The best way to deal with this is non-compliance and there need to be technical solutions to deny such attempts.
One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
Google just added age restriction on blogger. Result is that you need to provide Google with ID information to access some content. If more an more users elect to ID with their Google account you can see where it can lead. Naturally the EU wants to increase such schemes as well.
It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes of said tech companies is either an oversight or something worse. I would think it is the latter and giant tech companies are very glad about the behavior of the commission. Because they too tried get people to use their ID solutions.
Digital tech doesn't really prosper in the EU but certainly surveillance leveraging services of others.
The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible. While Google did many good things for net security, their compliance on topics that serve its self-interest is a danger. Same goes for other large tech companies.
That there is close collaboration between certain political elites and tech companies is pretty much a given. It was decried as a conspiracy theory until it was proven. Although it should be no surprise that there are such connections. Perhaps the influence of the EU commission is smaller, but I would not bet on it. Access to the market is on the hand they can play. Easily a strong enough hand to subject users to surveillance.
> The best way to deal with this is non-compliance and there need to be technical solutions to deny such attempts.
I disagree.
While these are good to have, they are not enough.
The reason is always the same: if you are found to be using the circumventing tech., you'll likely be in breach of the law, which will give the goons a legitimate reason to come and harass you.
In a civilized country, that can translate into a fine, community service, etc...
In the borderlands, it'll land you in jail or worse.
The goons will come and harass you if you are inconvenient or a threat to the ruling class, even if you are complying with all existing regulations. This happens in every country and region.
For the common man non-compliance is the only non-violent way to preserve his rights or exercise freedom. You can do it successfully if you are smart and agile.
Sometimes I think we have romanticized civil disobedience a little too much. Not because having authoritarian laws is good, but because it seems like some people would rather be heroic resistance fighters than engage dry policy work and advocacy. It would be better to never live under bad laws at all.
It's much easier for people to resist by using "forbidden" systems in private, than to affect political change. In the context of the EU, other rights afforded to citizens make things like this hard to enforce.
The reason is always the same: if you are found to be using the circumventing tech., you'll likely be in breach of the law, which will give the goons a legitimate reason to come and harass you.
> The best way to deal with this is non-compliance and there need to be technical solutions to deny such attempts.
You cannot solve human issues by technical solutions
> One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
And what is your solution for that? Any authentication solution will inevitable converge to having trusted actors authenticating you. There's no technical solution for that.
> It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes
So what is your technical solution to this human law?
> The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible.
I also want to wish for moon and the stars. But we're not dealing with the realms of fantasy.
Strangest thing to me about the topic is that it’s obvious vast percentage of citizens within democracies wish they lived in an authoritarian country, yet choose to live in a democracy and use the liberties they’re provided to actively destabilize and destroy it. To me this is the largest issue, not a given topic that results from it.
Yes, I am aware current authoritarian countries wage propaganda campaigns, but in my experience such campaigns would be meaningless without an existing tendency to seek out authoritarian rule.
While likely flawed opinion, I do feel like one possible explanation is nationalism in general, since while many democratic countries will argue they believe in the rule of law, ultimately any non-citizen is treated as if they are within an authoritarian country and for sure not as citizens by default. Only once there are countries that treats all people equally and as citizens, will such an issue be addressed in my opinion.
Most people voting/supporting these kinds of things believe there is a dastardly "other" that this will apply to more than it will apply to them. There are plenty of recent political endeavors where this was extremely obvious and loudly detailed and, yet...
So much of the large-scale political nastiness these days isn't because a rising minority wants to enforce fair rules that everyone has to abide by together. They want rules that suppress the opportunities of someone else and are certain that the rules won't suppress them.
You can argue that there's little difference between one side or the other, but it's like a game cube -- in one direction it's left vs right, flip the cube and it's rich vs poor, spin the cube again, it's majority race/religion against others. The dastardly part is that, say, the propaganda of one orientation of the cube is often accepted by the oppressed parties of another orientation of cube.
Agree. Another possibility (or possibly expansion of your points) is that people feel that they are being responsible by amplifying the predictability of their current environment without realizing the potential for it to destabilize it instead. Honestly puzzled by topic and it’s one that spent a lot of time and effort trying to impact. Ultimately, I want to believe people understand they’re making an informed choice, but obviously concerned and puzzled by the pattern, which is neither new, nor likely to fade away, especially as AI‘s role advances in societies. That said, I have hope, and believe future is truly open to those willing to take the time to make a positive difference.
> They want rules that suppress the opportunities of someone else and are certain that the rules won't suppress them.
It should be noted that some of this sentiment comes from people who used the same techniques themselves to disrupt social arrangement, and who want to suppress them precisely because they know that it can work. Here's what one Soviet dissident had to say on the subject of human rights after USSR was gone:
"I always knew that only the decent people should have rights, and the indecent ones should not. ... Personally, I've had enough. Some time ago we [dissidents] and the USA have used this concept as a ram against the USSR and communists. This concept has served its purpose, and we should stop lying about human rights and promoting their defenders, lest we undermine ourselves."
It's rarely that blatant, but you can kinda sorta see similar sentiments in e.g. the explanations of why ACLU "evolves" on free speech.
For reference, many years ago when a similar surveillance law was implemented in Sweden (the FRA law), 90% of people were against it (in random polling) but politicians voted it in anyway. It later turned out this was a diplomatic back channel direct order from the US, which was found out through that big Wikileaks dump.
So, the people are not at fault in these situations imo. First, it’s politicians and after that it’s journalists. Sunlight keeps malicious politicians in check, investigative journalism has been severely crippled with corporate media. As has whistleblowing.
> So, the people are not at fault in these situations imo.
In 2022 elections year one of the largest parties in Sweden (Moderaterna) had "more cameras and surveillance on our streets" as one of their big campaign points, including campaign signs and bilboards. It came in second.
Regardless of what form of government is currently ruling a given country, ultimately the people within it are responsible for the actions taken by the government, not the government itself.
As for your other point, I agree, free balanced independent journalism, whistleblower, leaks, etc - play a clear role in insuring public stays informed.
That said, in my opinion, if 90% percent of a population was against something, but they passively allowed it to happen, it is no one’s fault but there own. I don’t for a second believe average person does not understand they have a choice over who rules them and how, even if that choice is to fight to the death to defend that right, flee the area, or for that matter, simply do whatever they’re told to do.
> it’s obvious vast percentage of citizens within democracies wish they lived in an authoritarian country, yet choose to live in a democracy
Most people don't get to choose where they live. It's really a relatively tiny percentage of the population who would have the financial ability and/or skills to emigrate, and those are really the people you're talking about. They have no loyalty to where they live because they don't need any; they can leave whenever they want, and threaten to whenever they get upset about anything.
Understand your point, though disagree. My understanding is the majority of people on Earth stay within days walking distance from where they grew up. Further, there are numerous countries that if they wanted could easily cover the costs related to relocating anyone that desired to leave another country.
I would argue the real explanation is most likely regardless of person’s situation, most want a predictable future, regardless of how good or bad their current situation. Moving to a new culture with no home, no source of income, no family or friends, etc — is viewed as predictably unpredictable by most.
Nationalism is such an ubiquitous and powerful ideology, we don't realise that pretty much everyone today is an extreme nationalist.
Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Most today think it's a good-and-fitting thing to defend "one's country". And this impulse is vastly more powerful than defending "democracy".
Who would die to stop a coup? Few. Who would die to stop an "invasion", apparently, many.
What motivates Ukrainians after all?
Quite an extreme ideology, one that puts so many men on the battlefield. But nations were invented, there is nothing "natural" to fight for here; nor anything even clearly moral.
"Democracy", therefore, is clearly a vastly vastly weaker ideology. Nationalism is the most powerful ideology to ever exist.
I don't think Ukraine is a good example of your point, as apart from being a war between two nations, it is clearly also a war between democratic and authoritarian belief systems. That ideological divide is a large part of what sparked it in the first place--the whole thing began with mass pro-democracy demonstrations that ousted an authoritarian leader.
My perception is that Ukrainians know what it's like to live under an authoritarian system and they would rather risk death and the total destruction of the country than go back to it. Nationalism is clearly a factor as well, but it is deeply intertwined with pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian ideals. I don't think you'd see anything close to this level of resistance if victory would mean an authoritarian Ukraine rather than a democratic Ukraine.
> Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
"Nationalism" had more to do with the relationship between the state and the nation, not the existence of nations. The word "nation" is very old.
Nation comes from the Latin "natio" meaning "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe"[0]. Thus, the essential basis for nationality is familial, a matter of common descent (as all human beings form an extended family, where you draw the line on this blurry map will depend on other factors like culture and language and ultimately the good held in common; note how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians speak basically the same language, it is the religious and therefore cultural differences that separate them). Naturally, people migrate all the time between nations. That is normal to the degree that migration does not harm the common good of the host society. But immigration is effectively a matter of adoption. We can adopt children. We can also adopt nations.
You are fighting for who has the “monopoly of violence”, which is the most natural thing ever, that we have those cliques as big as they are might not be though.
Tribes have existed since before written history; not sure if you’re referring to something else, but to me a tribe is essentially same thing, us vs them.
I think we need to slow down and look at this with level heads.
1. What is a reliable measure of this "vast percentage"?
2. Are you perhaps lumping any departure from your preferred political model as "authoritarian"?
3. Are you perhaps overattributing the level of "democracy" to your preferred political regime?
4. Have you considered the motivations behind the distaste with ostensibly "democratic" regimes?
Simply declaring "nationalism!" is not an intellectually substantive remark and probably caricaturish because a) what do you mean by "nationalism", and b) you haven't identified the confluence of motives to see what might be happening and why.
My 2 cents: liberalism as a political ideology traceable to Locke and Hobbes is unraveling because of its inherent tensions and errors (like the tension between knowledge and the mistaken liberal notion of "freedom" understood as "do what thou wilt" versus "do what thou ought"; its radical individualism; its totalitarian "neutrality" which is a manipulative, underhanded means of entrenching liberal presuppositions; its egalitarianism). It is to be expected that someone whose sentiments have been shaped in a social climate that valorizes an ideology will view any departure as hostile and "authoritarian", not on objective grounds, but merely according to habituated affect. You had the same thing in post-Soviet Russia and post-War Germany.
From the first sentence of the related post — “The European Commission is currently in the process of enacting a law called Chat control. If the law goes into effect, it will mean that all EU citizens' communications will be monitored and listened to.”
Level headed person would see that the next step is logically that all communications regardless if they’re in private, in person, etc should be monitored. If that’s not an authoritarian state, I am happy to be listen to why.
As for a vast percentage, I mean that topic like this would not even see the light of day if there wasn’t source of significant support; hint, there is.
I have neither have preference over given political party, nor would I be affiliated with a given group; that is, I am fine independently observing, understanding, evaluating, and if needed, acting on any situation as needed.
Not sure understand you point 3, please feel free to clarify.
As for point 4, I covered a possible reasoning why current democracies might be viewed as unjust; if you missed that, might be worth reading my OP comment again.
And yes, nationalism is toxic. It treats other humans as subhumans by default, that is non-citizens are not treated equal, and for sure not as citizens by default. If there was a country that treated all humans as citizens, equally, fairly, etc - I would be happy to reevaluate my beliefs related to nationalism.
And for your two cents, I prefer plain-English and first principle reasoning, not reference to historical ideologies, list of ism’s, etc. Said another way, I don’t understand what you hoped I would understand, but happy to listen.
Well, I think we had a solid bipartisan support for classical-liberism up until 2015. It's worth going back to it with the lessons learned. It was the bedrock that allowed limited centralization and most importantly, accountability.
We need new journalism that keeps powers in check and hold them accountable, not pander to their readers in an ever resonating echo chambers.
Assuming by “we” you are referring to Americans, which to me not a democracy, but a plutocracy; that is, a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth, either as a individual or organization.
As for American media, issues related to pandering to readers is likely related to it deregulating media industry in the 80s; for more information see:
> Well, I think we had a solid bipartisan support for classical-liberism up until 2015.
This is a fantasy history. We have had solid bipartisan support for neoliberalism (property rights are king) and neoconservatism (and we need motivating myths about them to keep the proles in line) for a long time. That consensus continues. "Classical liberalism" has never been popular anywhere.
edit: we're having an extreme authoritarian wave as a reaction to the internet, but we shouldn't pretend like we don't come from countries that used to open people's mail to look for pamphlets about contraception.
Unpopular opinion: If you don't like democracy and use your democratic rights to actively work to dismantle it, you probably shouldn't actually be allowed to participate in democracy since you are operating in bad faith.
That's not unpopular, it's a typical authoritarian opinion. Every censor out there is defending us from threats to our democracy. They would love the idea of setting up the Agency for the Good Faith Belief in Democracy and Democratic Rights, who would certify individuals as being qualified to vote.
Reminds me of Popper’s idea that a democracy shouldn’t give it’s tools to those who seek to destroy it.
“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Karl Popper
While I don’t agree, I do believe it’s a common perspective and one that’s important to have dialogue on.
While for sure an imperfect response, I would say that no democracy will ever be absolutely perfect, since it would require a consensus on everything and everyone understanding the topic equally prior to voicing their opinion. Further, authoritarian beliefs are only true threat to a democracy if majority support authoritarian rule, at which point I would argue it’s not a democracy.
That said, with the advancements of AI, it increasingly dangerous, since if given the tools and opportunity, an authoritarian minority might over take an unprepared majority.
If you let them vote, they'll vote to destroy their society.
If you don't let them vote, they'll act to destroy their society.
It would be emotionally satisfying, but ultimately destructive. It would also be ripe for abuse; imagine how awful it would be if we had secret lists of people who weren't allowed to do other normal activities, like air travel or vehicle registration.
A few constitutions explicitly defend democracy, so you cannot modify the constitution to remove the democratic system. Germany is the most famous example (because, you know, Hitler).
That is a good opinion in principle, but rather complicated to implement in a way that would work as expected. Most implementations would at best add too much bias to the process which would make it counterproductive, at worst it would corrupted in no time and lead to an authoritarian government which would defetat its porpouse.
Every time this comes up people talk about protecting privacy and anonymity and what not and while luckily for us most of the time the laws die out they still do pass on occasion. The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy. As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up? I doubt very many. I ran into a similar scenario once defending privacy when a lady who said she was abused as a child came into the conversation and told her story to the crowd. As you can imagine the crowd was very supportive of her and my concerns were more or less dismissed afterwards. There is nothing technical I could say that could persuade them as much as the poor lady's life story could.
Say "Most sexual abuse is domestic. Shall we mandate cameras in every room of every house? Or remote engine-lock to stop terrorist car attacks? There are cameras everywhere, forensics is more advanced than ever, 'going dark' is the opposite of reality. But there is always some small remaining scrap of freedom left to sacrifice for supposed 'safety', until we are reduced to cattle. Doing so is spitting on the graves of everyone who ever died for freedom, of everyone who chose to fight instead of 'peacefully' submit to foreign conquest or domestic dictatorship.
But suppose you do prefer 'safety' to all else, to privacy and liberty. Suppose you want to sacrifice everything for it. Will you even get it? We can today build prisons and surveillance far more effective than at any point in history, and once we've turned society into a safe cage, how sure are you the wrong people won't get the keys? Historically, how many governments would you have trusted with such total surveillance of their citizens? Tsarist Russia? Soviet Russia? Present day Russia? Communist China? Present day China? Nazi Germany? The Stasi? The Khmer Rouge? The Ottoman Empire? Iran? The British Raj? But you're sure nothing like that will happen here? This time, benevolent government will last, and we can safely surrender all means of opposition?"
It's a great argument but way over the head of the average citizen. Most people are unable to think about things this way. The government and police are the good guys etc.
> The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy.
Speaking from a U.S. perspective here.
A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement without the 4th amendment is worse.
A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president without the 1st amendment is worse.
There are people who do terrible things in this world. Unfortunately people who do terrible things can run for government and be appointed to positions of power.
There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
> There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
I agree with you, but this illustrates part of the problem of our messaging. These policies are still just tools which don't have an inherent moral value. The evil comes from their abuse on a mass scale, and the huge temptation to abuse them, with the emphasis on how easily the powerful can be corrupted.
This is prone to being called out for being a slippery slope fallacy, but we need to just back it up with historical precedent, like how similar policies were abused in the US as revealed by Snowden.
> how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up?
Well, putting aside the "shut up" part, I'd be happy to state publicly that under no (reasonable, peacetime) circumstances should the government be allowed to read my texts, emails, and documents.
Obviously there's a bunch of qualifiers to assign to that (if I'm under suspicion of something, OK, sure, maybe the government can get a warrant) that I'm not qualified to speak intelligently about, but that's the gist. Saying that the government should not be able to read your email or list to your phone calls is not an unpopular opinion, at least in the States, and it's also not one that requires you to be of an overly technical persuasion to have.
People support victims of child abuse and they also distrust the government and don't want it to have awesome powers of espionage it can wield against the entire populace at scale all of the time. Those positions might conflict with each other if you frame the conversation that way, but if you do frame it that way, I don't think it's a given that the child abuse argument is always going to win the debate.
Don't worry about that audience. Us profesional-managerial upper-middle class types are surrounded by people whose beliefs are subordinate to their personal ambition; it's a qualification for entering the class, because it takes an enormous amount of hard work, social connections, and study to reach and maintain that position. So you end up surrounded by people who live a politics of personal interests i.e. real concern about issues that affect them and the people they love (deemed universal), and ephemeral concern that sometimes borders on actual ignorance of things that don't affect them and theirs. This ephemeral concern and ignorance is entirely based in fashion.
Upper-middle class PMCs generally aren't worried about being monitored or censored by authorities (except within the games of party power politics and wedge issues.) If anything, when they hear about it, they look to see if there are job openings. They are concerned about child abuse, because even wealthy children get abused. Universal.
They constitute (if I'm being generous) 20% of the population and are useless to try to convince. It's their duty to explain to you that the society that has rewarded them generously for their hard work actually has everyone's best interests at heart, no matter how ludicrous it seems.
Side argument - why do you need protection from drug dealers? Just don't buy drugs from them if you don't want any.
Main argument: you bring up very important aspect - emotional one. We are very emotional and in the heat of the moment you probably won't be able to make good technical and reasonable case to persuade people, but that doesn't mean they are right.
Also I am not against _solutions_ to the problem. I am against solutions that when implemented have really low cost of switching them into tools of abuse.
Example: There is law that allows banning of websites (just DNS resolution) that promote gambling, illegal porn etc. It was recently used to "take down" a website that leaked emails of politicians of current government (it could be bad if we speak of some national security / military stuff, in that case they share info about corruption and nepotism)
Conflating privacy stripping laws with paedophilia protection is something I'd happily deconstruct, whether in front of a camera or otherwise. It's not difficult to show with logic how one doesn't help the other, and I could even go as far as showing how the laws make things worse.
> As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or news show with their real name and face and tell a child abuse victim that while their concerns may be valid they are wrong and they should shut up? I doubt very many.
I think I'm misunderstanding you here, are you implying presently real politicians would have to do that to advocate for privacy laws?
It isn't logic, and I think that's the point--it's an appeal to emotion, and if you pit logic vs emotion, emotion will almost always win in the broader culture. (A few oddball cultures like ycombinator and lesswrong etc. aside, perhaps).
It's always a matter of availability, balance, justification, right. The justification is there, so your argument is a strawman.
It would be more relevant in a direct comparison to gun control, which. Blades are fairly easy to furnish on the spot, easier than guns, so this comparison fails, too.
Balance requires a need for knives, which is difficult to put aside and certainly not the point of this argument. The ball park figure alone is not making a rational argument.
The internet is not the breaking point either way, though it could be used to implement access control.
So, I am effectively unsure if your whatabout'ish strawman is in favour of intrusive regulation.
This is an awesome point, and one I think geeks need to hear often: We act based on our emotions even if they are well-hidden beneath logical explanations.
Perhaps the "answer" to the lady who was abused as a child is to tell another emotional story--for example, Ann Frank:
> Have you heard the story of Anne Frank? She was a Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. She and her sister lived in hiding for two years until they were eventually discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. They later died of typhus in a concentration camp.
> How did surveillance play a role? No one knows who betrayed her. She lived through constant fear of being caught. Knowing they were being watched added to the already difficult conditions of living in hiding--the stress of the situation affected their relationships and mental health.
> If you or those you care about ever find yourself on the "less desirable" list in society, it's vital that you have some control over things you say to others in confidence. The Nazi's oppression of the Jewish people limited their freedom and contributed to Anne's tragic end.
As a pro-EU citizen I feel more and more inclined to agree on some of the Brexit rhetoric.
Commissioners have shown multiple times that they are too permeable to lobbying, too willing to water down tough environmental regulation, and too keen on 'security' surveillance.
So far the EU parliament members have balanced the act with some sanity. But the power and lack of transparency of the EC both with regards to lobbying and conflict of interest is very concerning.
I am making the point that the parliament votes, and _rejects_ proposals that overreach.
My point is not Britain as an example, but that one of the Brexit rhetoric points was the rah rah 'unelected officials'.
Arguably we both know that EC comissioners are appointed by democratic governments but we see multiple times how permeable EC commisioners are:
1. Surveillance proposals such as posted in this thread
2. Net Neutrality exemptions - allowing Facebook/Youtube/et al. 'zero ratings' on metered connections
3. SUPD with guidelines that have so many Plastic exceptions that basically only q-tips and plastic forks got banned. Nestle, Coca-Cola, all the supermarket wrapping remain untouched.
4. 'Green Deal' was completely watered down on implementation. [0]
The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me. I really just don't get it at all. Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap?
I'm all for European trade, but I felt I had to vote Brexit because obviously the goal of any political system should be to maximise the political power of individuals and local communities. The more you centralise and expand power over larger geographical areas the less tolerant of regional political difference your political system must become. This become obvious when we talk about a country like Turkey potentially joining the EU.
That said, I hate the UK government with a passion and they are arguably even worse when it comes to surveillance, but at least we can vote them out.
>Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap?
Basically, no. What you're asking for is what the EU has tried to do somewhat: become a confederation. It doesn't work. The USA tried it back in the 1700s and it was a disaster. The country couldn't defend itself, have any kind of central banking and currency, or any consistent policy. It was replaced in 12 years with the more centralized federal system that exists now.
The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity that could rival the US, and have the same benefits and power on the world stage. But there are costs to this: you need much greater centralization. Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.
Basically, if you want to be a world power, you can't just be a bunch of small, disparate countries in a loose trade confederation. You need more centralization of power, and the problems that come with that. If you don't want that, you need to just be happy with being a bunch of separate, sovereign nations with different currencies and trade barriers between them all. Pick one.
From my perspective, the EU's problems you see are because it won't just commit to a centralized system and eliminating national sovereignty, and it's trying to have it both ways.
> The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me
Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!
The EU is literally a government by committee. A kind of technocracy with very little accountability for those making these decisions. The UK has a lot of problems right now, but at least BREXIT helped preserve some sovereignty from that behomoth. That is good for the long term.
I had several discussions like that and always said something along the lines of: "Well, I am not so sure about it being a bad decision in the long term. I think time will tell." and every time people have valid arguments of why Brexit is bad for the UK, but still I will say something like "Lets see how it all turns out.", because we do not know the future.
When the EU cooks up the next surveillance law attempt, I am always reminded of those conversations. But where else to go, if even EU gets too crazy? There are probably only worse places with regards to privacy.
It isn’t a democratic system. It’s clearly been infiltrated by both lobbyists as you say but also foreign powers. Further integration should be halted in my opinion until the undemocratic elements are dissolved and replaced with ethical moral means of representation if that doesn’t happen then we are at an impasse for which I see no future in this system. Personally I will not donate the labor my life to it. Everyone is free (for now) to do what they wish. Nothing is perfect but society should benefit those who benefit society not oligarchs and tyrants.
We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
This will only hurt people actually fighting for their rights, and this needs to stop.
> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.
In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done.
Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
TFA rightly calls on citizens to instead be that group, on the side of freedom.
> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
It's marketed to upper-middle class elites as reasonable, and of course it's upper-middle class elites that are paid to put together this marketing. But it's really orders from an owner class that has entirely different interests from the other 99.9% of the population.
If an individual member of of the upper-middle class has a problem with {the imposition of the week}, they are harshly corrected, shunned, then eventually ejected from the upper-middle class. Your credentials will be taken away, your friends will avoid you to keep from being suspected themselves (and will rationalize this behavior to overcome cognitive dissonance, becoming energetic state chauvinists), your credit will be destroyed.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
This is just a slander. There are people who own large parts of the economy, and people live for decades, and people pass their ownership to their children. They are also friends with their peers. The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.
Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.
This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history. The PATRIOT act in America was quickly used to facilitate mass surveillance, and it reflects a greater pattern of government behavior. While there are "useful idiots" who embody the technically clueless bureaucrats you describe, there is absolutely collectives of nefarious actors aiming to control populations.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them"
How did you got this out of GP?
I think you both saying/meaning the same.
> and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
Yep, and their actual desire is to control people's freedom (even admitting that some or all of them themselves belief that this is only for good cause, the reasons that also GP listed.. ).
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy
I wouldn't be so naive. Groups like the Council For National Policy and Lance Wallnau pushing The Seven Mountain Mandate have been working for DECADES to push the agenda that you're seeing in schools and politics today.
Maybe not a "world order", but they'd certainly like to be.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe too much in the existence of such a group, but I can argue this is really bad logic.
A. Do you think such a group would be public with their ambitions? Such a group would doubtless deny their own existence. Arguing that they do, or do not exist, can only be based on observation and opinion, because it is not falsifiable.
B. Secret societies do exist, and there are some that still exist to this day that had major political power previously. The Freemasons, for example, were pretty influential in the French revolution on both sides, and counted leaders like Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Paul Revere, and so on among their members. We know that nine freemasons, at a minimum, signed the US Constitution. (Then, fun fact, they put "Novus ordo seclorum" on the great seal of the US.)
C. And even if there weren't powerful secret societies historically (which is doubtful), we currently live in a very globalized world with much easier ability to meet and privately message, so there's always a first. Saying that it never happened, therefore it can't happen, is always misguided.
D. The World Economic Forum literally called for everyone to build a New World Order in 2018. With that exact terminology. It's still on their website. I would argue that makes them partially culpable for the conspiracies. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together...
There is no need to pretend. People with power want more power. As a thought exercise consider how you would arrange the world were you in a position to do so and try to determine placement of structures that could undermine your benevolent rule. Freedom of speech is such a structure. It is not really a paranoia if there are people out there working on just that. Now, just because there are also fellow travelers who truly believe 'for the children' cry, that is quite another and separate conversation.
> I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.
> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
If public servants were left to their own devices and could mandate any law they like, they would instantly prohibit any behavior that is not explicitly allowed. Because that's how they themselves must function so that public can hold them accountable.
The trouble is that they inherently push this mentality to the politicians who must rely on them to get popularity contest points and sometimes manage to win these nonsense laws that help nobody.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
Sure, but there actually is "them". They are clueless, individually powerless, out-of-sight, largely disconnected social class that actually makes this happen. And they can wait decades for the right situation. In Czechia, the public servant actually responsible for introducing DNS blocking was actually tasked with online hazard oversight. He pushed it through in order to block just 6 websites because it was somehow easier for him than negotiating banning payments to them, probably because of turf wars. The respective two ministries are rivals and won't ever cooperate. He lobbied for this for like 10+ years and then a bunch of idiots has gotten elected and ran with it.
So in a way, you are right. But you are also somewhat wrong. From my experience finding the actual people pushing for this (it's usually not the politicians) and outing them would work way better.
The reason is, and always has been, to enable lazy police work. They won't have to do their jobs if facebook will just tell them who the criminals are.
"Them" is a metaphor for aligned incentives. If there are incentives for something to happen, it will happen. These incentives create a self-organizing conspiracy where the participants don't even need to communicate with each other, but they are co-operating anyway, just by acting in their own interest. It doesn't matter whether "them", the NWO or the lizard people are real or not; the end result is the same.
Parts of Germany instated laws that allowed to arrest people without trial for 30days.
They claimed to only use it to prevent severe crimes like terrorism.
Current statistics show, the most people that got arrested via that laws are climate activists.
So either the law makers and police are incompetent and therefore shouldn't make these laws way or they know what they are doing and therefore shouldn't make these laws.
BTW these laws made for "good reasons" don't get the jobs done.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
Thankfully, we don't have to pretend! A cadre of wealthy Americans have a documented history of conspiring against the people of this country.
It doesn't need to be a "World New Order" for three letter agencies lobbying to increase surveillance, and hence their power over the people. You are right, bureaucrats are clueless, but they don't need to be sharp, the agencies that will benefit from violating people's privacy and right already are. The is no possible good coming from those laws, the argument of "saving the children" falls flat, because you could extended to anything, "ban knives because children could cut themselves", etc... Privacy is a right, and those agencies(also known as deep state) pushing lawmakers to subvert it, are doing in to control people indeed.
> A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
I agree with you. We are too dumb, to selfish, to humans to be able to run a a New World Order, with decades-long plans in silence. For sure one stupid member would do a tiktok video while using their funny clothes
How do you explain the countless tyrants in ancient and modern history? Hell, even in contemporary times. The truth is that there are absolutely very dangerous people around. And also a lot of good people too. We can't know for certain who is who, so the best approach is to be as polite as if they were good people but as cautious as if they were evil.
no matter the reasons, even if current politicians and institutions are 100% trustworthy, no such law should be made.
you cannot guarantee that future institutions, and governments will be benevolent, and with such laws you give them easy access to tools of oppression.
There is a "them" though: Tech giants. And they are pushing/lobbying hard with their huge financial reserves, which they extracted from clueless uninformed masses. A company like Google would love for all privacy protections to disappear tomorrow, because of the riches they can amass then. It is simply capitalism and greed at work.
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out:
1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next?
2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what?
3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement?
Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud.
If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate and access information freely.
IMO, your hypothetical falls apart at the second point:
> Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures.
A government could legislate that it may not rain anywhere in the country on Tuesdays, but executing that isn't practicable. Likewise, backdooring one family of CPUs may be possible, but you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.
And I want to say that there exists provably un-backdoor-able "zero-knowledge" computing, something like Ethereum's smart contract ISA, but I may be misremembering.
In the end, our governments are democratic, we elect politicians to represent our will. They shouldn't be pushing for things like backdoors at all when no citizens are in favour. So yes,
> [...] we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak.
I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.
I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.
here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it
in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them
many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too
in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did
"if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought
the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers
Once a decentralized system becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, banning it becomes tantamount to imposing economic sanctions on yourself. That's basically what happened with the internet. That might have just been a fluke, but it would be awesome if we could somehow manage to create more systems like that.
I've always wondered behind the rationale on privacy being a human right. What if it wasn't? What if instead we were enforcing transparency? Force everything to be public, starting from the government down to the local coffee shop. All transactions, all communications, everything. Make privacy a crime for everybody, including the government and the military. Just as a thought exercise, it would be a remarkably different world. I think the problem privacy is solving enables a different set of problems to emerge that would have otherwise been impossible. And one could argue that these new problems are those that enable the necessity for privacy to be established as a human right in the first place.
The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively).
Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.
people need privacy not because their acts are unworthy
people need privacy because others' intentions and judgment are unworthy
if you've ever known anyone who was gay, who got divorced, who secretly had a deprecated ethnic background, who left their faith, who didn't want their ex-boyfriend to know where they lived, who revealed government corruption, who struggled for political change, or who could be raped or robbed by a stranger, you've known someone who needed privacy
even though they had nothing to be ashamed of
you might argue that if nobody had privacy, nobody would be able to get away with rape, or with lynching people they discovered had a drop of black blood, or with lynching apostates, or with gay-bashing, so these things wouldn't happen in a world without privacy
that would be a stupid argument because people did those things openly all the time, and they usually got away with it, and some of them still do; humans have a social
pecking order, and it is defined by aggression with impunity
also people murder their ex-partners all the time even when they won't get away with it
Sure, let's make everyone to walk around naked. Let's also make sure, that everyone knows what is going on in your life, where you and your loved ones live, what they buy, how much money they make, what they say, ....... Your argument is ridiculous.
There are a lot of people objecting to the "real motivation" argument (it's just bureaucratic incompetence, they don't know what they're doing, etc. etc.)
Usually those are good arguments. Not this time.
This proposal is Pure Evil. Hardly anyone is willing to come out and say they admire the Chinese social credit system. But when their every action leans towards replicating it, it's more than fair to drag them out into the sunlight.
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.
Trying to fight legal frameworks with technology, failed in the past with some notable but hardly repeatable exceptions. In the 90s a few geeks tech awareness could match the resources of a small state, non tech-savvy state. Nowadays it is impossible because the discrepancy in resources is huge.
There are countries that force you to download their own "secure" SSL certificate, so they can sniff all traffic. China is the worst and most prominent example.
This battle need to be fought on the street, with votes, by raising awareness, etc. If we want to be "free" we need to take-over the political battle, not the tech battle because if we win on that front, most likely won't matter. I don't want to risk jail for using an open source encryption tool.
>No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.
I'm reminded of the EMH joke about the economist walking by a 100 dollar bill on the street, assuming that it must be fake because if it were real, someone already would have picked it up.
If you pay enough attention, you will notice that the same argument is used to push many political agendas (for better or worse):
- "You can't ban encrypted messaging. Terrorists will always find a way to communicate."
- "You can't outlaw abortions, just safe ones. Women will always find a way."
- "You can't uniformly enforce gun control. Dedicated criminals will keep buying weapons on the black market."
- "You can't ban cryptocurrencies. Enthusiasts will still trade on P2P exchanges."
All of these are half truth, and half lie.
Every policy introduces a certain amount of user friction, which is proven to discourage action. Some people will refrain from infringing the policy (e.g. using guns, performing abortions, using encrypted messaging apps), some others will comply. Percentages obviously vary depending on the specific policy, but it's never 0% nor 100% like "both" sides want you to believe.
For years the US government has attempted to limit the use (and 'export') of strong encryption protocols like PGP using the argument that they should be treated as munitions. The case against Zimmermann in the early 1990s regarding his posting of PGP to a Usenet site, and the eventual decision by the US government not to proceed with the case, is illustrative. Here's an excerpt from the statement by lawyer on the case. It's from over two decades ago, but still worth reading (the laws have been relaxed somewhat since then, but it's not really clear how far):
> "Now, some words about the case and the future. Nobody should conclude
that it is now legal to export cryptographic software. It isn't. The
law may change, but for now, you'll probably be prosecuted if you break
it. People wonder why the government declined prosecution, especially
since the government isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be
that Mr. Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a
deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't sure whether
someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that person to find out.)
Another might be that the government did not want to risk a judicial
finding that posting cryptographic software on a site in the U.S., even
if it's an Internet site, is not an "export". There was also the risk
that the export-control law would be declared unconstitutional. Perhaps
the government did not want to get into a public argument about some
important policy issues: should it be illegal to export cryptographic
software? Should U.S. citizens have access to technology that permits
private communication? And ultimately, do U.S. citizens have the right
to communicate in absolute privacy?"
> "There are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our
liberties. There always will be. But at least in the United States, our
rights are not so much stolen from us as they are simply lost by us. The
price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation. Those
folks I mention in this message have participated and no doubt will
continue. My thanks, and the thanks of Philip Zimmermann, to each of
you."
One obvious concern about this move in the EU is that they'll try to criminalize the use of cryptography again.
Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.
Systems outside the control of any government entity devolve into a familiar cavalcade of horrors. You need a better answer for the fact that those horrors exist, and that many people who draw government paychecks devote their careers to fighting them in good faith, with good results.
You'd think that after twenty years the debate would have moved past advocating for complete lawlessness, but we get stuck in the same puerile tropes. The fact that bad state actors exist does not change the fact that horribly abusive material, with real victims, will be shared on any platform those abusers consider safe, and that the existence of such platforms will encourage further abuse.
Anyone who has worked on child sexual exploitation material on any platform knows this, and any privacy advocate has to have a better answer for it than 'nuh-uh'.
> Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography"
The four horsemen of the Infocalypse
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime.
>Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
That's the hard part, IMO.
Imagine that we really got that "decentralized system that cannot be controlled" going and everyone is using it. Everyone, including those who is into illegal things. And they don't get caught.
Now the government starts to push their "this decentralized shit is doing more harm than good" agenda. Whatever their motivation is, it would be easy to sway public opinion against surveillance-free communications, because the harm is real, not hypothetical, like it is now.
WhatsApp chats are secret, but not necessarily private.
Authorities can ask Meta to release the meta data and they can inspect phones to retrieve the chat logs.
Private communications have never been secret, it was always possible for the people with the necessary authorizations to access them.
Privacy is consensual, secrecy is not.
But there is no right to secrecy.
As much as I love mullvad and their excellent products, they never link the proposal they talk about in that page, which hinders the people' ability to form their own opinion.
All the material we can find revolves around the same actors, quoting each other, some like the Pirate party, say it was leaked
Leaked Commission paper EU mass surveillance plans
But it's not true, it's officially published on the EU website, it wasn't being kept hidden, it had to be translated to all the EU official languages before being published.
I understand being concerned, what I do not understand is being catastrophic.
Even if everything they wrote was true, a proposal is not a law, so whatever happened in the Swedish parliament, was not influenced by the EU proposal.
p.s. the system is similar to CSAM, which I don't like either, but sooner or later such systems will be everywhere, like it or not.
The discussion must be held in a way or another.
Apple too considered scanning the users' devices to match CSAM pictures, they dropped it, for now, but probably only because they are developing their own system, independent from the government, so they don't have to give them any kind of access.
Here the discussion is being held in public, by people elected by European citizens directly with their vote, these people are paid exactly to discuss these matters, theya re doing their job.
You wrote "the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it." but the they you mention are elected officials, not SP.E.C.T.R.E. evil agents
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.
No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen.
Though, part of this deal is that we take control on when they go too far, and do stupid things. Which seems to be the case in this case, because of which we push against it, because that's how we hope to get a healthy world.
> Privacy is a human right.
So is security. It's all about balancing interests and abilities.
> whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.
> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
No, they are not. The majority of criminals are not some organized super villains. They are usually also depending on the same tools and networks as everyone else. And they are also just flawed humans, making errors.
Not sure if it was here before, but they also posted an article yesterday on how this may (or may not, its up to interpretation) affect open source operating systems
There should be a law against spamming the lawmaking process with proposals that have previously failed or are near identical to it, for a set time period. Means, you are no longer allowed to lobby for a law proposal once it has been rejected for a time period of one voting cycle.
1. The book of law should have a fixed number of words, written in stone in the constitution. Side effects:
a) you want to pass a new law? Pick one in the book to get rid of.
b) magically, the enforcement budget and the size of the fat leech that feeds off of it (the government) remains constant. See "The Advantage of a Dragon" by Stanislaw Lem [1]
2. A law should always (with the possible exception of those in the constitution) have an expiration date, voted with the law, with a maximum of 10 years, at which time the law should get re-voted on if it turns out it was actually useful to society.
This proposal hasn't been made before (at least in the EU at the EU level)
If you're thinking that you saw something like this last year and now again it's the same law. The EU legislative process is extremely slow (not that it's a bad thing in this case, I'd rather this not get rushed through, or even better not get through at all)
And even now it is not likely to pass before December 2023 or might even get delayed to January 2024
Article 6 of the law requires all "software application stores" to:
- Assess whether each service provided by each software application enables human-to-human communication
- Verify whether each user is over or under the age of 17
- Prevent users under 17 from installing such communication software
- “impact assessments” before launching new features that kids are likely to access
- businesses, not parents, to figure out what’s in the best interest of children
- [treating] children as if they all .. face the same risks .. lumps together 17 year-olds and 2 year-olds
- threatens to make face scans a routine and everyday occurrence
- before you can go to a new site, you will have to do either face scanning or upload age authenticating documents
- would require every adult in Utah to submit age verification in order to use social media
- minor accounts would need to be associated with a verified adult account
- social media companies.. collect personal information from their parents
Readit News
One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
Google just added age restriction on blogger. Result is that you need to provide Google with ID information to access some content. If more an more users elect to ID with their Google account you can see where it can lead. Naturally the EU wants to increase such schemes as well.
It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes of said tech companies is either an oversight or something worse. I would think it is the latter and giant tech companies are very glad about the behavior of the commission. Because they too tried get people to use their ID solutions.
Digital tech doesn't really prosper in the EU but certainly surveillance leveraging services of others.
The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible. While Google did many good things for net security, their compliance on topics that serve its self-interest is a danger. Same goes for other large tech companies.
That there is close collaboration between certain political elites and tech companies is pretty much a given. It was decried as a conspiracy theory until it was proven. Although it should be no surprise that there are such connections. Perhaps the influence of the EU commission is smaller, but I would not bet on it. Access to the market is on the hand they can play. Easily a strong enough hand to subject users to surveillance.
I disagree.
While these are good to have, they are not enough.
The reason is always the same: if you are found to be using the circumventing tech., you'll likely be in breach of the law, which will give the goons a legitimate reason to come and harass you.
In a civilized country, that can translate into a fine, community service, etc...
In the borderlands, it'll land you in jail or worse.
For the common man non-compliance is the only non-violent way to preserve his rights or exercise freedom. You can do it successfully if you are smart and agile.
Not if almost everyone does it at once.
also dns and the tls ca system, even including let's encrypt
Apple, Google, and Facebook are the 5th, 6th, and 7th largest lobbyists in the EU.
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/?sort=lob&order=desc
Your statement makes it look like OAuth2 is inherently endangering net freedom.
This isn't true.
If OAuth2 was used ...
- for authentication (versus authorization) only AND
- AND by a select few providers (e.g. Google, Github, Facebook, Twitter) solely AND
- AND NO other privacy-protecting authentication methods (e.g. classic username-password credentials) are available
... THEN your statement has reasonable truth.
You cannot solve human issues by technical solutions
> One major factor that works against users is central authentication. Schemes like oauth2 might bring convenience and security in many cases, but will endanger net freedom overall.
And what is your solution for that? Any authentication solution will inevitable converge to having trusted actors authenticating you. There's no technical solution for that.
> It just released a law (DSA) that allegedly to restrict the influence of tech giants. That their proposals will drive people into ID schemes
So what is your technical solution to this human law?
> The only defense against such laws is to make them technologically not feasible.
I also want to wish for moon and the stars. But we're not dealing with the realms of fantasy.
Dead Comment
Yes, I am aware current authoritarian countries wage propaganda campaigns, but in my experience such campaigns would be meaningless without an existing tendency to seek out authoritarian rule.
While likely flawed opinion, I do feel like one possible explanation is nationalism in general, since while many democratic countries will argue they believe in the rule of law, ultimately any non-citizen is treated as if they are within an authoritarian country and for sure not as citizens by default. Only once there are countries that treats all people equally and as citizens, will such an issue be addressed in my opinion.
So much of the large-scale political nastiness these days isn't because a rising minority wants to enforce fair rules that everyone has to abide by together. They want rules that suppress the opportunities of someone else and are certain that the rules won't suppress them.
You can argue that there's little difference between one side or the other, but it's like a game cube -- in one direction it's left vs right, flip the cube and it's rich vs poor, spin the cube again, it's majority race/religion against others. The dastardly part is that, say, the propaganda of one orientation of the cube is often accepted by the oppressed parties of another orientation of cube.
It should be noted that some of this sentiment comes from people who used the same techniques themselves to disrupt social arrangement, and who want to suppress them precisely because they know that it can work. Here's what one Soviet dissident had to say on the subject of human rights after USSR was gone:
"I always knew that only the decent people should have rights, and the indecent ones should not. ... Personally, I've had enough. Some time ago we [dissidents] and the USA have used this concept as a ram against the USSR and communists. This concept has served its purpose, and we should stop lying about human rights and promoting their defenders, lest we undermine ourselves."
It's rarely that blatant, but you can kinda sorta see similar sentiments in e.g. the explanations of why ACLU "evolves" on free speech.
So, the people are not at fault in these situations imo. First, it’s politicians and after that it’s journalists. Sunlight keeps malicious politicians in check, investigative journalism has been severely crippled with corporate media. As has whistleblowing.
In 2022 elections year one of the largest parties in Sweden (Moderaterna) had "more cameras and surveillance on our streets" as one of their big campaign points, including campaign signs and bilboards. It came in second.
People are definitely at fault.
Source? I can't find any such documents.
As for your other point, I agree, free balanced independent journalism, whistleblower, leaks, etc - play a clear role in insuring public stays informed.
That said, in my opinion, if 90% percent of a population was against something, but they passively allowed it to happen, it is no one’s fault but there own. I don’t for a second believe average person does not understand they have a choice over who rules them and how, even if that choice is to fight to the death to defend that right, flee the area, or for that matter, simply do whatever they’re told to do.
Most people don't get to choose where they live. It's really a relatively tiny percentage of the population who would have the financial ability and/or skills to emigrate, and those are really the people you're talking about. They have no loyalty to where they live because they don't need any; they can leave whenever they want, and threaten to whenever they get upset about anything.
I would argue the real explanation is most likely regardless of person’s situation, most want a predictable future, regardless of how good or bad their current situation. Moving to a new culture with no home, no source of income, no family or friends, etc — is viewed as predictably unpredictable by most.
Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Most today think it's a good-and-fitting thing to defend "one's country". And this impulse is vastly more powerful than defending "democracy".
Who would die to stop a coup? Few. Who would die to stop an "invasion", apparently, many.
What motivates Ukrainians after all?
Quite an extreme ideology, one that puts so many men on the battlefield. But nations were invented, there is nothing "natural" to fight for here; nor anything even clearly moral.
"Democracy", therefore, is clearly a vastly vastly weaker ideology. Nationalism is the most powerful ideology to ever exist.
My perception is that Ukrainians know what it's like to live under an authoritarian system and they would rather risk death and the total destruction of the country than go back to it. Nationalism is clearly a factor as well, but it is deeply intertwined with pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian ideals. I don't think you'd see anything close to this level of resistance if victory would mean an authoritarian Ukraine rather than a democratic Ukraine.
"Nationalism" had more to do with the relationship between the state and the nation, not the existence of nations. The word "nation" is very old.
Nation comes from the Latin "natio" meaning "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe"[0]. Thus, the essential basis for nationality is familial, a matter of common descent (as all human beings form an extended family, where you draw the line on this blurry map will depend on other factors like culture and language and ultimately the good held in common; note how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians speak basically the same language, it is the religious and therefore cultural differences that separate them). Naturally, people migrate all the time between nations. That is normal to the degree that migration does not harm the common good of the host society. But immigration is effectively a matter of adoption. We can adopt children. We can also adopt nations.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/nation#etymonline_v_2309
Not in Europe. This poll was in 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine:
https://i.imgur.com/QnTeCwP.png
Deleted Comment
1. What is a reliable measure of this "vast percentage"?
2. Are you perhaps lumping any departure from your preferred political model as "authoritarian"?
3. Are you perhaps overattributing the level of "democracy" to your preferred political regime?
4. Have you considered the motivations behind the distaste with ostensibly "democratic" regimes?
Simply declaring "nationalism!" is not an intellectually substantive remark and probably caricaturish because a) what do you mean by "nationalism", and b) you haven't identified the confluence of motives to see what might be happening and why.
My 2 cents: liberalism as a political ideology traceable to Locke and Hobbes is unraveling because of its inherent tensions and errors (like the tension between knowledge and the mistaken liberal notion of "freedom" understood as "do what thou wilt" versus "do what thou ought"; its radical individualism; its totalitarian "neutrality" which is a manipulative, underhanded means of entrenching liberal presuppositions; its egalitarianism). It is to be expected that someone whose sentiments have been shaped in a social climate that valorizes an ideology will view any departure as hostile and "authoritarian", not on objective grounds, but merely according to habituated affect. You had the same thing in post-Soviet Russia and post-War Germany.
Level headed person would see that the next step is logically that all communications regardless if they’re in private, in person, etc should be monitored. If that’s not an authoritarian state, I am happy to be listen to why.
As for a vast percentage, I mean that topic like this would not even see the light of day if there wasn’t source of significant support; hint, there is.
I have neither have preference over given political party, nor would I be affiliated with a given group; that is, I am fine independently observing, understanding, evaluating, and if needed, acting on any situation as needed.
Not sure understand you point 3, please feel free to clarify.
As for point 4, I covered a possible reasoning why current democracies might be viewed as unjust; if you missed that, might be worth reading my OP comment again.
And yes, nationalism is toxic. It treats other humans as subhumans by default, that is non-citizens are not treated equal, and for sure not as citizens by default. If there was a country that treated all humans as citizens, equally, fairly, etc - I would be happy to reevaluate my beliefs related to nationalism.
And for your two cents, I prefer plain-English and first principle reasoning, not reference to historical ideologies, list of ism’s, etc. Said another way, I don’t understand what you hoped I would understand, but happy to listen.
We need new journalism that keeps powers in check and hold them accountable, not pander to their readers in an ever resonating echo chambers.
As for American media, issues related to pandering to readers is likely related to it deregulating media industry in the 80s; for more information see:
https://apnews.com/article/business-immigration-deregulation...
This is a fantasy history. We have had solid bipartisan support for neoliberalism (property rights are king) and neoconservatism (and we need motivating myths about them to keep the proles in line) for a long time. That consensus continues. "Classical liberalism" has never been popular anywhere.
edit: we're having an extreme authoritarian wave as a reaction to the internet, but we shouldn't pretend like we don't come from countries that used to open people's mail to look for pamphlets about contraception.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test
“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Karl Popper
While for sure an imperfect response, I would say that no democracy will ever be absolutely perfect, since it would require a consensus on everything and everyone understanding the topic equally prior to voicing their opinion. Further, authoritarian beliefs are only true threat to a democracy if majority support authoritarian rule, at which point I would argue it’s not a democracy.
That said, with the advancements of AI, it increasingly dangerous, since if given the tools and opportunity, an authoritarian minority might over take an unprepared majority.
If you don't let them vote, they'll act to destroy their society.
It would be emotionally satisfying, but ultimately destructive. It would also be ripe for abuse; imagine how awful it would be if we had secret lists of people who weren't allowed to do other normal activities, like air travel or vehicle registration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrenched_clause#Germany
Deleted Comment
But suppose you do prefer 'safety' to all else, to privacy and liberty. Suppose you want to sacrifice everything for it. Will you even get it? We can today build prisons and surveillance far more effective than at any point in history, and once we've turned society into a safe cage, how sure are you the wrong people won't get the keys? Historically, how many governments would you have trusted with such total surveillance of their citizens? Tsarist Russia? Soviet Russia? Present day Russia? Communist China? Present day China? Nazi Germany? The Stasi? The Khmer Rouge? The Ottoman Empire? Iran? The British Raj? But you're sure nothing like that will happen here? This time, benevolent government will last, and we can safely surrender all means of opposition?"
Speaking from a U.S. perspective here.
A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement without the 4th amendment is worse.
A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president without the 1st amendment is worse.
There are people who do terrible things in this world. Unfortunately people who do terrible things can run for government and be appointed to positions of power.
There are darker things down the path of eroding our protections from our government than whatever evil they’re asking us to yield for.
> A pedophile with a cameraphone is terrible. But law enforcement that can search and seize property at will is worse.
> A racist with a social media account is terrible. But a president that can deny people their freedom of expression & assembly is worse.
I agree.
(ps. offtopic meta remark, the American enthusiasm for remembering laws by number never ceases to amaze me)
I agree with you, but this illustrates part of the problem of our messaging. These policies are still just tools which don't have an inherent moral value. The evil comes from their abuse on a mass scale, and the huge temptation to abuse them, with the emphasis on how easily the powerful can be corrupted.
This is prone to being called out for being a slippery slope fallacy, but we need to just back it up with historical precedent, like how similar policies were abused in the US as revealed by Snowden.
Well, putting aside the "shut up" part, I'd be happy to state publicly that under no (reasonable, peacetime) circumstances should the government be allowed to read my texts, emails, and documents.
Obviously there's a bunch of qualifiers to assign to that (if I'm under suspicion of something, OK, sure, maybe the government can get a warrant) that I'm not qualified to speak intelligently about, but that's the gist. Saying that the government should not be able to read your email or list to your phone calls is not an unpopular opinion, at least in the States, and it's also not one that requires you to be of an overly technical persuasion to have.
People support victims of child abuse and they also distrust the government and don't want it to have awesome powers of espionage it can wield against the entire populace at scale all of the time. Those positions might conflict with each other if you frame the conversation that way, but if you do frame it that way, I don't think it's a given that the child abuse argument is always going to win the debate.
Upper-middle class PMCs generally aren't worried about being monitored or censored by authorities (except within the games of party power politics and wedge issues.) If anything, when they hear about it, they look to see if there are job openings. They are concerned about child abuse, because even wealthy children get abused. Universal.
They constitute (if I'm being generous) 20% of the population and are useless to try to convince. It's their duty to explain to you that the society that has rewarded them generously for their hard work actually has everyone's best interests at heart, no matter how ludicrous it seems.
Ensuring that the government has access to everyone's nudes includes children's nudes.
Pedophile police officers is worse than pedophile non-police, since the pedophile police would have the law on their side
I steadfastly refused to use the mm wave scanners for years until DHS went through the proper comment period. I have no love for those things.
Initially, the device produced revealing images. Now the images are more or less anonymous white figures with private areas even more obscured.
If you have data to the contrary, Im interested.
Main argument: you bring up very important aspect - emotional one. We are very emotional and in the heat of the moment you probably won't be able to make good technical and reasonable case to persuade people, but that doesn't mean they are right.
Also I am not against _solutions_ to the problem. I am against solutions that when implemented have really low cost of switching them into tools of abuse.
Example: There is law that allows banning of websites (just DNS resolution) that promote gambling, illegal porn etc. It was recently used to "take down" a website that leaked emails of politicians of current government (it could be bad if we speak of some national security / military stuff, in that case they share info about corruption and nepotism)
Don't bring feelings to a logic fight.
Something being useful (lack of privacy) does not make it either good or necessary.
No. Police are not psychics. They do not stop theoretical crime. They can only respond after crime has happened.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I think I'm misunderstanding you here, are you implying presently real politicians would have to do that to advocate for privacy laws?
It's always a matter of availability, balance, justification, right. The justification is there, so your argument is a strawman.
It would be more relevant in a direct comparison to gun control, which. Blades are fairly easy to furnish on the spot, easier than guns, so this comparison fails, too.
Balance requires a need for knives, which is difficult to put aside and certainly not the point of this argument. The ball park figure alone is not making a rational argument.
The internet is not the breaking point either way, though it could be used to implement access control.
So, I am effectively unsure if your whatabout'ish strawman is in favour of intrusive regulation.
Perhaps the "answer" to the lady who was abused as a child is to tell another emotional story--for example, Ann Frank:
> Have you heard the story of Anne Frank? She was a Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. She and her sister lived in hiding for two years until they were eventually discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. They later died of typhus in a concentration camp.
> How did surveillance play a role? No one knows who betrayed her. She lived through constant fear of being caught. Knowing they were being watched added to the already difficult conditions of living in hiding--the stress of the situation affected their relationships and mental health.
> If you or those you care about ever find yourself on the "less desirable" list in society, it's vital that you have some control over things you say to others in confidence. The Nazi's oppression of the Jewish people limited their freedom and contributed to Anne's tragic end.
Commissioners have shown multiple times that they are too permeable to lobbying, too willing to water down tough environmental regulation, and too keen on 'security' surveillance.
So far the EU parliament members have balanced the act with some sanity. But the power and lack of transparency of the EC both with regards to lobbying and conflict of interest is very concerning.
It's proposed by the EU Commission, and such things have been struck down by the Parliament before.
Also: Britain hardly has any leg to stand on regarding privacy (which is something the EU usually has a focus on[0]).
Did you forget the Snoopers Charter[1]? That isn't a proposal. That's law.
[0]: https://gdpr.eu
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
My point is not Britain as an example, but that one of the Brexit rhetoric points was the rah rah 'unelected officials'.
Arguably we both know that EC comissioners are appointed by democratic governments but we see multiple times how permeable EC commisioners are:
1. Surveillance proposals such as posted in this thread
2. Net Neutrality exemptions - allowing Facebook/Youtube/et al. 'zero ratings' on metered connections
3. SUPD with guidelines that have so many Plastic exceptions that basically only q-tips and plastic forks got banned. Nestle, Coca-Cola, all the supermarket wrapping remain untouched.
4. 'Green Deal' was completely watered down on implementation. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/06/exxonmobil-...
Over and over they start with strong technocrat proposals and then cave in to business lobby.
Like article 13?
I'm all for European trade, but I felt I had to vote Brexit because obviously the goal of any political system should be to maximise the political power of individuals and local communities. The more you centralise and expand power over larger geographical areas the less tolerant of regional political difference your political system must become. This become obvious when we talk about a country like Turkey potentially joining the EU.
That said, I hate the UK government with a passion and they are arguably even worse when it comes to surveillance, but at least we can vote them out.
Basically, no. What you're asking for is what the EU has tried to do somewhat: become a confederation. It doesn't work. The USA tried it back in the 1700s and it was a disaster. The country couldn't defend itself, have any kind of central banking and currency, or any consistent policy. It was replaced in 12 years with the more centralized federal system that exists now.
The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity that could rival the US, and have the same benefits and power on the world stage. But there are costs to this: you need much greater centralization. Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.
Basically, if you want to be a world power, you can't just be a bunch of small, disparate countries in a loose trade confederation. You need more centralization of power, and the problems that come with that. If you don't want that, you need to just be happy with being a bunch of separate, sovereign nations with different currencies and trade barriers between them all. Pick one.
From my perspective, the EU's problems you see are because it won't just commit to a centralized system and eliminating national sovereignty, and it's trying to have it both ways.
Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!
When the EU cooks up the next surveillance law attempt, I am always reminded of those conversations. But where else to go, if even EU gets too crazy? There are probably only worse places with regards to privacy.
More transparency is indeed needed though.
Deleted Comment
Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
This will only hurt people actually fighting for their rights, and this needs to stop.
I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.
In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done.
Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
TFA rightly calls on citizens to instead be that group, on the side of freedom.
It's marketed to upper-middle class elites as reasonable, and of course it's upper-middle class elites that are paid to put together this marketing. But it's really orders from an owner class that has entirely different interests from the other 99.9% of the population.
If an individual member of of the upper-middle class has a problem with {the imposition of the week}, they are harshly corrected, shunned, then eventually ejected from the upper-middle class. Your credentials will be taken away, your friends will avoid you to keep from being suspected themselves (and will rationalize this behavior to overcome cognitive dissonance, becoming energetic state chauvinists), your credit will be destroyed.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
This is just a slander. There are people who own large parts of the economy, and people live for decades, and people pass their ownership to their children. They are also friends with their peers. The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.
How did you got this out of GP? I think you both saying/meaning the same.
> and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.
Yep, and their actual desire is to control people's freedom (even admitting that some or all of them themselves belief that this is only for good cause, the reasons that also GP listed.. ).
I wouldn't be so naive. Groups like the Council For National Policy and Lance Wallnau pushing The Seven Mountain Mandate have been working for DECADES to push the agenda that you're seeing in schools and politics today.
Maybe not a "world order", but they'd certainly like to be.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe too much in the existence of such a group, but I can argue this is really bad logic.
A. Do you think such a group would be public with their ambitions? Such a group would doubtless deny their own existence. Arguing that they do, or do not exist, can only be based on observation and opinion, because it is not falsifiable.
B. Secret societies do exist, and there are some that still exist to this day that had major political power previously. The Freemasons, for example, were pretty influential in the French revolution on both sides, and counted leaders like Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Paul Revere, and so on among their members. We know that nine freemasons, at a minimum, signed the US Constitution. (Then, fun fact, they put "Novus ordo seclorum" on the great seal of the US.)
C. And even if there weren't powerful secret societies historically (which is doubtful), we currently live in a very globalized world with much easier ability to meet and privately message, so there's always a first. Saying that it never happened, therefore it can't happen, is always misguided.
D. The World Economic Forum literally called for everyone to build a New World Order in 2018. With that exact terminology. It's still on their website. I would argue that makes them partially culpable for the conspiracies. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together...
> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.
If public servants were left to their own devices and could mandate any law they like, they would instantly prohibit any behavior that is not explicitly allowed. Because that's how they themselves must function so that public can hold them accountable.
The trouble is that they inherently push this mentality to the politicians who must rely on them to get popularity contest points and sometimes manage to win these nonsense laws that help nobody.
> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.
Sure, but there actually is "them". They are clueless, individually powerless, out-of-sight, largely disconnected social class that actually makes this happen. And they can wait decades for the right situation. In Czechia, the public servant actually responsible for introducing DNS blocking was actually tasked with online hazard oversight. He pushed it through in order to block just 6 websites because it was somehow easier for him than negotiating banning payments to them, probably because of turf wars. The respective two ministries are rivals and won't ever cooperate. He lobbied for this for like 10+ years and then a bunch of idiots has gotten elected and ran with it.
So in a way, you are right. But you are also somewhat wrong. From my experience finding the actual people pushing for this (it's usually not the politicians) and outing them would work way better.
I donate money to the EFF in the hope that they turn out to be this group eventually
They claimed to only use it to prevent severe crimes like terrorism.
Current statistics show, the most people that got arrested via that laws are climate activists.
So either the law makers and police are incompetent and therefore shouldn't make these laws way or they know what they are doing and therefore shouldn't make these laws.
BTW these laws made for "good reasons" don't get the jobs done.
Deleted Comment
Thankfully, we don't have to pretend! A cadre of wealthy Americans have a documented history of conspiring against the people of this country.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/u...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
I agree with you. We are too dumb, to selfish, to humans to be able to run a a New World Order, with decades-long plans in silence. For sure one stupid member would do a tiktok video while using their funny clothes
Never seen any abuse by law enforcement before :|
you cannot guarantee that future institutions, and governments will be benevolent, and with such laws you give them easy access to tools of oppression.
Dead Comment
I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out:
1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next?
2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what?
3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement?
Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud.
If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate and access information freely.
> Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures.
A government could legislate that it may not rain anywhere in the country on Tuesdays, but executing that isn't practicable. Likewise, backdooring one family of CPUs may be possible, but you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.
And I want to say that there exists provably un-backdoor-able "zero-knowledge" computing, something like Ethereum's smart contract ISA, but I may be misremembering.
In the end, our governments are democratic, we elect politicians to represent our will. They shouldn't be pushing for things like backdoors at all when no citizens are in favour. So yes,
> [...] we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak.
I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.
I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.
I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.
in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them
many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too
in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did
"if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought
the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers
Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.
Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.
If transparency is the norm, governments need to go first.
Since that will never happen, the only solution remains privacy for all, or no government at all.
people need privacy because others' intentions and judgment are unworthy
if you've ever known anyone who was gay, who got divorced, who secretly had a deprecated ethnic background, who left their faith, who didn't want their ex-boyfriend to know where they lived, who revealed government corruption, who struggled for political change, or who could be raped or robbed by a stranger, you've known someone who needed privacy
even though they had nothing to be ashamed of
you might argue that if nobody had privacy, nobody would be able to get away with rape, or with lynching people they discovered had a drop of black blood, or with lynching apostates, or with gay-bashing, so these things wouldn't happen in a world without privacy
that would be a stupid argument because people did those things openly all the time, and they usually got away with it, and some of them still do; humans have a social pecking order, and it is defined by aggression with impunity
also people murder their ex-partners all the time even when they won't get away with it
Usually those are good arguments. Not this time.
This proposal is Pure Evil. Hardly anyone is willing to come out and say they admire the Chinese social credit system. But when their every action leans towards replicating it, it's more than fair to drag them out into the sunlight.
No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.
Trying to fight legal frameworks with technology, failed in the past with some notable but hardly repeatable exceptions. In the 90s a few geeks tech awareness could match the resources of a small state, non tech-savvy state. Nowadays it is impossible because the discrepancy in resources is huge.
There are countries that force you to download their own "secure" SSL certificate, so they can sniff all traffic. China is the worst and most prominent example.
This battle need to be fought on the street, with votes, by raising awareness, etc. If we want to be "free" we need to take-over the political battle, not the tech battle because if we win on that front, most likely won't matter. I don't want to risk jail for using an open source encryption tool.
I'm reminded of the EMH joke about the economist walking by a 100 dollar bill on the street, assuming that it must be fake because if it were real, someone already would have picked it up.
Matrix and XMPP exists, what should we do to make this more popular?
I'm not for more surveillance, but this is the exact argument that people give against gun control
- "You can't ban encrypted messaging. Terrorists will always find a way to communicate."
- "You can't outlaw abortions, just safe ones. Women will always find a way."
- "You can't uniformly enforce gun control. Dedicated criminals will keep buying weapons on the black market."
- "You can't ban cryptocurrencies. Enthusiasts will still trade on P2P exchanges."
All of these are half truth, and half lie. Every policy introduces a certain amount of user friction, which is proven to discourage action. Some people will refrain from infringing the policy (e.g. using guns, performing abortions, using encrypted messaging apps), some others will comply. Percentages obviously vary depending on the specific policy, but it's never 0% nor 100% like "both" sides want you to believe.
http://dubois.com/No-prosecute-announcement.txt
> "Now, some words about the case and the future. Nobody should conclude that it is now legal to export cryptographic software. It isn't. The law may change, but for now, you'll probably be prosecuted if you break it. People wonder why the government declined prosecution, especially since the government isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be that Mr. Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't sure whether someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that person to find out.) Another might be that the government did not want to risk a judicial finding that posting cryptographic software on a site in the U.S., even if it's an Internet site, is not an "export". There was also the risk that the export-control law would be declared unconstitutional. Perhaps the government did not want to get into a public argument about some important policy issues: should it be illegal to export cryptographic software? Should U.S. citizens have access to technology that permits private communication? And ultimately, do U.S. citizens have the right to communicate in absolute privacy?"
> "There are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our liberties. There always will be. But at least in the United States, our rights are not so much stolen from us as they are simply lost by us. The price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation. Those folks I mention in this message have participated and no doubt will continue. My thanks, and the thanks of Philip Zimmermann, to each of you."
One obvious concern about this move in the EU is that they'll try to criminalize the use of cryptography again.
You'd think that after twenty years the debate would have moved past advocating for complete lawlessness, but we get stuck in the same puerile tropes. The fact that bad state actors exist does not change the fact that horribly abusive material, with real victims, will be shared on any platform those abusers consider safe, and that the existence of such platforms will encourage further abuse.
Anyone who has worked on child sexual exploitation material on any platform knows this, and any privacy advocate has to have a better answer for it than 'nuh-uh'.
The four horsemen of the Infocalypse
> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
That's the hard part, IMO.
Imagine that we really got that "decentralized system that cannot be controlled" going and everyone is using it. Everyone, including those who is into illegal things. And they don't get caught.
Now the government starts to push their "this decentralized shit is doing more harm than good" agenda. Whatever their motivation is, it would be easy to sway public opinion against surveillance-free communications, because the harm is real, not hypothetical, like it is now.
Now, I have a cryptography library to polish.
Thats the same argument for less gun control.
I believe you where talking about secrecy.
WhatsApp chats are secret, but not necessarily private.
Authorities can ask Meta to release the meta data and they can inspect phones to retrieve the chat logs.
Private communications have never been secret, it was always possible for the people with the necessary authorizations to access them.
Privacy is consensual, secrecy is not.
But there is no right to secrecy.
As much as I love mullvad and their excellent products, they never link the proposal they talk about in that page, which hinders the people' ability to form their own opinion.
All the material we can find revolves around the same actors, quoting each other, some like the Pirate party, say it was leaked
Leaked Commission paper EU mass surveillance plans
https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commissi...
But it's not true, it's officially published on the EU website, it wasn't being kept hidden, it had to be translated to all the EU official languages before being published.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...
I understand being concerned, what I do not understand is being catastrophic.
Even if everything they wrote was true, a proposal is not a law, so whatever happened in the Swedish parliament, was not influenced by the EU proposal.
p.s. the system is similar to CSAM, which I don't like either, but sooner or later such systems will be everywhere, like it or not.
The discussion must be held in a way or another.
Apple too considered scanning the users' devices to match CSAM pictures, they dropped it, for now, but probably only because they are developing their own system, independent from the government, so they don't have to give them any kind of access.
Here the discussion is being held in public, by people elected by European citizens directly with their vote, these people are paid exactly to discuss these matters, theya re doing their job.
You wrote "the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it." but the they you mention are elected officials, not SP.E.C.T.R.E. evil agents
No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen.
Though, part of this deal is that we take control on when they go too far, and do stupid things. Which seems to be the case in this case, because of which we push against it, because that's how we hope to get a healthy world.
> Privacy is a human right.
So is security. It's all about balancing interests and abilities.
> whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.
That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.
> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.
No, they are not. The majority of criminals are not some organized super villains. They are usually also depending on the same tools and networks as everyone else. And they are also just flawed humans, making errors.
> That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.
Are you familiar with a country called China?
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34608330
[1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3725
If you're thinking that you saw something like this last year and now again it's the same law. The EU legislative process is extremely slow (not that it's a bad thing in this case, I'd rather this not get rushed through, or even better not get through at all)
And even now it is not likely to pass before December 2023 or might even get delayed to January 2024