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Comment by tossaccount123 | Hacker News Reader

The government's primary goal is to protect itself and continue growing like cancer. In many ways the citizens are it's greatest threat because they can vote to cut budget and the power of the political elites. These laws are a way to increase monitoring of citizens so problems can be squashed before they grow too big and threaten the government.

Make no mistake, with the rise of ML governments will be able to crush social movements in the nascent stage before they become too big to stop. People will be arrested for thought crimes because they posted the wrong thing on the wrong website. And currently a large number of people would cheer because the people getting arrested are on the "other" side of the political spectrum. Be careful what you wish for

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Except that there's other countries where their governments don't seem to have these problems.

coughs in American

where? From what I've seen Europe, UK, USA, Canada, and especially China are all moving in this direction of more privacy intrusions. Considering the West has traditionally offered the most freedom for its citizens I'd say things are trending towards authoritarian governments

EU seems to be pretty concerned with data privacy, and they even have laws protecting it.

They have laws protecting individuals from companies, not the government. The GDPR has special exceptions for government investigations, and many EU countries have strong domestic spy agencies that spy on their citizens.

Aside from the UK (which is doing its best to leave the EU, and never really felt like an EU country anyway), which countries are actually spying on their citizens like that to any great extent?

The EU had (until 2014 when it was ruled to violate fundamental rights) a data retention charter which required member states to store all telecommunications data generated within the EU for a period between 6-24 months[1].

The GDPR explicitly allows for government surveillance to be excluded from the directive's protection.

Privacy International and a bunch of other NGOs have filed complaints[2] against "Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K." for violating rulings by the European Court of Justice over illegal mass surveillance. Here's another article[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2018/06/25/eu-na... [3]: https://medium.com/privacy-international/a-new-era-of-mass-s...

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