When you work for law and order, there are only so many customers you can sign, so signing new services is the most reliable way to accomplish growth.
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
Well obviously they want it, they voted for it. They probably see the situation in terms of something like class war. There are a bunch of people they don't like in society and they want to identify and marginalise them.
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
Clearly it’s not all of them. Some countries voted against, and even the ones voting in favour had a few people against.
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
It's baffling from our perspective, but perhaps not so much if you try to look at it the mindset of its proponents.
It's been sold as "for the children". A very substantial proportion of the population are natural authoritarians, and this is red meat for them. Never mind that "the children" that they profess to be protecting are going to grow up living in an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state, this is what authoritarians want for our future, and they see it as not only morally good, but any opposition to it as indefensible.
> The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top.
Dumb and greedy voters, traditional and social media, and electoral interference are known reasons. But it's also a matter of compromise: you vote for a party because you agree with a bunch of their points, but almost certainly not all. Topics like privacy are ignored by the general public, so politicians are hardly held accountable for them.
Some countries have more faith in their institutions than others. Countries with good and reliable institutions, comparatively at least, are easier to convince this won't be abused and is for the greater good. I'm not surprised the Danes have found a faction to support this bullshit.
It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information.
It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.
What is untrue? You need to verify your identity with Persona to use GPT-5 or GPT 5.1 or a lot of other models.
"By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."
Are you able to access the API models without verifying your organization? See if you can access all models here.
https://platform.openai.com/chat/edit
Web/app interface and API access are two different access layers for the model. Everyone can use the web or app interface for accessing all models, but API access is restricted unless you provide biometric information.
Why is this even surprising? Mass surveillance is not a new thing. It's been there since the inception of the internet. This only makes it "official" and is nothing more than a formality. We need to fight back by using decentralized and p2p software
As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be:
* Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE
* The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages
* The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay)
* That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually
* If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued
* If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions
* This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds
Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.
Nothing new under the Sun mate. Look up Clipper Chip.
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
Difference is that with the above you’d have a party that actually discloses what data is accessed so having the ability to access it doesn’t immediately turn into mass surveillance and the people (e.g. opposition politicians) would at least be able to bring attention to the fact by making the reasons for the surveillance be revealed in a court hearing.
Of course I have 0 belief that it wouldn’t get hijacked/corrupted by horrible people anyways so whatever.
Europe is no longer a place that should be considered ideologically compatible with the United States. At best neutral. The US should abandon NATO and downgrade relations with the continent.
There are also constitutional barriers to lie under oath, e.g. about spying and collecting data on US citizens, but those barriers seem very ineffective (I'm talking about the 2013 congressional hearing involving James Clapper).
I see no clear indicator that the situation has improved since.
Because US already has it. Did everyone forgot about Snowden? They have the ability and they are actively using it for at least the past 12 years. There is a reason that every major cloud provider is building a European sovereign cloud now, because US services are not trusted.
It's all relying on US tech and there is strong lobbying coming from the US for such solution. US has already deployed mass surveillance, major difference is they did it without telling citizens.
Obviously you dont know anything about Europe.
In the 90's there was a huge migration of Polish people and you know where they migrated mostly? Spain (and Italy). And you know what?, most of my friends during that moment were from Poland (incredible good and educated people to be honest)
Step 1: Allow reckless immigration
Step 2: Terrorism and Insecurity obviously
Step 3: People give up their privacy for security
Step 4: Insecurity continues and government safe regardless
Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
Well, the impression of speed is mainly in the head of the headline writers.
What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
> Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
While I agree with your point, it's still crucial to raise awareness of Europe's actions. It may be a small step, but it is not insignificant.
Awareness of the reality, yes, but there's no reason to play people's emotions to get them "aware" of it - or in other words, get them angry about it.
This type of legislation should never ever be proposed in a democratic system, so had disagree.
This is an extremely totalitarian-style move from EU - governing bodies are exempt from the law, meanwhile peasants have to be watched 24/7 for wrongthink, all under guise of protecting the children.
While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.
Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
>While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.
I'm thinking like state already, i would never trust ANY state with such powers, even the one that was perfectly aligned with my political views.
It's not issue of state, but dilution of responsibility and the way the votes are counted.
It is also an issue of unelected officials deciding things - the whole system is broken.
Before you say that heads of state were elected - this is highly contentious issue, no one ran on this in internal campaigns, and votes on this issue are counted country-wide(all for or all against), without any regards to distribution of populace's opinion on this subject.
>Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
You're enacting legislation that will actually empower those entities this way!
Criminals - surprise surprise - can just break the law, and use devices/software that just.. does not do content scanning, and uses true E2E encryption. Even over insecure channel by using steganography and key exchange over it.
Espionage can be handled the same way, probably even easier as they can easily use one-time pads and key phrases established beforehand in their country of origin!
Meanwhile only group affected by it are just normal citizens.
I keep seeing this fallacy argument about some bad actors and criminals etc. etc. Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens. I don't understand how someone can be apologetic for totalitarian state.
> Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens.
Indeed, the state doesn't need all of them.
That it's all-or-nothing is due to how the tech works, in that you can't break it *only* for the targets — a point I make when I'm trying to explain the dichotomy to the politicians who want to spy, that this absolutely will be abused to reveal *their own* secrets, too.
The way politicians talk about this stuff, suggests they think computer code is like law, that words may have precise meanings but there's still an element of human judgement and common sense, and at human speed, not cold logic operating on bits faster than us by the degree we are faster than geology, where the potential harm from errors can be irreversable total loss of an entire business due to one single error made one time by one person, nor where mistakes from 20 years ago might be discovered and exploited at any time.
That's why I said "I can't even square the circle". If I thought the government position here was just absolutely fine, it wouldn't be difficult to square the metaphorical circle.
The difficulty is that despite their wrongheadedness about the consequences of what they're trying to do, what they're trying to do is actually necessary.
And that's just the crypto parts of this.
I left the UK for two reasons: The Investigatory Powers Act, and Brexit. Kinda related cause I thought Brexit would make it harder to fight the IP Act. Went to Westminster to talk to my MP to try and convince them to vote against the IP Act. I remain convinced that the British government was straight up lying about its reasons for having that Act.
Organized criminals (especially state actors) will find ways to communicate in the dark regardless, including just continuing to use illegal encryption.
> including just continuing to use illegal encryption.
First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.
Second, what gets talked about in public (the only thing any of us knows for sure, but also definitely not the whole picture) includes foreign governments recruiting locals via normal messenger apps.
More of a problem is that the back-doors can be exploited by both criminals and hostile powers.
> First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.
You're assuming they continue to use monitored channels to carry it out.
I am assuming that the entire (EU in this case) internet is monitored for un-decryptable messages, and that they use the internet.
Can you square the circle, even in principle, without questions of cost?
The issue is that EU does not control the internet, nor all means of communication. Nor perfect form of monitoring exists so question is moot in itself. Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.
and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.
The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so.
> Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.
Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send.
"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
> policy/economic problem instead
Instead? Everything about this is about groups wanting to act in secret for their best interests, and other people wanting to ensure that only the interests they share get to do that. This is true when it's me logging into my bank and criminals trying to get access to the same, when it's the Russian government sponsoring arson attacks in Europe and local police trying to stop them, and when it's the CIA promoting Tor for democracy activists in dictatorships and those dictatorships trying to stop them.
We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.
It is possible for unauthorized hardware to exist. People who want to do illegal things to begin with won't mind so much if their methods of communication happen to be illegal.
Irrelevant.
1) Illegal telecoms equipment can be seized
2) Someone doing this on the public Internet would only get away with it if their encrypted packets *never ever* went through a government licensed router. The moment they go through a public router: instantly detected.
You have an absurd level of confidence in government competence. Not even China can pull this off.
China isn't doing it for the same reasons I already said.
Can't square the circle. Crypto is too important.
Must have. Can't have. Must have. Can't have.
If it was easy to come down one side or the other, everyone in the world would be on the same page.
The tension between them is pulling everyone in both directions.
> "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text.
It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.
> It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what?
If that seed doesn't generate that particular white noise sequence, or if you can't supply that photo, then you go to jail.
> It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.
It's also economically unfeasible.
Am I using moonspeak without realising it when I say "I can't square this circle"? Is this a phrase that people are unfamiliar with and I just haven't realised?
the issue is that you've made a lot of a priori assumptions that do not hold up
>"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
Guilty until proven innocent, the burden is on you to prove it.
you are hung up on your pre-made assumption that the EU(state) in this case can have perfect control - which is fallacious in itself - and therefore are just arguing in bad faith. When they have such perfect control this is already a totalitarian state, that requires no such thing as due process.
all of that to push forward your point:
>We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.
Chat messages are tiny. You can easily put the encrypted signal into e.g. the residual portion (i.e. high entropy/looks like noise part) of lossless images/sound that you send unencrypted. "That was just a FLAC of me singing". Or innocuous cat pictures. Or whatever.
And while all this is happening, there are cases were peoples homes get search for comments on twitter. These are often in bad taste, but what tastes even worse is that the judiciary doesn't seem to understand proportionality anymore. Mean tweets carry higher sentences than raping someone, stern look at Germany here.
A judiciary in such a sorry state, that has not adapted to a changed reality, cannot be permitted to read private communications.
'Mean tweets' is such an empty meaning. Come with examples. It is on paper very easy to break the law via speech. If I post something here about how I want to reward a murder on a certain politician (or want to do it myself), I can guarantee you the police would be involved. And rightfully so.
Freedom of speech is about pre-moderation. It doesn't mean your actions do not have consequences. If you yell fire in a theatre while there is none, you should be held liable. See also the case of Gennaro P. (the Damschreeuwer) who at May 4 of 2010 yelled during two minutes of silence of Rememberance of the Dead.
This is an example from UK about a dead military officer: “The only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn,”
Now the rest of Europe has much more freedom of speech than UK, but that is an example of a mean tweet about a government official that got sentenced. We don't want that in the EU.
Note that the guy was convicted even though he almost immediately deleted the tweet and apologized, the law is that bad, you aren't allowed to slip up even a little bit.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/31/twitter-user-sentenced-to-comm...
>doesn't mean your actions do not have consequences
YES IT DOES THAT IS EXACTLY THE POINT
You obviously do not believe in freedom of speech as defined by US law. You are conflating extremely narrow exceptions with broad politically motivated violations of freedom of political speech
> You obviously do not believe in freedom of speech as defined by US law.
Neither do you. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly held in numerous rulings that freedom of speech and/or freedom of expression is not absolute and you can be sanctioned, prosecuted and/or imprisoned for some forms of speech and/or expression -- i.e. you do have consequences.
- Schenck v. United States (1919) -- Speech that has intent and a clear and present danger of resulting in a crime is not protected under the First Amendment
- Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) -- The First Amendment does not protect fighting words, which are those that inherently cause harm or are likely to result in an immediate disturbance
- Feiner v. New York (1951) -- The police are permitted to take action against those exercising speech that is likely to disturb the peace
- United States v. O'Brien (1968) -- You can be prosecuted for destroying certain property as an act of political speech; the law forbidding this was not unconstitutional
- Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) -- It is permissible to restrict speech that advocates for imminent unlawful violence and is likely to incite people to perform such
- Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton (1973) -- Restrictions on the dissemination of obscene material are not by themselves unconstitutional (see also the ruling immediately below)
- Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc (1991) -- Public indecency laws banning dancing nude are not unconstitutional
- Virginia v. Black (2003) -- Partial reversal: While a broad ban on cross-burning is unconstitutional, banning cross-burning for the express intent to intimidate is not
- Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) -- As a public official, you can be sanctioned by your government employer for speech contrary to employment policy
- Morse v. Frederick (2007) -- Schools can ban students from sharing speech about illegal drug use at school
- Counterman v. Colorado (2023) -- True threats of violence are outside the bounds of the First Amendment, and laws covering stalking and making threats in this manner are not unconstitutional
Provide 11 meaningful examples of things that are legal to say in the US and not legal in the UK or EU and then reevaluate your position.
The US Constitution. What a beautiful piece of paper, such a nice theory. Yet your current president is circumventing Congress. Your president is bullying states. You don't even have a functional popular vote. Your SCOTUS is dysfunctional. And, this 1st amendment, is that why peaceful protestors got shot by rubber bullets when they were protesting against the war in Iraq? Which, as it turned out, was started for dishonest reasons. You folks also were first with DMCA. Yet we don't have BS like filibuster and gerrymandering.
There's a good reason why on every half-serious index about freedom of speech or freedom of press, the best countries are Scandinavian and Switzerland, followed by West-Europe. And that data is from before the current orangutan is in office.
Thats like asking kim jong un who the freest country is and being proud that he say its north korea
'Being proud that he say' [sic]. You're not even a native English speaker, are you, 'greg'?
First you say freedom of speech is about after the speech (it is about before the speech, as after that the law is applied pragmatic).
Then you come with this KJU joke. North Korea doesn't make these indices. [1] [2] [3]. In each of these, USA is decidedly below the vast majority of the free West, including the very countries I mentioned before, each of which couldn't be further from North Korea. It is also Trump during Trump 1 who was positive about KJU (IIRC before the Rocket Man rhetoric, but still), and who is being a shill for one of North Koreans partners (China by proxy / Russia). Mind you, all of these sources are post-Trump 1 yet pre-Trump 2 (ie. from Biden 1 era).
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy...
[2] https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-econom...
[3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
By one of your own references USA is in the top 3 for freedom of speech.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Yep, in fafs in 2021. Pew 2015: 8th. gsod 2023: 28th.
On all of the freedoms, USA tends to do best on freedom of speech. But how can you say such, when the press has less freedom than in other rich West countries? Isn't that counter interactive?
I didn't say it, your sources did.
> There's a good reason why on every half-serious index about freedom of speech or freedom of press, the best countries are Scandinavian and Switzerland, followed by West-Europe. And that data is from before the current orangutan is in office.
Can you share your half-serious indicies?
> Can you share your half-serious indicies?
I already shared them.
The Democracy Index is by The Economist [1]. The USA was #28 there (2024), well below Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and well below Germany, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and various others. That's from 2024, before Trump's attack on the US democracy.
World Press Freedom Index by Reports Without Borders [2]. The USA is #57 in this list (2025), in the yellow color ('problematic').
Also, take note that both of these values are world-wide under threat, and the USA is part of being under this threat.
You also wrote in your previous post:
> By one of your own references USA is in the top 3 for freedom of speech.
But that one has incomplete data. It lacks data from like half the world. Finland, Iceland, The Netherlands, Switzerland (each countries doing well on every other index) aren't included.
> I didn't say it, your sources did.
Yeah, they couldn't know your country would be nearing a constitutional crisis by end of 2025.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
both of these sources are European
Which data sources would you point to for ranking freedom of speech by country?
That’s a great question. The answer (of course) depends on what result you want to get and nothing else.
Yes, there is. This shouldn't move forward at all, regardless of how many steps are involved and how small they are.
An angry, divided population is a lot easier to push to the extremes, enabling such legislation because people are so angry and divided and can't come to a reasonable compromise or solution.
These things shouldn't move forward, indeed. But being angry about it for years at a time when things aren't even remotely set in stone doesn't seem healthy for an individual or society at large.
Anyone can and does say this about their pet favorite bit of legislation. And so journalists are more than happy to pull this shit with every other topic, too.
That's okay. I can just choose not to read the stuff I'm not interested in.
Nah the first reaction of anyone who cherishes democracy which by necessity should be skeptical of entrenched and liberty abusing policies in the name of "safety" should be "what? are you crazy? what a stupid idea" for any of these encryption banning scams.
Mass surveillance of private messaging is something anyone with a brain should be angry about. Your position is insane.
Mass surveillance of private messaging has been happening since day 1 at Facebook and them.
That's a bad faith argument, in effect an outright lie, because you're conflating individual instances of bad actors with what would now be a universal policy meant to neuter encryption and 100% of net privacy.
While I disagree with your position for the reasons already given by others, it's quite ironic that in this thread about government censorship that your opinion is in the process of being censored by other HN users.
unless someone tells you to "shutup and get off hackernews or I'll see what I can do about getting <insert name here> to ban you" then they aren't being censored.
Being downvoted is not remotely "censorship"
It makes the opinion hidden from the vast majority of visitors, except those who go out of their way to both have an account and showdead.
It is in every appreciable way censorship via unaccountable mob. It's censorship in a way that Reddit's downvote isn't, because Reddit allows anonymous users to read downvoted posts - or at least did the last time I checked.
Does your definition of censorship require everything to be viewable by anonymous users?
Does your definition of disagreement require that it be made harder for others to hear voices you disagree with?
That was an illuminating question. Thank you. I see my parent's point now because no, I don't think that disagreement requires what amounts to censure if it makes it harder for something to be seen.
Pretty much.
At the point where tensions rise beyond polite disagreement, HN ceases to be a functional social space and turns into a game of "who can make the other's opinions disappear first."
Doing so is technically against the rules, but either the moderators don't care, aren't doing it on a large enough scale to be an effective deterrent, or are knowingly complicit.
As others have mentioned:
1. this wasn't fast, it took ~5 years and most (but not all) of the problematic parts have been removed
2. It also wasn't "fully rejected" or anything in the decision which gained some awareness of hacker news, just one specific draft was rejected, not the proposal as a whole (but IMHO it should have been).
3. it's not passed just approved by the council, which consists of the various head of states elected in their respective countries (i.e. is the easiest part to pass something controversial), but still needs to pass the European parliament (elected through the EU elections)
4. and then it must not be shot down by the ECJ or ECHR, both might shot it down, the ECJ for it being excessive/disproportional, and the ECHR because privacy is accepted as a human right by it (in general, there are exceptions so not 100% guaranteed). Or shut down by the German supreme court (same reason as ECJ and ECHR) which has somewhat of a veto right (or else Germany wouldn't have been able to legally join the EU), idk. if any other countries supreme courts have similar veto rights, but idk. why they shouldn't have)
EU law has supremacy over national laws. National courts need to disapply local laws in conflict with EU law, so typically any subsequent local disputes in court will just be ruled based on a new EU law/ruling. EU laws in conflict with a local constitution pose more of a challenge: from the EU point of view, EU law is supreme and they might apply infringement procedures for failing to recognize it, but for a country, the constitution is probably more important than a treaty.
> for a country, the constitution is probably more important than a treaty.
The constitution is always supreme, because the ability to agree to the treaties derives from the constitution.
> EU law has supremacy over national laws
Yes however EU has very limited capabilities to enforce that. They can bully smaller countries a bit more but Germany can do more or less whatever it wants
> EU law has supremacy over national laws
This only applies where countries ceded sovereignty to the EU.
Technically in Germany non of the sovereignty was ceded but transferred based on two different articles in the German Constitution. But that transfer is neither absolute, nor automatic. Practically it means that in most situations it is "as if" it was cede, but just in most situations.
This leads to a situation where if the supreme court rules that some EU regulations or similar are against the German constitution you have a conflict between the constitutional articles which transfer authority and the ones the court ruled to have been infringed one.
But in the German constitution not all articles are equally, the first few have special protections and extra hurdles to amend. And the article which transfers powers to the EU _is not one of them_. This means that for any of the more protected clauses Germany has not at all ceded the authority of their supreme court to do a final judgement on.
In such cases if the German supreme court says no, it's means no for any application of law in German no matter what the EU courts say. And there are only 3 ways to fix that, 1. the EU amends their regulation, 2. Germany amends their constitution (practically impossible in such cases), 3. the rule informally applies to everyone but Germany, 4. Germany leaves the EU which would likely mean it's end.
So while everyone pretends there is no issue (3rd option) can in some situations be viable and given that 2 is non-viable it pretty much always ends with a compromise of amending things just far enough to not longer cause an issue with the German constitution.
Systematic breaches of privacy through mass surveillance fall under that especially protected articles in the German constitution. And option 3 doesn't really work here. So it's one of the rare cases where German Supreme court actually matters on EU level.
Through practically it hardly ever matters outside of very very few cases:
- because of Article 1 (the most protected one you could say), the ECHR has more or less implicitly the same amount of power as the supreme court, only if the ECHR does rulings in conflict with human rights would that not be the case (so in practice never)
- as one of the core founding members and the country with the largest population (and seats in the EU parliament are distributed based on population) Germany can normally make sure such a situation doesn't arise
- and the breach must really be of a constitutional article standing above the one which transfers power to the EU (which most are not)
- you have to propagate things up to the supreme court, while all other courts will rule based on EU law/ECJ decisions
but it doesn't mean that it never happened,
e.g. there had been one case where the German supreme court ruled that a) something is against the constitution and b) that the EU organ which caused this acted unreasonable in a way which isn't covered by the transfer of authority. That case go resolved with compromises, but was neither the first nor will it be the last where "in practice" the German Supreme court overruled EU decisions, even if it on paper doesn't (because it only overrules what happens with law in Germany and overruling an EU decision would affect other countries, too).
One thing to add is that there is no guarantee this is even against the German constitution.
Local devices only scanning which only if there is an issue sends any information to anywhere outside of the device might actually be compatible with the German constitution by the argument that the privacy is only violated if the local validator phones home and that it only does so if there is a reasonable suspicion at which case it isn't baseless mass surveillance anymore... on a technicality iff the local scanner have close to now false positives. It's anyway a bad idea and a lot of the things it claims it's meant to help with have a lot of neglected other solutions which would improve things a lot.
That's generally how the EU works, they forced Ireland to hold another referenda after the first one rejected the Lisbon treaty
The Irish people demanded concessions, got them.
Saying "forced" about this is like if someone offered me a job, me reading the offer and saying "can I do a 4-day week?", the company's response being "yes, here's a new contract for you to sign", and describing that second contract as "forced" on me.
The EU Constitution was rejected so they basically rolled its key provisions in the Lisbon Treaty.
This has been the typical modus operandi in the EU. There is always a correct answer and the people are free to choose as long as they choose it.
Forced - was this an EU navy ship parking off Dublin?
You are a fool if you think the UK is better. I've moved from the EU to the UK and it is worse in every way when it comes to authoritarian measures.
I'm not sure how you can have already forgotten the fact that we have to upload or face or ID to access websites.
I think you misunderstood his post. It's generally un-British to suggest the UK is better in any regard whatsoever. I've no doubt he thinks the UK is just as bad if not worse but in different ways.
I think he meant that as "I live in the UK where this is already bad, yet the EU still ended up worse.".
This is how I also read it.
I’m not sure how you got there unless you were ready for an argument already.
The UK is perhaps less competent at it's authoritarianism
I genuinely think the public sector being a bit hopeless is a major check on tyranny in the UK.
Ofcom (the communications regulator charged with imposing the censorship laws) literally maintains a public list of non-compliant websites that anyone who doesn't want to give their ID to a shady offshore firm can browse for example.
> can browse for example
can't browse?
No, "can" is correct. It is neither illegal nor, currently, technically restricted to browse non-compliant websites. So
No they can browse them, Ofcom literally compiled the sites it doesn't want everyone to browse in an easily-accessible list.
In the UK we've had an authoritarian Conservative government for 14 years, followed by an even more authoritarian Labour government, which we'll have until 2029.
In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
https://www.ft.com/content/886ee83a-02ab-48b6-b557-857a38f30...
America also has a party that always runs on the idea of small government and restoring rights to the people. Every time they get power, they do the exact opposite.
>America also has a party that always runs on the idea of small government and restoring rights to the people. Every time they get power, they do the exact opposite.
You seem to be confused. The Libertarian Party never gets any power. The closest we get is representatives like Ron Paul, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie, who run as Republicans (which are NOT the party of small government, despite what you may have been told) while acting much more like Libertarians.
Thomas Massie in particular is famous for frequently and routinely standing up against Trump, much to Trump's chagrin.
> Republicans (which are NOT the party of small government, despite what you may have been told)
I believe that's the point.
The Republican Party *pretends* to be "small government", but isn't.
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The far-right Reform party[1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK
I wonder if your statement was ironic, as the article you posted does not describe Reform as far-right?
From the article:
> In March 2024, the BBC called the party far-right but soon retracted its statement and apologised to Reform UK, writing that describing the party as far-right "fell short of our usual editorial standards".[219] Commenting on the incident, the professor of politics Tim Bale wrote that labelling Reform UK as far-right is unhelpful, and that it "causes too visceral a reaction and at the same time is too broad to be meaningful". Bale noted the importance of distinguishing between the "extreme right" and "populist radical right", and stated that parties described as far right should instead be "more precisely labelled".[220] Reform UK itself rejects the descriptor, and has threatened legal action against media using it.[221] In May 2025, Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator, argued Reform is "now a left-wing party", by attracting disillusioned Labour voters with stances on restoring welfare benefits, nationalising the steel industry with 50% of utilities and increasing government spending (including the NHS).[222]
> Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
A lot of politicians change when they get in power.
It is a massive assumption that reform will win the elections.
I think it’s plausible that the UK electorate are sick of switching between Tories and Labour for the last hundred years, especially as they have become indistinguishable in many respects. They were held back because there wasn’t a plausible alternative that had a hope of being elected. Reform has been leading the polls for nearly all this year, so let’s check in a year to see where they stand. But Labour (especially) and the Tories are not going to see an upswing any time soon. The problems in the country (mostly economic due to policy) continue, and their supporters are doomed to the madness of doing the same thing but expecting different results.
While I'm sure you know much more than I do about UK politics, it seems like some systemic factor pushes both Tories and Labour and whoever else comes close to power, well to the right of their respective voters. In the US, that factor would be campaign contributions and an extremely well-funded conservative propaganda/patronage machine on a war footing.
In the UK, is it all about media ownership or something?
The media plays a big role in election outcomes. The Murdoch empire used to have an oversized influence, but since Murdoch exited Sky UK, that's been on the wane. The Sun (which helped Labour's Tony Blair win his landslide) is still a Murdoch enterprise, but it hasn't really moved with the times, and newer media-savvy outlets are starting to get mindshare.
GBNews launched in 2021 with a strong anti-establishment mandate. The growth in its audience surprised everyone, surpassing both BBC News and Sky in viewership. For four consecutive months (July-October 2025) GBNews has been Britain's number one news channel (Source: BARB).
Crucially it also has 2.5bn views on YouTube since launch.
The establishment try to write off and condescend GBNews, but in doing so they condescend the large and growing section of the UK public that GBNews represents (e.g. for example - people on both the Left and Right who are frustrated with 110,000 undocumented migrants entering the UK over the last three years, many of whom have been put up in hotels at taxpayer expense).
As the elite condescend and push away large swathes of the population, they are creating increasing loyalty toward GBNews, and by extension, the Reform Party.
> In the UK, is it all about media ownership or something?
Yes.
Yelling 'racist' at Farage for over a decade hasn't got rid of him. Maybe 4 more years of doing the same thing will do the job?
Can't see the Tories bouncing back in a few mere years. Labour are heading rapidly into the same unelectable territory.
Which leaves us with Reform vs a Green-LibDem coalition?
But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy. And some will never forgive the Lib Dems for their last coalition.
> But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy.
Well, populist lunacy is how Reform got so popular, so I can see why it would be tempting for the Green party.
Main thing that's weird right now with the UK is that because it's first-past-the-post and the current polling is Reform:~29%, Lib/Lab/Con/Green:~16%, I would not be surprised by any of these parties forming a minority government nor any one of them getting a massive parliamentary majority.
That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.
Out of curiosity, which of Reform's policies are "lunacy"?
Removing the 2 child benefit cap? Increasing NHS spending? Returning to New Labour levels of net immigration, being a country with borders?
> That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.
At least we agree on that. The Tories deserve to be confined to the dustbin of history.
The numbers don't add up. I think "Removing the 2 child benefit cap" and "Increasing NHS spending" are good things, but they're not free, and the supposed cost-saving measures they're talking about mostly serve to demonstrate they don't know what the government is paying for anyway.
Immigration is always a funny one for the UK especially, given how people tend to look at gross numbers instead of which sectors the immigrants work in, and the discourse about why locals demonstrably do not fill those roles is mostly just insisting that locals can no matter what current unemployment levels actually are. Before I left the UK, the stereotype was all the Poles moving to the UK and building houses: UK should have invited over more builders, then there wouldn't be a shortage of houses.
Immigration is a shared bit of populist lunacy Reform have in common with the Conservatives and Labour: promises to be tough on immigration, then they get power and look at what the consequences would be of doing that, and put all the blame on asylum seekers* that are banned from working and therefore safe to kick out no matter how at risk they are in their countries of origin.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-whilst-an...
The below are conservative estimates of the money raised by Reform policies:
* £10bn+ per year - Adjusting how the Bank of England (BoE) treats reserves — e.g. stopping interest payments to commercial banks that receive money under quantitative easing (QE)
* £11bn+ per year - Rolling back expensive "net zero" policies
* £9bn+ per year - Alter eligibility for welfare
* £25bn - Scrap HS2
* multiple billions - Reducing foreign aid budget and cost of housing illegal migrants.
It's likely that pro-growth Reform policies such as lowering corporation tax to make the UK more competitive will significantly increase the corporation tax take - as was shown when the Tories entered power in 2010, lowered the corp tax rate and corp tax revenue increased significantly. In general, Reform's tax cuts are aimed at increasing the tax base.
> * £11bn+ per year - Rolling back expensive "net zero" policies
These in particular are fictional. That's an obsolete (due to tech improvements) estimate of the private sector costs.
At this point, with the tech now available, almost everyone gets rich by doing net zero, almost nobody saves money by abandoning it.
> * £9bn+ per year - Alter eligibility for welfare
"Welfare" includes e.g. the child benefit cap. You can save a lot by spending less. Do you want to spend less? OK, fine. But that's the cost: a majority have to agree who gets to be the next scapegoat, and the child benefit cap was itself introduced back when parents with too many kids were the scapegoat.
> * £25bn - Scrap HS2
Scrapping a one off payment to save money in the short term, at the cost of worsening long-term economic benefits by failing to improve national logistics.
> housing illegal migrants.
Do you mean asylum seekers? Reason I ask is that people who are actually in the UK illegally (which is different), don't cost "billions". Asylum seekers are housed because they're banned from working, theory is that if they work they might stay, IMO this is BS and everyone would benefit if they were allowed to get jobs and look after themselves.
Even without that there absolutely are savings to be made on the cost of asylum seekers (who are not "illegal migrants"). They're looked after at a total cost of about £100/person/day, and obviously (even without changing the "banned by law from working" thing) they could be looked after at about half that (or less) given what UK incomes are. But that's a whole one billion per year you might save from not letting UK hotels rip you off, or two if you let these people work and support themselves.
> It's likely that pro-growth Reform policies such as lowering corporation tax to make the UK more competitive will significantly increase the corporation tax take - as was shown when the Tories entered power in 2010, lowered the corp tax rate and corp tax revenue increased significantly. In general, Reform's tax cuts are aimed at increasing the tax base.
Even with the best will in the world, this kind of thing is unlikely to make a dent in comparison to the core Reform policy of hating their nearest and biggest market. Brexit (and consider who owns Reform) has cost the economy an estimated 6-8% GDP by this point, per year, in lost growth opportunities — around £200bn/year.
The biggest thing any government could do to increase the tax base is to get a bigger workforce to tax. Which means more immigrants, which is why Lab and Con don't ever do anything about immigrant workers despite saying so. This was also one of the benefits of the UK being in the EU, in that all of labour, capital, and goods could move around more freely to meet business opportunities, help with growth.
> At this point, with the tech now available, almost everyone gets rich by doing net zero
The likes of Dale Vince (Ecotricity), certainly get rich by doing net zero. Significant levies have been placed on taxpayers and consumers for years, with the money flowing into the companies of politically-connected individuals like Vince.
> the child benefit cap was itself introduced back when parents with too many kids were the scapegoat.
Parents that choose to have more children than they can afford are not "scapegoats." They are breaking the social contract.
The benefit cap was not retro-actively applied. It didn't put any existing children in poverty. It only applied to future births, to parents who were choosing to have children at the expense of taxpayers.
That's why the cap is a popular policy: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/20...
> Scrapping a one off payment to save money in the short term, at the cost of worsening long-term economic benefits by failing to improve national logistics [HS2].
The project cost has ballooned to the point where it will exceed the long term projected economic benefit (benefit-cost ratio of 0.9, as per a 2022 review). It is a white elephant.
> Do you mean asylum seekers?
No, I mean illegal migrants, as I said. Genuine Asylum seekers don't throw their documents overboard and illegally enter the country on a dinghy from France.
Take the war in Ukraine and and the post-war threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan for example - in both cases, the UK government made advance provision for documented, background-checked individuals, including the elderly, women and children (as you'd expect from genuine refugees). And the UK made safe routes available for those people. That's how the system should work.
Those who illegally enter the country via the Channel are 88-90% male, most of whom are fighting-age, and most of whom originate from countries that are not currently at war.
You still believe they're genuine asylum seekers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Channel_illegal_migran...
> that's a whole one billion per year you might save from not letting UK hotels rip you off, or two if you let these people work and support themselves.
If these people are allowed to economically benefit from illegally entering our country, it will send completely the wrong message to the third world countries they came from.
I don't want low-skilled/unskilled unvetted immigration that lowers our country's productivity, makes women and girls less safe, impacts public services and housing, divides our finite welfare spend and causes ghettoisation and (eventually) Balkanisation of my own country. Why would I want that?
> Brexit (and consider who owns Reform) has cost the economy an estimated 6-8% GDP by this point, per year, in lost growth opportunities — around £200bn/year.
I've heard various figures bandied around by continuity Remainers. They vary wildly, because at this point, nearly ten years later, it's impossible to scientifically compare a Brexit/non-Brexit scenario.
All we can know are the facts - Brexit gave us a huge opportunity to align our regulation with the precise nature of our economy, and an opportunity to avoid burdensome EU regulation (this is already happening in terms of the EU's hapless AI regulation). It's also an opportunity to avoid paying tens of billions of pounds annually into the EU's black hole unaccounted budget every year (consider the lifetime cost of that expense!)
The fact that the Europhillic Tory and Labour establishment failed to capitalise fully on Brexit is their fault - not the fault of the majority of voters who voted to leave the EU.
Luckily we have a party in 2029 who is unaligned with the Brussels and Strasbourg establishment, and who can make the bold decisions required to capitalise on our new freedoms and sovereignty. I relish this prospect.
Removing ILR for example?
Also the small possibility of being a Russian asset of course.
> Removing ILR for example?
You mean replacing it with renewable five year visas that have reasonable salary thresholds and English language criteria, and which still allow the holder to apply for citizenship?
Why is that lunacy?
ILR is the immigration equivalent of "squatters' rights" - completely immoral IMO.
> the small possibility of being a Russian asset of course
The Left tried that with Trump too. It didn't work out for them, and I doubt this tactic will damage Farage either. It smacks of desperation IMO, just like all the silly childhood racism heresay.
> In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government
Haha you're so funny.
If Reform get from, what is it right now, five -- or four, or six, depending on how the wind blows — MPs to 326 MPs, which is enough to secure the majority they think they are getting, then libertarian is not what that government will be.
It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian, because pure tabloid authoritarian thuggery is the only possible strategy that could cause a swing larger than any in history, against two parties (labour and liberal democrat) who currently hold 472 seats and represent a sort of centrist blob between them.
And this is to say nothing of the challenge they will face finding 326 non-crazy, credible candidates for 326 very different parliamentary elections. And to say nothing of the foreign influence scandal that currently engulfs senior Reform figures or the catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent. Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage? And do you think Farage's reputation is going to somehow be improved by the Nathan Gill situation?
I accept they will be the largest minority. But the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily.
Maybe they will get to largest minority and then campaign for PR/AV/STV, and maybe finally people will understand something like it is needed. But Farage will be a lot older in that election.
(It surprises me to see people who are so keen to believe that a council election wave is necessarily predictive of a national election wave because, what, somehow everything is different now? Why is it different?)
> libertarian is not what that government will be
How can you be so sure? Why do you assume that everything that the Reform chairman, Zia Yusuf (head of policy) is lies? What, from his history, suggests that he is a liar?
> catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent.
A small number of councillors left, but KCC is still a strong Reform majority. Councillors come and go throughout the year (just look at the constant stream of council by-elections), so to call Kent a "catastrophe" is hyperbole.
> It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian
Populist yes. But I've never understood why popular polices get such a bad rep in a supposed democracy?
White? So what? Although it's rapidly changing thanks to Tory/Labour policies, the UK remains a majority white country. Why is politicians' skin colour an issue in your mind?
"Significantly authoritarian" how? Can you name an "authoritarian" policy in Reform's last manifesto?
> Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage?
Yes. Zia Yusuf is an extraordinary man, and my money would be on him becoming the leader when Farage inevitably steps down. And your concerns about white politicians will hopefully be soothed when a second-generation Sri Lankan is our Reform prime minister.
https://www.youtube.com/@ZiaYusufOfficial
> the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily.
For that to happen, you need a strong i.e. 30%+ share, and you need numerous opposing parties with similar policies, and all polling at similar levels. That's EXACTLY what's happening, and the electoral calculus puts Reform on a strong majority (low = 325, high = 426)
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
> But I've never understood why popular polices get such a bad rep in a supposed democracy?
Because they are extremely short shortsighted and a wreck in a long term.
The classic populist political policy was the creation of the NHS in 1948.
Would you say that was "extremely short shortsighted and a wreck in a long term."?
Nye Bevan was not a populist, and the NHS was not a populist development.
In the context of its time it was a fairly pragmatic, top-down central-government post-war-socialism project. It appears more radical in retrospect, but viewed in the light of decisions in the war effort and the post-war effort, and in a country that still had mandatory rationing for example, the NHS was a solid decision that was actually pretty evidence-based.
There are few people alive now who can tell you what the foundation of the NHS was like in terms of their professional career, but my dad did tell me about that.
In no way would that have been considered "populist"; the UK was severely negative about populists at that time, for one thing. It actually made solid logical/technocratic sense. It definitely came as a huge relief, but in many ways it formalised the resource-sharing schemes in place in various regions, especially London.
I am not sure you understand what populism is, along with not understanding that securing a number of seats is not something that logically follows from projections of numbers of seats, particularly in the context of an entirely new party with divisive leadership. We don't have PR, so aggregate data like that is not easily interpreted, and council election data is not that strongly indicative.
Also pretty interesting to hear someone who is so pro-Reform so confidently talking up the NHS, considering the long-standing positions of many UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform people that it should be privatised. Free at the point of use healthcare is under threat from Reform in a way that no other political party in the UK would risk, as a consequence of that. Presumably you think we should still have an NHS but the state shouldn't own it. Given the international figures who gather around Reform and the hard right in this country, there is no way the NHS would survive Reform intact.
Populism and popular policies is not exactly the same. I would say NHS is a socialist/left policy but not populism.
I don't know an exact definition of a populism but for me it's when political messages are designed to trigger strong emotions, ignore complexity, promise simple solutions to hard problems. All politicians to some extent lie, over-promise and under-deliver but populists tent to take this on a next level.
Right populists tend to promise tax cuts (which unsurprisingly benefit their sponsors the most) and to balance budget they either increase debt or undermine public services (which is bad in a long term). Left populists promise to tax the rich ignoring that it's can be bad for economic growth and taxing alone would not give enough revenue to significantly benefit poor/middle classes.
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3-4 years is political eternity.
"a more libertarian government"
As long as you are white British. If you're anything else you're probably going to be worse off under Farage.
It's a shame that if you want to vote for someone with different policies to the two main parties, you have to accept that you are also voting for an outspoken racist.
I’ve seen white British a couple of times in this thread.
Reform policy is being drawn up by a team that’s led by a British Pakistani : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zia_Yusuf
There are plenty of instances of Reform politicians saying things that are just outright racist (e.g. Sarah Pochin) and receiving no real reprimand from the party leadership. The only people not seeing the racism are the people who don’t want to.
Reform is also headed by a guy who regularly used phrases like "Hitler was right", "gas them all", and "go home, Paki" as an 18 year old (confirmed by 20+ former classmates).
Ordinarily we might give him the benefit of the doubt: maybe he's matured and grown up since then. But the fact that he's called all of those classmates liars says that either they are all liars, or he is dishonest about his racism.
13 year old, actually.
The things said were truly disgusting.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for the Jewish community, but I would expect that they feel less threatened by something a child said in a playground during the 1970s, but rather the rampant antisemitism that has risen in our society, spearheaded by the toxic alliance of the hard left and the Islamists. Those are the ones who are assaulting Jewish people on the streets and hanging around Synagogues to “demonstrate”, or rather to intimidate them.
This is because politicians who fill the country with immigrants do so because they don't care in the slightest about the population and it shows in all facets of governance.
Net migration in the UK is falling, and fast. It grew under a party that is ideologically closer to Reform than the government currently in power.
IMO, statistical fluke, more likely a few years of delayed migrations post-pandemic got squeezed together and it's now back to the previous trend: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c246ndy63j9o
Net migration is only falling because of record high numbers of British and European people emigrating, against a backdrop of huge (800K+) levels of gross immigration.
Firstly, why do you lump British and European together? Because they are the same "race" in your eyes?
Non-EU net migration has fallen sharply too.
It proves what was always obvious to anyone who looked at it, that high net immigration was temporary, especially the peak post covid and the special scheme for Ukrainians.
Levels of EU vs non-EU immigration has been a particular subject of interest for the UK before and after Brexit.
And note also that the UK and EU share high-quality education systems, Western Judeo-Christian culture and Western-aligned geopolitics.
Recent waves of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa are importing wholly different culture, geopolitics, and crucially, we are importing from countries with measurably lower standard of literacy and numeracy.
These are objective facts, and they are not criticisms or judgements on the character of those who are migrating.
I would make exactly the same choices as our Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean friends, if I were in their position.
Half of Europe's cultural development was initiated by Muslims and the Renaissance started with Muslim scholars in Islamic Spain, which was Islamic for the lion's share of a millennium, leading to the hilarious fact that a state in the New World settled by Spanish-speaking settlers gets the "Calif" in its name from the muslim term for a leader due to it being so totally embedded in culture. But OK, yeah. Judeo-Christian.
The only link between the Renaissance and Islam is this:
When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans, many Greek scholars fled to Italy bringing:
• Greek manuscripts
• Knowledge of ancient philosophy
• Classical Greek language expertise
This boosted the revival of classical learning.
The Renaissance had far more to do with the Catholic Church than it had with Islam, and I’m curious to know who it was that told you otherwise?
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_692a2c6e0e588191ada9533927d72af4
The roots of the renaissance were established much, much earlier in Islamic Spain. It is essentially forgotten history (and largely systematically erased history, at that)
Track down a copy of Bettany Hughes’ “When The Moors Ruled In Europe”. I think it is on Youtube. It is long but exceptionally clearly presented.
Put simply, were it not for the Reconquista, what we understand as the renaissance would be very clearly perceived as Islamic in origin.
And maybe don’t trust ChatGPT to do anything but regurgitate the prevailing interpretation of history, which was, in fact, reshaped radically by Catholic propaganda.
Seems you've found a leftwing historian who chooses to endorse the violent Islamic conquest of Southern Europe, re-imagining it as a vibrant exchange of cultures, predicated on extreme timeline distortion.
The Renaissance is defined as follows:
> The Renaissance was a European cultural movement from the 14th to 17th centuries, marking a "rebirth" of classical Greek and Roman learning after the Middle Ages. It was a period of significant innovation in art, literature, science, and philosophy, with key developments like humanism. Notable figures include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and the movement began in Italy before spreading across Europe.
Islam did not even exist in the time of the Classical Greek and Roman periods.
Neither Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael ever met Muslims directly, travelled to the Islamic world, or interacted with Islamic institutions.
Sick of living with Nazis more like
Hard disagree on this. Immigration was the only realistic option to shield against demographic collapse and stabilize unskilled labor supply for decades, and it is no suprise that politicians took it.
I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.
I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.
"stabilising unskilled labour" in this context means dumping the salaries of the natives, making it so unskilled sectors no longer provide a living wage.
Sure, but local supply of labor was looking even worse than now back then, and cost of labor intensive stuff like daycare, nursing homes/residential care have gone through the roof, still.
Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation.
As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.
If you are not really subject to public control and re-election, it makes it much easier.
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
For democracy and government [1] to work it has to remain small and localised. The US had the right idea by expressly limiting the reach of the federal government to very explicit narrow things mentioned in the constitution (of course this was expanded by unconstitutional means over many governments over many years now but that is getting off topic).
The EU seems to be taking the opposite approach - countries push any unpopular law into the growing EU layer to prevent local backlash affecting them. As comments around this call it - "political laundering". A great term that I shall be borrowing.
[1] Relatedly, the philosopher Jimmy Carr has a great line about the failing of communism is about scale. It works locally at the family level but it can't scale to the level of a country.
Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
The process is many things but quick it is not
This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of people, who even start looking into this stuff by a factor of 1000 or so.
Is there a website that tracks these? That would be a nice divulgation process.
There is the Parliament's legislative train website [1]. However, it only tracks actual legislative steps, not the intra-Council negotiations, so the proposal's page appears to be have been largely inactive since 2024 [2].
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-new...
what do you mean, a slow bureaucracy is a democratic bureaucracy. the last thing you want is a highly efficient bureaucracy enacting change quickly.
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There is nothing democratic about the process. It's all unelected politicians ruling for you
I was making a joke (and referencing a book); that being said, you're wrong, no unelected politicians are ruling for me or any other european citizen.
Which politicians ran on a platform of "we are going to spy on you"? I guess all of them do.
"unelected politicians" and "politicians that do things outside their campaign promises" are very different claims
Which ones are unelected - the democratically elected heads of the member state governments? Or the democratically elected members of the EU parliament?
Or the commissioners that are appointed by the democratically elected heads of the member state governments?
I tried the same questions on multiple different threads, to multiple different imbeciles posting the same bullshit.
You will never get an answer from them. But we should keep asking it anyway.
I always wondered if they live on the EU and are genuinely too stupid to understand how the bloc their country joined works or, most likely, live outside of it and the idea of the EU as a political entity offends their sensibilities or heighten their anxiety.
The commissioners?
> are appointed by the democratically elected heads
Appointed, so, not elected. Thanks for answering.
People’s attention span has decreased to a matter of days now, if not hours. Have you seen how quickly front page news in the US is forgotten?
The democratic process needs a revamp but it shouldn’t be driven by the general populations attention span.
I wouldn't be so sure of that assertion regarding attention span. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance granted, it's about opinion rather than capability but the same bias would explain such a reflexive judgment, and such a judgment will have negative consequences if it is false. (Consensus can be shaped, as can the perception of consensus be.)
People on average are really not that stupid and are absolutely capable of looking back a few years for context.
Tell me more about that, while here in Germany people again and again vote against their own interest (AfD, CDU, SPD, and all the other corrupt and inept politicians and parties) and the mainstream parties have not managed to improve our situation for some 4-5 election cycles. Tell me more about that, while looking at the US. I am quite sure many other countries can be added to this list.
It's easy to reach for the "people are stupid" argument.
It's harder to ask, "Why are people still voting for this despite it seemingly being against their interests"
But once you do start asking that question, you'll find "they're just stupid" isn't really the only answer. At least 1 other answer would be they're responding to politics of other parties failing them too.
Is it the most rational decision for those people? No, probably not, but ignoring their motivations and chalking it up to stupidity or whatnot is really not going to solve anything - and, in fact, is only going to push those people further into what they believe. You should consider whether that's what you want.
Depends on how you define "stupid". In many cases you could say "unaware" or "forgetful" instead of "stupid". And mind, I did not say "stupid". That's a word you threw into this.
As to why they still vote like they do:
(1) Because every 4 years the mainstream party promise to solve some problems, netting votes of the young, gullible, or inexperienced voters.
(2) Promise pension increase, netting votes of the ever increasing amount of old people, most who don't care about who or what comes after them.
(3) People are too busy, burned out, or lazy (we still have it too good here, it seems), and cannot be arsed to inform themselves before elections. We also have tons of people, who are truly learning-resistant, right out of school or "university".
(4) People think, that SPD, CDU, Greens, etc. are the only way to stop AfD.
I think we are not very high on the democratic-ability scale. Yes, we vote every 4 years, but it is more like collectively we don't really care enough to inform ourselves properly and just check a few boxes, because we want to tell ourselves, that at least we did vote and that we are fine democratic citizen.
And look, I myself am not frequently reading all parties' positions. And I myself inform myself more shortly before an election, rather than all the time. But I do have a feeling for corruption and I don't always forget scandals that happen, when the next engagement-optimized news headline comes in. I still remember Rezo's "Zerstoerung der CDU" video. I remember reading those abgeordnetenwatch newsletters about the lobby register. Or the foodwatch newsletters about Kloeckner and the Lebensmittelampel. That's why I will not vote for mainstream-promise-a-lot-but-no-delivery parties and retired people clubs. And what more I do, is to use the Wahlomat, and actually check which party's position aligns most with my own.
I don't do too much either, but most people do way less to inform themselves. They just check a box out of habit. Why they vote for CDU/SPD? Because that's what they always did. It's real friggin dumb.
We clearly live in different worlds.
Maybe that says more about your biases than it does about the intelligence of 8 billion people though.
I'm not sure what factual basis you have for your optimism. I have plenty for my pessimism about human nature and our ability to competently govern ourselves as well as our general moral fortitude. We've gotten this far because we've been playing life on easy mode with a ridiculously nurturing planet and practically unlimited energy available under the ground, but we aren't smart enough or forward thinking enough to take on the minor pain necessary to avoid the catastrophe we are lumbering towards. We are short-sighted, selfish, self-important, and we haven't earned the regard in which we hold ourselves.
Regarding your specific point about using recent context to inform political opinions, if you spend any amount of time listening to the opinions of people online you'll find that not only do they fail to accurately recall past events, but they don't bother to research what actually happened, and when they do they fail at anything but the most superficial political analysis.
> We've gotten this far because we've been playing life on easy mode with a ridiculously nurturing planet and practically unlimited energy available under the ground, but we aren't smart enough or forward thinking enough to take on the minor pain necessary to avoid the catastrophe we are lumbering towards. We are short-sighted, selfish, self-important, and we haven't earned the regard in which we hold ourselves.
Where's your "factual basis" for such assertions?
> Regarding your specific point about using recent context to inform political opinions, if you spend any amount of time listening to the opinions of people online you'll find that not only do they fail to accurately recall past events, but they don't bother to research what actually happened, and when they do they fail at anything but the most superficial political analysis.
1) People regularly online are a rather specific group
2) People sharing their opinions online are a very specific group
3) Basing your views on society at large on opinions of those groups is a risky strategy, especially given how easy it has become to spread propaganda online
Anyway as for my optimism, it's based on actually interacting with people directly. Having discussions with them. Talking to them about what they believe, and why. They're usually a lot more complex and intelligent than those various descriptors used above.
Now one could counter equally, that people you interact with directly are:
(a) limited in number due to the nature of your interaction with them
(b) will express themselves differently, due to the nature of interaction. (Just like people expressing themselves online act differently.)
(c) are probably also a very specific group or bubble, which is simply the people you get to interact with. Which _might_ be more varied than the other person online, but might also be less varied. Really depends on how you pick the people you interact with.
(d) Anecdote of one person N=1 is not really a good factual basis for other people.
So if you want to show how your view is more based on evidence, then you will have to do better than anecdote and no links to statistics or cases we can peruse.
Maybe so. But between "people are stupid and that's why all these bad things are happening" and "people have complex motivations and rationals for doing what they do", I'm going to lean toward the latter, anecdote or not.
>> that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span
The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.
That could still be democratic in principle if it weren’t for lobbyists
If legislative processes are so drawn out and complex that no more than a handful of ordinary citizens could keep track of them, the advantage that paid lobbyists have over the public is enormous
That's where Unions and NGOs come in. Their job is to be lobbyists for the people, against corporate power.
Is the process democratic if citizen's opinions are irrelevant?
No matter who's in charge, no matter the election results, no matter the protests - the same style of legislation is pushed.
and once something's in it is almost impossible to remove.
That describes pretty much every democratic government in the world, from the USA to New Zealand
> The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.
It would work if we could elect politicians who were both competent and trustworthy.
Of course that would require successfully electing people who are competent about a broad range of issues, able to see through well funded and clever lobbying, unblinded by ideology, and able to resist pressure.
> Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works
Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].
The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.
[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/
[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/document/en/163352
They're not complicated for anyone with above room temperature IQ. And they're almost identical to how it works in the member countries anyway
And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter
Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure. The Commission have no direct link to the electorate and the your country's (sorry, “state”) Council representatives can hide behind collective consensus.
> the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure
Completely immune is overstating it, and the power to initiate legislation is not that meaningful given that the EC initiates what the council tells it to initiate and can't actually turn it into law without parliament and council
> Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure.
You are aware that those with power to initiate legislation are appointed by national governments right?
If you are unhappy with how your country posed itself in those propositions, you can and should vote for parties that have different stances.
How do the people kick out a EU representative ? Without the power to do so, it is not a "democracy".
There are elections for the EU parliament.
As for council or commission, I presume you can elect different national governments from time to time? I mean, unless you are in Hungary.
Your link to the Commission and Council is homeopathic democracy, right?
In the UK with a Parliamentary democracy, unpopular policy ideas can be abandoned. Manifestos are not always adhered to, but they typically include ideas that their canvassers can sell on the doorstep and there is robust media criticism when they abandon their promises. We have a strong history of U turns because our politicians are wary of unpopularity. The most recent big backlash was the Winter Fuel Allowance cut which was proposed by the two parties (with the Treasury pushing for it behind the scenes) and abandoned by both due to deep unpopularity in the Country. Even the budget this week had a run-up where various fiscal changes were unofficially floated through the media, to see which ones had the smallest backlash.
This is completely different to the EU, where the Commission and Council arguably get what they want even if it takes several attempts.
Interesting you say that, after the UK already passed the equivalent of Chat Control with cross party support, without the law being part of the mandate of either party.
Which is terrible legislation, I agree on that.
But my point elsewhere in this thread is that we have the ability for future governments to overturn unpopular legislation, something that is not unusual at all in the UK.
Consider it read/write versus write-only in the EU, which doesn’t give a damn about unpopularity.
You speak as if the Commission and Council are somehow divorced from ne national governments of the member states.
Those are not Lovecraftian entities that came from undersea. Their members are appointed from the national governments. If you dislike how your country position itself on those organs, this should change your view on how the ruling parties in your country took decisions at the EU level.
Your theory is that democracy would trickle up. I am saying in practice it is homeopathic democracy.
Why do people get so defensive about obviously flawed processes? This reply reads like a 4chan comment written by a frustrated teenager
Quite the contrary, you don't get to claim that the entire process is flawed while failing to demonstrate even the most basic understanding of it.
"The plans for scanning your chats were on display for fifty Earth years at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri"?
Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of.
If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
> I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
Because your puny state is no match for the US, China or soon enough, India. Heck, even Russia in its current incarnation outmatches 80% of the EU countries.
That's it, it's that simple, conceptually.
It's basically the Articles of Confederation vs the Constitution of the United States.
Yes, it's not a pretty process, but the alternative is worse.
We can all live in La-La-Land and pretend we're hobbits living in the Shire ("Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you") until reality comes crashing down.
If the end result is going to be that the EU turns into Russia or China under the pretext of standing up to them (because apparently building an opaque process that civil society can't keep up with to ram through authoritarian laws is what it takes to be competitive?), then I'd rather they cut out the extra steps and let the Russians/Chinese take over. At least then nobody would be telling me that what I got is the outcome of some sacred democratic process I am obliged to respect.
Why, then, is the supposed anti-US/China/India/Russia power bloc trying to pass laws to mandate absolute surveillance of all private communications? If the EU is going to continue attempting to legislate away people's freedoms for purposes that are completely out of scope for the reason it exists, then the natural result is that people will turn on the EU. There is little purpose in staving off the surrendering of independence to US/China if the process entails surrendering even more freedom than they would demand to the EU, all the more so when the EU already rolls over to the US/China on almost everything anyways. I am supportive of a pan-European unification in theory, but if the result looks anything like this, no wonder people are disillusioned with the European project. With friends like the EU, who needs enemies?
Every government has abhorrent proposals. This is a PROPOSAL.
Then proposals maybe turn into laws, through a complex process. We are HERE.
A good government doesn't have many with abhorrent LAWS.
I understand that it is not currently law. I also understand that the EU has been dedicated to this road of eroding citizen privacy for decades, constantly trying to pass more and more egregious legislation. For example, the Data Retention Directive of 2006 was abhorrent law. After 8 years in force, it was struck down by the ECJ, which would be somewhat reassuring if not for the fact that the EU appears to consider the ECJ a thorn in its side that it seeks to undermine at every turn. I have very little faith that this will not eventually become abhorrent law given the persistence with which the EU pursues becoming a surveillance state.
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> Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
They are not. People just don't bother themselves to spend half a calory in brain power to read even the Wikipedia page about it, and just repeat shit they read in forum posts.
I mean, here on HN, a website where people are supposedly slightly above average in terms of being able to read shit, the amount of times I read how EU is "bureacrats in Brussels" "pushing hard for changes" is weird.
The issue is not with the lack of understanding of "process". But sheer frustration because there's nothing you can do as just a citizen. An unelected council of !notAyatollah has decided, and this thing is being pushed at glacier slow pace.
If EU is a trade union this is a severe overreach, if EU wants to be a federation, there's not enough checks and balances. This is the crux of the problem.
The issue is that this is a legislation that only ones in power want(censorship on communications channel where they themselves are exempt from it), that has been pushed over and over again under different names(it goes so far back - it started with ACTA talks and extreme surveillance proposals to fight copyright violations) and details in implementation and/or excuse(this time we get classic "think of the children")
The Council is a meeting of the heads of state, all of which are elected in their respective countries.
Your problem is with the leadership of countries, not with the EU as an institution. I agree that it is a problem btw, but I think you got the wrong culprit. This isn't pushed on the states by the EU, this is the states using the EU to push it and launder the bad publicity.
My problem is that i as a citizen can vote for my heads of state, but if other parts of EU decided something my vote is null and void, EVEN if majority of EU citizens are against such issue.
Imagine is those issues were campaign promises and part of internal(country's) elections - they aren't in reality but we can set that aside for now. as it was extremely well said by sibling post.
My country is 80% against 20% in favor(in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control!), other EU countries are 51% for, 49% against.
Yet such 'vote' by heads of state counts whole countries in,if you were to count individual votes majority of EU citizens would be against it.
This allows you to pass undesirable or extremely contentious legislation, that would most likely prevent you from being elected in the future in your local elections but you can easily shift the blame too!
This is as far form democracy as possible, it is pure bureaucracy that serves it's own goals.
The irony is that this is all because the EU was specifically designed to not supercede its member states. In other words, they repeated the same mistake[0] the US did. Fixing it - i.e. ditching all the appointed positions that are responsive to nation states only - would amount to federalizing the EU.
"But why can't we just leave the EU to stop this" - too late. Most EU countries have enough intra-EU migration and trade to make leaving unthinkable. The UK was a special case - and, ironically enough, actually responsible for some of the EU's worst decisions.
Furthermore, this isn't exactly an EU exclusive problem. Every supranational organization that is responsive to member states and not individual voters is a policy laundering mechanism. Ask yourself: where's your representation in the WTO, and when did you vote for them? The sum of democracy and democracy is dictatorship. Any governing body that does not respect all of its voters equally is ripe for subsumption by people who do not respect them at all.
[0] Originally, US senators were appointed by state governors. This eventually resulted in everyone voting for whatever governor promised to appoint the senator the voter wanted. Which is sort of like throwing away your gubernatorial vote for a senatorial one. This is why we amended the constitution to allow direct election of senators, and I hold that any sovereign nation that makes the mistake of appointed politicians will inevitably have to either abandon it or fail.
This brings up a structural issue with the EU as it is designed right now - trying to give maximum power to nation states.
A unitary state would solve that problem by allowing us to have simple, Union-wide elections instead.
The issue is that EU is stuck in-between federation(which requires more checks and balances), and a trade union - which should concern themselves with just trade regulations.
In the UK all I can do is vote for my member of parliament. The victorious member may or may not get in with a majority of votes (about half get under 50%)
They then in effect elect a Prime Minister, who appoints an executive, who create laws and then put them to parliament
In the US you can vote for the leader of the executive directly. 64% of Vermont voted for Harris, yet they still got Trump.
> in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control
My understanding is that the public as a whole do not want chat control, yet the democratically elected heads of each member government do want it. The problem here is the democratically elected heads of each member government.
Doesn't take many council members to be against it to stop it in its tracks.
The culprit is correct. If the EU exists for political laundering, then it is the organisation which is harmful to the people's interests. Nobody voted for any of these heads of states on a platform of enacting Chat Control. That was not on the ballot or the platform of any party in any individual EU country. If it was, they would not have voted for it. If an individual party tried to initiate a chat control bill in its own country, it would surely face a massive reckoning at the next election[1]. Therefore, an individual party would likely not undertake to enact chat control. It is the existence of the EU which is enabling politicians to force undesirable legislation on their populace. In that environment, it is entirely correct to call the EU an un-democratic process. If it exists to pass legislation nobody would vote for and take the blame, then it will in fact be rightfully at blame and provide a strong motivation for people to exit the EU.
[1] In fact, we have helpfully seen this play out with our friendly early exiter. The remarkably self-destructive Labour party has passed their own absolute nonsense "online safety" bill, and are likely to be utterly destroyed in the next election with repealing the bill being part of the platform of the party that is polling at ~twice the share of the next largest party. With the EU providing blame-as-a-service, though, it is unlikely that anybody will be able to repeal Chat Control once rammed through, without exiting the EU entirely.
You provide your own counterexample. The UK left the EU and all it got for it was a quicker passing of it's "online safety" nonsense with none of the checks and balances (EU parliament, ECHR) that would stop it in the EU.
80% of the UK public were in favour of the "online safety" idiocy.
ECHR is still part of UK law (but I agree with your overall point).
TFA mentions "european governments" but this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission or the union. In short it tries to depict a group of old farts as an overreaching snooping authority.
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
> this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission
Well, here is the guy from where that comes from, the minister of justice of Denmark. He certainly represents a good part of Denmark, even though he may be irrelevant to any other EU country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hummelgaard
This legislation is not proposed by members of parliament, only the commission can draft legislation, the parliament can only approve it.
However the European Council consists of the heads of state / government of EU member states, not MEP's.
Are you saying that a neutral observer would not see this as repressive?
That could be a result of the Parliamentary style system. With multiple parties - each sharing a part of the government - proposals and alliances can shift rapidly. It all depends on how big the pie becomes for each to get a slice
Power sharing is very rare in the UK. What is more common is a party with a large majority with lots of infighting between factions of their party
Not usual, but two out of the last 20 governments is not what I would call very rare.
its more likely than it has been in a very long time with multiple smaller parties gaining seats. Nationalists in Scotland and Wales have been around a whole, and NI always had its own parties, but on top of that we now have Reform and the Greens making gains.
Fair - "very rare" was a little over the top. I'm sure we can agree on "uncommon" :)
Are you predicting a minority government in the next election? Time will tell!
> passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.
It did not pass.
I think the problem here is that you don't understand how the system works.
The EU parliament still would have to approve this for it to become legislation.
This is akin to a national government proposing a law, and the congress having to vote for it.
Yes, I think that is right. I don’t understand how it works. This comment got a little more attention than I expected.
"European Council has no legislative power, it is a strategic (and crisis-solving) body that provides the union with general political directions and priorities, and acts as a collective presidency." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
Wrong Council, this is about the Council of the European Union (yes the naming is terrible).
Because that's what autocracies in anything but name usually do. Who's going to stop them?
The EU is more of a bureaucracy than a real autocracy. Lots of members with veto powers and the like.
There is a lot wrong with the EU (the system). Opaque power structures, backroom deals, corruption. But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.
Aristocracy is the correct word
> Lots of members with veto powers and the like.
Similar to the Political Bureau in former communist countries, but still an autocracy.
> But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.
It has most certainly started to walk and quack a lot like an autocratic duck, it wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago, or not as visible, to say the least, but the pandemic and this recent war in Ukraine have changed that.
The EU Parliament, that has to vote to pass the law. Let's be better at commenting than Libertatea, circa 2010 (or The Daily Mail, for international readers).
The EU Parliament is a lame-duck thing, we both know that, let’s not pretend that this won’t pass at some point. It’s also not a parliament by definition, as it cannot propose any legislative measure, it can only propose “resolutions”, this is as lame-duck as it gets.
But it can block laws. Which matters. Just like in this case.
And guess what, national governments are the ones blocking the European Parliament from proposing laws, the EP has proposed multiple times that it be allowed to laws.
So EU member states themselves are the ones that don't want the EP to become a full blown parliament.
The UK keeps a register of non-crime hate incidents and invests its scarce police resources into harassing, arresting and punishing people for twitter posts.
And also: silently praying in public near an abortion center. The lady in question should have asked the policeman (as he was) "How would you define praying?". At least he'd maybe have paused for an interesting short discussion on semantics and more before for arresting her - as he did. https://youtu.be/wXURFRSUS9U
Two years ago and she has received damages however similar attitudes still abound with marked police disapproval of attempts to display the English National flag - in England.
That might well change:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kn54vj55xo.amp
Non-AMP link to help keep dirty monopolists at bay: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kn54vj55xo
Please don't use AMP.
I did not actually notice it was AMP.
Its on the same domain as the version you link to - is that still a problem?
All good, and sorry I'm used to making posts like this on Reddit where people are less aware.
I just did what I always do, edit out the AMP part and check that it still works. Sometimes the URL will go elsewhere or need more fiddling, this time it just worked.
How they're packaging it now? Terrorism? Child porn? Russian agents?
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
It's important to know that the "new" in the title is entirely made up, it's the same draft as last week when they just ran out of time at the meeting, probably because they were fighting about Ukraine stuff.
Honestly that's fine, even good. This issue needs to come to the attention of everyday people.
> Child porn?
This, the article says so in the first paragraph. The bullshit justification hasn't change in the last couple of years afaik.
Why change what works?
Well, historically "Won't someone think of the children!" has been the most successful, so they're using that here too.
They've optimized the packaging away. What's left of it now is a recycled paper tag that reads "because", and then if you scrutinize it further, there is poorly printed, barely readable "we're fascists".
Seems to me this is a kind of advanced persistent threat.
You defeat them one day, but they're still there, and they keep trying, day after day after day.
This is "Red Queen" concept, constant battle between society and state (Leviathan).
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/narrow-corridor-acemoglu-liberty-0...
Hard to maintain a balance when the State, by definition, has monopoly over violence, and State interests have the propaganda machine of mass-media on their side; the media with their pathetic justification that "we're only reporting the news!" just repeat and perpetuate bullshit rhetoric.
The real problem is that the State tends to grow like a cancer. When it gets to a point that it lords over tens or hundreds of millions of souls, it's already impossible to control and contain.
Until someone implements Jim Bell's ideas using encryption algorithms, distributed networks, and the cryptocurrencies, then there will be no government. Perhaps there won't be one anywhere. Perhaps we'll really miss the good old days.
You can't win against state with tech only.
At the same time, citizens get more tools and technologies to organize and push back.
The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people.
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).
The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.
Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.
I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
Odd, I've never seen a theory of state creation that starts with the benefits of scaling "electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing". Those are quite modern benefits, so seem like odd choices to illustrate your point.
I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.
This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.
I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.
Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.
So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.
Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.
Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.
States are responsible for orders of magnitude more innocent human deaths than every "terrorist" group in human history combined.
Man, some people really want humanity to be banging rocks against rocks to scare off the Jaguars again.
They’re also responsible for the preservation of more human life and well being than any other organization.
Sure, but also for y'know, basic civilization and stuff like, idk, food safety, hospitals, roads, disaster preparedness, medicine approvals, building guidelines and all sorts of things that probably end up saving a lot more lives than they cost.
What alternative do you propose?
I've always advocated a proliferation of overlapping "states." Let them keep each other in check.
Instead of having a tree with a king at the top and your local police station at the bottom, be a part of the governance for the river that you live near, for the city that surrounds you, for the grocery store in your neighborhood, for your local fire department, and let all of them have codified relationships with each other that are determined by codified processes.
I believe the limitation on this was technological; that we had to get people into a room, get Robert's Rules out, and shout our way into decisions. Those limitations are gone; we all have phones. We should be able to participate in the governance of everything, or if we really don't want to think about that crap, hand our proxy to someone who does, get alerts on what they're doing with it, and revoke or transfer it instantly.
Let's see some real social networking.
So, the problem with all of these proposed replacement systems (such as IRV, for example) is that "democracy" is a meme. People, en masse, believe in these systems-as-written (for better or worse) - critically - even if that isn't how things actually work on the ground in the real world.
So many people believe that, for example, the stuff written on the paper currency of the United States is legally binding. (It's irrelevant whether it is or not - people believe it, because they hear, believe, repeat, and teach the meme.)
Representative government is the same way. There are much better systems, and anyone can easily think up a few of them. The problem is going from A to B, also known as "the tyranny of the installed base".
No proposed new form of government or representation is worth the paper it's printed on unless it comes with a viable migration path from the status quo.
Because democracy IS a meme
Well the VCs and tech elite read a lot of Curtis Yarvin and decided the masses are too stupid to have a say in government so in the US we’re getting a CEO/king instead
There's no alternative, it's constant battle for freedoms and liberties.
Let's not fall for the is/aught fallacy: Identifying that something is a certain way doesn't make one in any way shape or form inherently more qualified to say what it SHOULD be like instead.
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You seem to mistake an ideal for reality and forgo a few difficult eventualities: eg. tyranny of the majority, corruption, regulatory capture, etc.
Depends on the specific incarnation of the democracy. Not infrequently in elections the majority sees the choice as the one of the lesser evil.
The state might be comprised of people, but unless everybody is directly involved in the final decision process you'll always have (at least) a principal-agent problem between the people acting as political representatives and everybody else.
As you do in most things in life.
Do you grow your own food? Do you refine your own oil? Do you write your own contracts?
I would assume you pick somebody to do those things for you because one human can't do literally everything.
"Democracy" is just a word. It means rule bu the mob, and adds no other details. Describe what you mean by it.
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Suddenly it has become normal to scan face in 3D, nonchalantly demand copy of ID and passport, freeze people's money and demand full financial statement arbitrarily. Not only there is no push back but things are becoming more and more restrictive.
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
Considering that in concert with all of the above a device has been developed that emulates human speech more convincingly than most humans, I guess it's pretty obvious
What is obvious? Why they need my messages for the voice speech emulation?
The person you’re replying to is saying that in the several years the technological means to impersonate people at scale has become widely available, and because of this financial institutions are having to strengthen their security measures to defend against fraud.
When last time employee of bank or public administration in developed world paid consequences for leaking private or biometric data, copies of documents or documents themselves?
Because now you have kiddos in customer service demanding things like deed of purchase of real estate or inheritance documents.
Well, that's why we've made 'em and put 'em there - we need accountability sinks!
Wrong, I am saying that you are already an impersonation of an impersonation and that's the only reason you have access to banking in the first place.
It is obvious that what need them for is not the voice speech emulation.
Yes I experienced this with FastSpring. Had a store with them for 15+ years, then suddenly they froze it and demanded all of the above. Was quite disturbing to say the least.
If you look up comments on fintechs, trading platforms, and even legit banks on reddit and review websites there has been surge of these practices in last maybe 12 months. Basically "all savings and accumulated funds are illegal by default". In the past I only had heard horror stories about Paypal but now this it widespread.
That's the blessing of the KYC/AML laws/regulations for ya.
Moving money needs source of funds, documentation etc... doing any business requires you to doxx yourself to the world and to vendors in the name of transparency.
Luckily though none of this is a problem for large multinationals :) which the EU cares about most in the end
So after you paid income tax, then capital gains tax while accumulating, and about to pay VAT tax while purchasing something, they say "hold on, this money looks illegal!". Savings don't have documentation in form of recent payslip or deed of sale.
The yachts and private jets on European harbors and airports don't look like their owners have any problem with money transfers. Wirecard billions? poof, vanished!
If feels as if elites were in process of cutting off everyone else.
We’ve gone from “Don’t share lots of information online.” To “Submit everything on demand…”
why are specifically the Danish so obsessed with pushing this through? it always seems to come back to them
Partly it's because the Danish have the rotating EU presidency at the moment so they have the job of pushing things forward (which also means receiving the most lobbying). In the previous wave earlier in the year, it was the Polish for the same reason.
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
I wonder how aware they are of the damage to the EU's reputation that they're continually creating by repeatedly bringing this back
I think this theme of the EU, this lack of taboo against continually bringing unwanted laws until they pass by fatigue, it may well be the death of the institution as a whole. every time they try, every time people hear about it, more and more think worse of the EU, and unlike most western governments, the existence and function of the EU is actually severely vulnerable to what people think of it. no other major government takes as much reputational damage from laws that don't even pass, and the existence of no other major government is as vulnerable to reputational damage as the EU is right now. all it takes is another 1 or 2 major exits and the whole thing will slowly collapse, which is insanely sad
The UK government laundering unpopular regulations through the EU and then blaming the EU for them even when the UK had proposed and often championed then was definitely a factor in Brexit passing.
Somewhat relevantly, the UK already has their own version of this legislation in the Online Safety Act which lead to a bunch of small-medium UK community sites closing and the likes of Imgur, pixiv and 4chan blocking the UK.
I believe 4chan is taking ofcom to court for trying to restrict their first amendment rights rather than blocking the UK, at least I'm still able to access it without a vpn.
> restrict their first amendment rights
how is this relevant in the UK
4chan is an American company with no presence whatsoever in the UK. 4chan doesn't even use normal payment processors, relying on crypto instead, so the UK can't even block payments made by UK subjects to 4chan.
In light of this, why would 4chan comply? Contrary to the claim above, 4chan has not actually blocked UK users, and has no reason to do so. They did however get a lawyer to write up a letter telling the redcoats to go fuck themselves.
A better question is how is whatever the UK is doing relevant for 4chan, which is an American company with no presence in the UK.
because 4chan's services are available to people residing in the UK
the OSA is ridiculous and I hope it goes the same way as the last time they tried it, but this idea that US companies should be immune to domestic regulation in countries their services are available to is silly. even if that domestic regulation is silly. because otherwise the utterly encaptured regulatory environment of the US (plus Visa and MC) solely dictates the internet
> because 4chan's services are available to people residing in the UK
I don't understand why 4chan is obligated to be the one to ensure that UK citizens don't access the site when this should be entirely within the UK government's power, no? At the very least, the infrastructure which allows their citizens to access 4chan is on UK soil so it stands to reason that they actually have authority over that.
I feel like making the case that any site which serves an international audience on the Internet has to observe the laws of every single country represented in that audience is bad precedent and has the potential to be incredibly stifling to anyone but the type of multinational corporation which has the sort of legal apparatus that's required to operate in that sort of environment.
What alternative do you think is a good balance?
Before you answer, substitute the UK with Iran and whatever distasteful content 4chan is hosting this week with "the dictatorship of Iran is harmful to its people, and they should rise up to remove it from power".
my comment was already talking about content I would prefer not to be restricted by law
You describe the EU as an undemocratic institution that brings about unwanted laws by fatigue, I understand that perspective.
You also say that the collapse of the EU would be insanely sad. I also understand that perspective.
What I don't understand is how somebody could have both of these points of view at once, in the same comment no less.
first of all, not everything is good or bad. the EU does masses of good and is probably [read: definitely] the most mature and healthy legislative body governing >100m population ever to have existed
chat control has not passed, and undoubtedly will not pass in any deeply unpalatable state. this is the point of the unanimity requirement of the EU. most likely in the end we will get some kind of law giving additional search powers to police, perhaps allowing them to remotely "switch on" chat scanning for a suspect via specific court order, comparably to how they compromised on facial recognition
secondly, to agree with the sibling comment, I look at the results, not the process. the EU has incredible results by anyone's measure, and perhaps their processes need a tweak or two, but this "it must be ultra-democracy or I don't want it" attitude just feels overly simplistic, and likely driven by ideological commitments to other things the EU opposes
A lot of people think democracy is a bad thing - or that too much democracy is a bad thing.
A lot of people support what they want the EU to be rather than what it actually is. Applies in general - people can love their country without supporting its current government or constitution.
Lobbying.
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
After reflecting on this a bit earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion; Palantir and maybe other like minded lobbying clueless politicians. It is a considerable weakness in the way laws are formed and voted on.
> Palantir and Thorn lobbyists
So, US interests? Which means the NSA?
No need to look that far.
Palantir sells software for analyzing data, like Excel but on a large scale. If "Chat Control" passes, they will need software to analyze the data they collect, which is exactly what Palantir sells. It is just business.
I don't know about Thorn but it looks like the same: they sell software that may be of use for implementing "Chat Control".
Thiel also has a religious angle, where he thinks himself a god and imagines a perfect society where every human is watched at all times
Will that constant monitoring include him? Because these billionaires get ultra touchy even if you track their private jets.
"It is a just a business" is crazy to say if your founder was Peter Thiel and you ostensibly merged already halfway with the operating goverment (US, DoD)
I wish I were religious so I could believe that there is a special place in hell for those who do such societal damage for profit.
But it don't look like it.
I don't want to fall in a conspiracy but to me it seems there's an entire sector interested into relaxing E2E cryptography and data access.
Even if the NSA was not involved the same data and security companies would have the same incentives imho.
The council of the EU operates on a rotating chair model (which gets called Presidency, sometimes Presidency of the EU)
It's currently held by Denmark so it's the Danish delegation that's mostly doing the brokering etc for this semester
I guess it never hurts to try and find alternate ways of placating the US in order to make them get over their Greenland obession.
The US pressured the UK to withdrawn encryption backdoors.
I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish took the territory without permission themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.
This is 1814 we're talking about, right? That's only a decade after Louisiana Purchase just for reference and before the Mexican-American war. I guess we might as well give all that back to the Mexicans? You can play this game to the end of time. There's a reason for statute of limitations in law.
1953 is when Denmark asserted complete ownership of the territory and it ceased just being a "colony". That's not exactly ancient history.
So? The US prior to 1776, those specific colonies that became the US, were British colonies, are you claiming before that those colonies weren't considered British?
Britain lost their claim to those colonies when they lost a war to the Americans. The Inuit had no capacity to fight a war with Denmark. So it's the same situation except now Denmark is on the short-end of the power imbalance, and they're upset about it.
Its not the same situation. Greenland has self-rule, and are masters of planning and executing their own independence. They wouldn't have that if swallowed by the US. Its funny how you appear to be miffed about colonialism, while holding outdated views that paints the Greenlanders as poor natives that don't have any self-determination.
I find it a pointless rabbit hole to go down given the timeframe. I guess we disagree. We're not talking about the independence of the indigenous people at this current point in time, we're talking about Denmark relinquishing it by default because they colonized and annexed it imorrally.
I mean if Mexico wants to come up here and invade us to take it back they can try, but it's not going to end well for them.
because the US would be upset about it
Time is a factor. Taking land is what was done in the past. US wanting to do it now is as if Mexico decided to revive slavery and threatend to capture Afroamericans in USA. It's a touchy subject and I think most of US wouldn't be exactly on board with this idea.
Especially since putin shows us exactly what happens if you try.
> Mexico decided to revive slavery and threatend to capture Afroamericans in USA
It's a bad example because the power balance doesn't make sense. I think you will have a hard time coming up with any example where USA would be on the receiving end of something like this.
the power balance isn't relevant. the original commenter said that they find it funny that Europeans get upset about Trump pretending he'd take Greenland. honestly the comment just seems like deliberately triggering 4chan-esque fare with little to no value to it. the power balance is completely irrelevant. it's one territory not happy with another power coveting its territory. how bizarre and unexpected
The power balance is relevant because USA can just take it if they want it. People in Europe will be upset but that isn't going to change the outcome. USA has offered to purchase it many times.
I think ultimately this will end up being resolved with USA getting rights to something like 80% of the resource value and Denmark getting 20% in exchange for getting to keep the title.
the power balance isn't relevant because "the US could just take it" doesn't make it any more surprising that Europeans aren't happy with the idea. Spain could take Gibraltar if they wanted, that doesn't mean it's hilarious that the British aren't happy about the idea
the original commenter quite obviously doesn't find it surprising or funny, they're just anger baiting
Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to Turkey taking Cyprus because they need Turkey on side for the migration crisis and Ukraine.
Everyone operates on self-interest but not everyone is smug about it.
TRNC is a separate country with its own laws, even though it is pretty much economically dependent on Turkey.
1814 vs 1974? seems a bit of a stretch. See above comment.
Hard to believe any of them actually take that seriously. What a bunch of babies
twisting into pretzels to try to find some way to blame this on the US. sorry honey this is all y’all
I was told the proposal the Danes carried forward actually had its roots from Sweden.
Every Chat Control proposal has its roots in Sweden. It originated with Ylva Johansson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson
this is an assuaging read. the German government decided it was illegal. reading this featured article, they don't appear to have changed their minds, plus another couple of countries, too. so what are we worried about?
The problem is that it doesnt matter if Germany is against it. If this gets approved in the EU parliament, the countries will have no choice but to agree to it.
That is how the EU works. The time to disagree has come and gone basically.
EU laws require unanimity. if Germany, i.e. by far the most powerful member, doesn't want it and sees it as illegal, it's not going to happen, is it?
My conspiracy theory is because they’d probably give a lot of contracts to Palantir (see the UK giving NHS to Palantir on a silver platter), and the US basically threatening to annex Greenland recently
At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?
Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too. How they implement it however and when and if at all remains to be seen. All maybe they will not and EU will block signal. Maybe they will allow you install apk and Google will block installing from apks directly, basically forcing companies to do the scanning.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
> Signal is centralized. So this company operating in EU, under EU laws, will have to do the scanning too.
The Signal CEO has repeated that they will rather leave the EU than start doing the scanning.
We will see...
Yeah, I agree. We will see what happens.
Words are just words as far as I know but the prospect of leaving the EU for Signal would really send a strong message to all those who still believe that the EU is better in terms of privacy than the US.
As far as I am concerned this is the nail in the coffin for the EU privacy advocates/ evangelists.
Simplex Chat looks like a decent alternative. It also has the benefit of not needing a phone number or email address.
They have the same jurisdiction problem as Signal. So does Delta Chat, Matrix which were mentioned in another response here.
From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.
Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.
SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.
XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.
On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.
Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.
For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.
Overlay networks + libre and open-source software only (preferrably with reproducible builds).
Yes I believe one way to see what is happening is in fact our own mistake. We thought we could prevent those law of being signed but it was very naive.
The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid. But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades:
- We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet
- We let big tech dominate the mobile OS space
- We embrassed the Cloud and SaaS (not your computer)
These 3 things made us sitting duck to any authoritarian government and now we pretend to be surprised we are getting shot.
Here is what we can do before it is too late:
- Buy a $10-20 LoRa device and setup Meshtastic, Meshcore or Reticulum https://reticulum.network/
- Buy one for a friend
- Run openwrt and consider things like like B.A.T.M.A.N https://www.open-mesh.org/
- Connect and explore yggdrasil https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
- Try I2P https://geti2p.net
- Get into a protocol like NNCP https://www.complete.org/nncp/
- Self-host at least a few services you can and care about
- Setup a DNS like https://opennic.org/
- A fair amount of understanding and use of the good parts of crypto/blockchain
- Get out of GMail, Outlook, iCloud, etc.
(there are probably many more)
It is gonna take the governments time to figure out what those things are and how to block and attack them.
Plus you will get more satisfaction and knowledge than with writing HELM charts, web apps or using AI.
Some decentralized platform with federation abilities. Delta Chat seems promising, but does not support forward secrecy. It is quite interestingly based on plain old email!
Or Matrix? No experience with it though
Repeatedly introduce measures permanently banning these types of legislation. Only have to win once.
Keychat or Whitenoise.
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It would be nice to have details:
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
This is the same way the law in many EU countries mandates ISPs to store communication logs for every internet subscriber for months or longer.
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
Business, eh. Maybe it's time to go open source and fully distributed peer-to-peer. Something like Tox[0] or SimpleX[1].
The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next.
But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing.
0. https://tox.chat/
1. https://simplex.chat/
> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.
I have been successful in getting non-technical people onto Signal. As far as a technical product goes, Signal is kindof shit (among other things: no support for non-Debian-based Linux forcing users to use sketchy third party repos when they are a massive target for backdoors, really shitty UX for backups), but it gets the job done and seems to have robust encryption from what other people say (I am not qualified to evaluate this myself).
If a P2P solution that solved the aforementioned Signal issues were to have excellent UX, then that could probably work.
Lastly, what counts as "excellent UX" for technical and non-technical people seems to differ. For example, I consider Discord and Slack to be quite intuitive and easy to use, but multiple technical people have expressed to me that they find it to be very confusing and that they prefer other solutions, such as GroupMe in one example. To me, GroupMe shoving the SMS paradigm into something that's fundamentally not SMS is more confusing and poor UX, but to these non-technical people that seems easy. I suspect that Signal's shortcomings that I perceive are an example of this: making UX trade-offs that work great for non-technical people but are less good for technical people. I'm not sure what these specific UX trade-offs are, but I suspect that it's something akin to having a conceptually sound underlying model (like Discord or Slack servers/workspaces and channels), versus having really obvious "CLICK HERE TO NOT FUSS" buttons like GroupMe, while having graceful failures for non-technical users that can't even figure that out (like just pretending to be SMS in GroupMe's case if you can't figure out how to install an app, or don't want to put that effort in, something that many people know how to use).
This seems a bit more polished: https://tryquiet.org/
But some friction is to be expected.
More? You sure not mean less?
SimpleX, and especially Tox, are much more mature. They're not newcomers.
They are only lacking in users, as they don't have the marketing resources companies like Slack or Discord do.
I have never heard of the ones you mentioned so it's indeed a marketing problem. I've looked at the sites and made a quick judgement.
My (very non-technical) 70 year old mom was actually happy to use Element because it has a nice desktop client, so she can more easily type and see pictures than on her phone screen. Simplex Chat would have worked for her as well.
Whet nerds perpetually don't understand, is that regular people hate the apps that nerds love, which are largely apps made by nerds who hate the apps that normal people love.
As a first step, after that they will expand it and force to do it effectively boiling the frog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
From the second paragraph in your link:
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
It's just a metaphor.
It is just a saying my dear friend. I added link because I was not sure how known it is in other countries - if at all.
But of course some HN commenter had to do: 'well actually...'. :D If I would write something like: 'Better late than never' would you be correcting me too? 'Well actually studies shows that it is better never...'
I recommend some chilling with a nice cup of tea.
I genuinely didn’t mean to upset you, and apologise for that. I enjoy learning about idioms and their origins, and find it doubly interesting when something is widespread but based on an incorrect notion. My comment was made in good faith, it was in no way intended as a slight on you.
Exactly this
But people like to sensationalize stuff
This is less worse than the original proposal
Oh and honestly game chat rooms should not be private.
(of course personal 1:1 messages should)
This achieves every goal the original proposal achieved, except the wording is sneakier.
Services are obligated to do risk analysis and take appropriate safety precautions against high risk actions. High risk actions include "anonymous accounts", "uploading media", and of course "encrypted messages".
The moment they catch the next random pedo, every messenger app on their phone will be tasked with explaining why they didn't do enough to stop the pedo. They'd better get their business together next time, because otherwise they might be held liable!
There's no law that says you have to hand over arbitrary data to the police without a warrant but when Telegrams shady owner landed in france, he was locked up until his company pledged to "work together with police better".
Don't be fooled by pretty words, none of this optional stuff is optional for any messenger the government doesn't already have the ability to read along with.
You're reading too much into this
Technical gotchas are not the same as legal gotchas
> You're reading too much into this
OP is not reading too much into this. You are being naive if you think that this is not the intended goal of this law.
Everyone who has looked at this proposal know that the 'changes" made to the latest draft are not real changes and that voluntary scanning with repercussions is the same exact thing as mandatory.
If a robber walks into your house and ask you to give all your cash and threatens to break your legs if you don't do it, did you give your money voluntarily or was it forced by the threat of violence?
Either something is mandatory and if not done, should be punished accordingly or something is voluntary in which case, then if someone does not do it there are no repercussions.
You can't say that something is voluntary and but that there would be repercussions if that thing is not done. It does not make sense.
Yet that is exactly what this law says. High risk companies should prevent the spread of CSAM but they are not forced to do it, except that if they don't do it then bad things will happen to them but don't worry it's not mandatory.
Those are just weasel words by politicians. Nothing more.
> of course personal 1:1 messages should
And what my undersensationalized friend do you understand by the word chat?
Maybe read the whole thing and learn the word steelman instead
> Oh and honestly game chat rooms should not be private. you are part of the problem
Note how they exclude themselves. No privacy for the you only for them. We will all become lawbreakers in the near future as the voluntary aspect is enforced.
And all this was done in a highly democratic manner, thanks EU!
Did you read the article?
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
Democracy means that the people decide.
Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”
And those politicians there form their own little interest groups across members states and vote accordingly, which is the exact opposite of what we think of democracy.
You'd basically have to rely on magic to know how those politicians you vote in will decide to vote on because they join some sect that lobbies them to vote against your interests.
And we all know no voter aside from the 1% will ever think this far. It's exactly like you called it, the illusion of choice
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In just a few short weeks we've gone from it losing by a vote to being forced through no questions asked so the question is, who paid them off?
The european parliament still has to vote for it where it will probably fail as long as public pressure against it keeps up
this is basically how Chinese social media works - liability for 'problematic' user posted content (ambiguously defined by the govt...) is on the technology platforms themselves, so they inevitably have to scan messages / posts, taking a zero risk policy on whatever content type is proscribed.
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If as journalist or activist this is what you quote:
> Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”
From this translation:
https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CnZOD1F...
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
[dupe] 135 comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062777
Thank you ChrisArchitect. That story was mysteriously (downranked/downmodded/deranked/downweighted) from the front page.
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
https://hnrankings.info/46062777/
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. The EU is flawed beyond and possible reform, but I feel the alternative of a segmented Europe is even crazier to think about
> I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe.
I believe that EU countries having trading agreements, sharing technology and sharing intel would be good but what we have now as the EU is not that.
It has become a single point of failure that is too easily gamed by lobbyists.
Before the EU, you needed to have lobbyist in 27 countries to get all of them to agree to something, now you just send them to Brussels and only need to convince 15 countries to agree to something for it to be approved.
We basically made the system easier to game. And now we are paying the price.
Yeah I agree with that. I think Europe needs a post-EU future
Maybe read the actual article. This still needs to go through parliament, where many pro-EU parties are also voting against this proposal.
> I am a fairly apolitical guy but in light of this I will cast my next votes for the parties that want to leave the EU from now on.
You say that you are apolitical, but you sound like an extremist. What should I believe, what you say you are or what you actually do?
So now holding politicians accountable is being an extremist?
If the EU politicians start working against my interests as a citizen, then why shouldn't I penalize them? If the EU as a whole starts working against my interests as a citizen, when why should I keep supporting this system?
The fact that you label me as an extremist for voicing my opinion (which I can only assume is different from yours) is telling. Your view of democracy seems quite skewed and if you were in charge of my country, you can bet I would vote you out too.
This is a forum where everyone is free to participate. If you don't like opinions different from yours, then feel free to skip them instead of insulting other people. This is not high school.
What is also funny is that they are doing that at the same time that they are thinking about relaxing requirements on GDPR and things like that that are really beneficial to the citizens on the pretext to make the regulation easier for "innovation".
I thought chatcontrol was dropped. What happened?
it's a long process of negotiations, currently in this form it was approved by the council, it'll then go to the parliament
the requirement to backdoor e2e was dropped, and who knows what will eventually remain of the reporting requirements, etc.
of course if a company is processing unencrypted images they might be required to use some service to flag them
...
will we end up in yet another false positive flood? who knows
I'm very curious what people in this thread think is happening now
Do you think Meta, Google and them are not scanning every bit of data hosted on their servers to ensure they're not hosting things they don't want to?
Do you think they don't cooperate with governments to share those findings?
I don't disagree that this push is silly, ineffective, and bad for democracy. We should fight it and fight for the right to privacy.
However, people are acting like we have privacy right now. What evidence is there for that?
It's a massive difference when you consent to scanning by agreeing to the terms of service when you sign up for those services.
It is not direct state imposed laws requiring you to be scanned wherever you are and every service you are using (including ones you built yourself)
This is such a weird sentiment and I see it often when talking about EU politics. Is this just how the European constituency feels? Just like beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about and no control over?
Well I'm Canadian, so...
But going off what I said, I acknowledged this sort of legislation is bad and that a right to privacy is needed. How do you arrive at "beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about"?
All I did was point out the reality right now, even without this legislation.
taking away our right to privacy sounds like a good way to get a lot more of what you say you dont want!
All hail the EU Federation for pushing this no matter what. Can't wait to be protected even more by our beloved nanny!
Unfortunely it was to be expected, the mighty ones would not rest until they managed to make it happen.
You can imagine what forms most of the the “pressure” from the government will take, on platforms owned & controlled by large corporations. Hint: it will involve their profit motive.
Also it is not just in Europe — digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/07/dangerous-us-su...
This “papers, please” is now happening quickly all around the world. Here we maintain the updates:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
Who would have thought?!
Selfishly, part of me hopes this passes, because it will drive high-IQ people to move out of the EU (I highly recommend Armenia), and the EU is a major economic competitor of my own country.
Of all places in the world, Armenia. A country so afraid of its neighbors they would allow Moscow to tell them to do anything. I hope I'm my IQ is not high enough to be included in this proposal.
ashamed my home is pushing this garbage…
Great we need this
I have this feeling that I can’t shake off that this is done as the EU political class’ coping mechanism for being absolutely terrified because their whole worldview was shattered overnight:
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
… so they resort to projecting power internally
Why are all politicians so shit? Launch these no-good leeches into the sun.
Nobody wants this, including they themselves, which is why they specifically exempt themselves from it.
Don't forget the lobbying. Behind every authoritarian move are a group of companies lobbying for these changes. When you work for law and order, there are only so many customers you can sign, so signing new services is the most reliable way to accomplish growth.
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
Well obviously they want it, they voted for it. They probably see the situation in terms of something like class war. There are a bunch of people they don't like in society and they want to identify and marginalise them.
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
Clearly it’s not all of them. Some countries voted against, and even the ones voting in favour had a few people against.
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
It's baffling from our perspective, but perhaps not so much if you try to look at it the mindset of its proponents.
It's been sold as "for the children". A very substantial proportion of the population are natural authoritarians, and this is red meat for them. Never mind that "the children" that they profess to be protecting are going to grow up living in an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state, this is what authoritarians want for our future, and they see it as not only morally good, but any opposition to it as indefensible.
> The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top.
Dumb and greedy voters, traditional and social media, and electoral interference are known reasons. But it's also a matter of compromise: you vote for a party because you agree with a bunch of their points, but almost certainly not all. Topics like privacy are ignored by the general public, so politicians are hardly held accountable for them.
Some countries have more faith in their institutions than others. Countries with good and reliable institutions, comparatively at least, are easier to convince this won't be abused and is for the greater good. I'm not surprised the Danes have found a faction to support this bullshit.
Because nobody sane & level headed wants to participate in the circus that is politics
I wonder if being a certain type of politician could be considered a mental health condition
Mostly because they are people
>Why are all politicians so shit
So that you can blame them for your problems.
This is morally indefensible. The process arguments seem beside the point if the product is fascism.
Here we go again
Leave EU now and let them ROT.
Done
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It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information. It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.
If the govt is to do anything, I would support laws explicitly banning this kind of biometric ID under most circumstances.
This is nonsense, stop spreading FUD.
What is untrue? You need to verify your identity with Persona to use GPT-5 or GPT 5.1 or a lot of other models.
"By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."
Are you perhaps a UK citizen? I, a German, can use GPT-5.1 without providing biometric information.
Are you able to access the API models without verifying your organization? See if you can access all models here. https://platform.openai.com/chat/edit
Web/app interface and API access are two different access layers for the model. Everyone can use the web or app interface for accessing all models, but API access is restricted unless you provide biometric information.
Oh, I didn't realize you're talking about the API, sorry. I don't know about that.
Not very subtle moving of the goalposts there.
Why is this even surprising? Mass surveillance is not a new thing. It's been there since the inception of the internet. This only makes it "official" and is nothing more than a formality. We need to fight back by using decentralized and p2p software
As the most "good faith" interpretation, I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be:
Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.Nothing new under the Sun mate. Look up Clipper Chip.
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
Difference is that with the above you’d have a party that actually discloses what data is accessed so having the ability to access it doesn’t immediately turn into mass surveillance and the people (e.g. opposition politicians) would at least be able to bring attention to the fact by making the reasons for the surveillance be revealed in a court hearing.
Of course I have 0 belief that it wouldn’t get hijacked/corrupted by horrible people anyways so whatever.
Europe is no longer a place that should be considered ideologically compatible with the United States. At best neutral. The US should abandon NATO and downgrade relations with the continent.
You can’t seriously be proposing that the United States respects the privacy of its citizens more.
We have constitutional barriers that would obstruct something like this.
There are also constitutional barriers to lie under oath, e.g. about spying and collecting data on US citizens, but those barriers seem very ineffective (I'm talking about the 2013 congressional hearing involving James Clapper).
I see no clear indicator that the situation has improved since.
As a US citizen, I have to say that you are completely mistaken. The US is a privacy hellscape.
Last I checked the US isn't trying to force legal backdoors into encryption which puts it firmly above the EU.
Source: US citizen which gives me special knowledge
Because US already has it. Did everyone forgot about Snowden? They have the ability and they are actively using it for at least the past 12 years. There is a reason that every major cloud provider is building a European sovereign cloud now, because US services are not trusted.
It's all relying on US tech and there is strong lobbying coming from the US for such solution. US has already deployed mass surveillance, major difference is they did it without telling citizens.
There's no one solid "Europe", there is a bunch of countries that are farther from each other than states in US.
E.g. what do Spain and Poland have in common?
Obviously you dont know anything about Europe. In the 90's there was a huge migration of Polish people and you know where they migrated mostly? Spain (and Italy). And you know what?, most of my friends during that moment were from Poland (incredible good and educated people to be honest)
Step 1: Allow reckless immigration Step 2: Terrorism and Insecurity obviously Step 3: People give up their privacy for security Step 4: Insecurity continues and government safe regardless