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That's only double standards if one considers states and companies as being in the same position.

A state and a company have vastly different goals. A state should care for its citizens, this includes protections against threats to public safety (terror, organized crime) and surveillance is a tool in the box for that. A company on the other hand, would have no issues fleecing people and abusing their power for profit if they only could. States are the entities actually powerful enough to keep companies in check and I'm pretty happy when they do that.

I admit that this is a, I guess, pretty european view of things (i.e. govs are good, since they keep greedy companies in check), while the american view might rather be that govs are bad because they get into the way of companies (which are considered good).

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In many places in the world, the government is corrupt and there is no transparency.

I’d be surprised if people trust their governments in Poland, Bulgaria etc.

Government officials have more power to abuse people than companies. At least Germany has an established constitutional court that can still resist the politicians to some degree.

I think the american view is that governments are bad because they can be used to establish tyranny. Every citizen’s right to be judged by their own peers, their right to carry firearms and freedom of speech are the things that allow people to fight against corrupt governments.

This is my view being someone living in Turkey. I am even afraid of posting this comment.

Maybe this generation in Europe trusts their government and thinks that its good. But I bet people having experienced autocratic regimes can never trust their government.

> I’d be surprised if people trust their governments in Poland, Bulgaria etc. > But I bet people having experienced autocratic regimes can never trust their government.

If there is a lack of trust within the Polish public toward the state, then it stems in large part from a history of oppressive foreign or foreign-controlled governments over the course of the last 200 years. Of course, prior to that, the Polish republican tradition generally took a somewhat skeptical view of government and government power, introducing a system of checks and balances that ultimately tipped in favor of the nobility via the Sejm. But recent attitudes are IMO influenced by a kind of habit of viewing government as a foreign intruder dominated by foreign interests (which, frankly, continues to this day in the form of competing German, American, and Russian influence often represented by competing parties). The end of the Cold War did not, of course, lead to the expulsion of the entrenched interests and power networks formed during the years of the Soviet-dominated People's Republic which also contributes to the antipathies Poles have toward government.

Rulings of the constitutional court have almost no real life consequences. If there is a negative ruling the parliament is given ample time before the unconstitutional law must be replaced. If there is any replacement within that time, the same law, formulated differently, is passed.

That's not true at all. The rulings of the German Constitutional Court are extremely important (at the very least compared to almost all other Constitutional Courts in the world) and have very real consequences. Just one example: The recent PSPP Judgement had the potential to end the Euro. It didn't but if the Court had ruled in a slightly different way (which would have been within it's Constitutional Powers) the Bundesbank wouldn't have followed the orders of the ECB anymore which would have had unbelievable consequences for the Eurozone.

The fact that the Court tries not to do something like that is because it is also a political actor searching for stability.

> The fact that the Court tries not to do something like that is because it is also a political actor searching for stability.

This sounds to me like someone saying that the Queen of England has the power to dissolve parliament - and just doesn't for political concerns. (Those political concerns being that if she ever exercises that power, it'll be removed)

At some point you have to recognize that if you can only use power in ways that don't interfere with another governmental body, that power might not really exist.

I can see where you're coming from but this analogy does not hold up. The German Constitutional Court (GCC) does exercise its powers, but it tries not to break anything, therefore it gives the responsible actors some time to change the law/their behavior. Maybe another example: The Court decided that the (specific calculation of the) German property tax was unconstitutional. But if they just declared the whole tax void, this would have been an enormous problem for the state financing. Therefore they decided that the Government had roughly one year to set up a new system that would follow the constitutional requirements as laid out by the Court. This is what the government has done and now the requirements are fulfilled.

You originally posted a response to this.

> Rulings of the constitutional court have almost no real life consequences. If there is a negative ruling the parliament is given ample time before the unconstitutional law must be replaced. If there is any replacement within that time, the same law, formulated differently, is passed.

To say that the court does have power. But your example is an example of exactly what the OP was saying happens!

Yes you are correct, that is an example except for this part

>If there is any replacement within that time, the same law, formulated differently, is passed

Which is not accurate. Actually the new laws are substantially different, in the case of the ground tax this is also very obvious.

Did they replace a property tax with a tax paid on property?

The process is long and yes, sometimes parliament iterates on laws to bring them into compliance with the constitution (and sometimes those changes get struck down again) but it's patently false to claim that the constitutional court doesn't have consequences. (real life is tough a claim to argue against - what is a real life consequence?)

Some consequential decision that come to my mind (without judging whether these were good or bad decision): - they derived the right to privacy (Informationelle Selbstbestimmung) based on other rights. This is now firmly established in the judicial process. - They struck down the law allowing the government to shoot down hijacked planes (no replacement) - Secret paternity test are illegal and hold no value as evidence - mass deployment of automatic number-plate recognition is illegal - they set the barrier for voting machines so high it's de facto impossible to use them - they've struck down the data mention laws multiple times since 2007. The government keeps trying but to this day there's no law in force - struck down the law requiring a cross in every classroom

And these are just the bigger ones that made the press. There are a huge amount of cases that narrow down and define things like when apartments can be searched, when people can be wiretapped, what are the rights and responsilties of people living in a civil partnerships (before marriage for everyone was enacted), when and when not it's allowed to use the armed forces abroad and what restrictions on the right to assemble are allowed.

The reason you might have this impression are three-fold: - sometimes a law that is unconstitutional can be made constitutional by adding some exceptions. For example a surveillance law might only be unconstitutional because it didn't have adequate measures to protect priests, therapists, lawyers and other professions with certain privileges. The law is then often revised and passes muster. - some ruling a purely procedural. The decision itself is valid but either it didn't come to be in a valid way (e.g. proper parlimentary procedure wasn't maintained) or it exceeded authority (the government acted but it would have to be a law). These are often easily fixed by going through the process again or turning a decree into a law - Lastly, the constitution might just be changed. The Constitutional Court doesn't have any higher authority than the parliament. If the parliament, following proper procedure, changes the constitution a lot of things are possible. This does require a big majority in both parliaments. Note there are some basic principles that can't be changed but they're quite limited.

so what you're saying is that the court... works?

It sounds different than something like the US, where if a law is unconstitutional it's struck down immediately (rather than giving time for the legislature to fix it), and the defendant acquitted (not sure what happens in germany).

> where if a law is unconstitutional it's struck down immediately

What? Cases take years or decades to make their way through the court system. You might be thinking of the fact that some laws get an injunction on their enforcement until they are ruled on, but that is not mandatory. More important, they are not struck down, only enjoined. And of course if the legislature changes the law, the case becomes moot by the time it reaches the court (this happens semi-regularly, where the court refuses to rule on the constitutionality of a law that is no longer on the books).

>What? Cases take years or decades to make their way through the court system. You might be thinking of the fact that some laws get an injunction on their enforcement until they are ruled on, but that is not mandatory.

It's implied that we're talking about what happens after it's decided. We obviously can't talk about the action of the court before it's been decided. What matters is what happens after a decision has been made. The grandparent comment gave me the impression that in germany, after a law has been found to be unconstitutional by the courts, it doesn't get struck down. Instead, it gets sent back to the legislature for revision, while remaining valid in the meantime.

>And of course if the legislature changes the law, the case becomes moot by the time it reaches the court (this happens semi-regularly, where the court refuses to rule on the constitutionality of a law that is no longer on the books).

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Is this supposed to be a flaw? What purpose does it serve to rule on laws that have already been revoked? To throw some shade on the legislative branch? To punish them somehow? Moreover, is this something that doesn't happen in germany?

I think I did not understand GGP the way you did, leading to me not making sense of your response. And of course it makes perfect sense not to rule on laws that have been repealed. :-)

It depends on the law. Often the law (usually just the specific provisions found unconstitutional) are immediately struck down. If there are wide decision to be made instead of the the status quo with the unconstitutional law, then the court will give parliament time to make the rules. This is currently the case with the election law where it's considered unconstitutional but there a multiple legal ways to design a legal one. The choice, how the law should look like, was passed back to parliament.

I think they are saying that if no replacement for Law A is found, Law A just gets re-instated. No reform, making rulings impotent.

> Maybe this generation in Europe trusts their government and thinks that its good.

Which is strange, since there are people alive today who's relatives were executed in camps by the democratically elected government of Germany. People who think that democratic government is somehow a panacea against tyranny are constantly being proven wrong by history. The modern example is Venezuela and the fact that Maduro's predecessor, Chávez was elected by the majority of the population.

You can be certain that nobody in Germany has forgotten the Third Reich. The German constitution is a direct response to the experience of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and has been very carefully designed to avoid the same sorts of mistakes. There are consitutionally guaranteed, inviolable rights and principles that can never ever, legally, be changed ("Ewigkeitsklausel"). Nazi Germany can't ever happen again in any sort of legal way, nor whatever happened in Venezuela.

No system is flawless and if shit really hits the fan and somebody makes a coup, who knows what may happen, but the German system is probably the most stable in the world, so I think some amount of trust in it is not misplaced.

And the European, or at least Western European, perspective is that governments are elected and certainly more representative than any large companies that are incentivised only to maximise profit above everything, so having an oligopoly of companies dictating the rules of society is seen as a problem. This is a perspective I largely agree with.

(NB: I'm not saying you should fully trust the government, I certainly don't always do that, but I do trust that the system generally works to keep the government in check.)

It's complicated. I doubt that the right to bare firearms is effective deterrent against the abuse of power by the US federal government. It does enable use of force. I don't know any other country with the right to bare firearms protected by its constitution. Switzerland does have regulation in this regard.

You would think the Germans of all people would know better than to view the state with this kind of naivety.

I don’t think the state is dangerous because it gets in the way of profit (though it can do that) but because it can directly oppress its people in all kinds of violent ways. The mitigating factor is supposed to be that people can hold their government accountable, but allow the government to snoop on everyone’s private communications and they’ll take care of that.

I can't really bring myself to agree with this view of the world. To me it sounds like saying that parents are dangerous because they can mistreat children or that employers are dangerous because they can oppress employees.

Obviously those are true statements, but they are also horrible first approximations. Parents are supposed to be caregivers, employers are supposed to be source of opportunities, and governments are supposed to protect and safeguard the state and its people.

To me this looks like a self fulfilling prophecy, if you treat parents as primarily evil oppressors you are in part forcing them in that position, same with governments. Some parents and some governments are evil and should be treated as such, but having an a priori predisposition that they will become evil seems inefficient

Employers will be good to you if you have bargaining power, but employees who have none are often mistreated. That is why we need a competing source of power (the government!) to regulate employers. The government, like an employer, needs to be checked by something if it isn’t going to grow abusive.

Parents are somewhat different in that they tend to actually know and love their children. But even then we don’t give parents unchecked rights over their kids.

I completely agree, what I wanted to say is that in all those cases relationship work better when the basic nature of the connection is trust, not distrust. In a sense societies puts limitation on the power of governments/employers/parents so that they can be safely trusted even more (specifically so that those deserving of trust are allowed to have it), not because they are inherently untrustworthy.

>Parents are supposed to be caregivers, employers are supposed to be source of opportunities, and governments are supposed to protect and safeguard the state and its people.

This is a bizarrely naive worldview. In democratic countries the government's role is to implement a system of governance decided on by the people. The whole idea behind having a system of "checks and balances" is to prevent the government from unilaterally deciding what constitutes "safety and protection" and what measures it deems necessary to do so. Every despotic regime in history has claimed to be "protecting and safeguarding the state and its people" while stifling the freedom of its people. Ceding rights and freedoms to the government because you perceive them as benevolent overseers with pure motives is incredibly dangerous and absurd to anyone with any knowledge of history.

I never said this, what I said is that is that societal figures of power exist with a benevolent purpose and should not be perceived as evil.

The system of checks and balances on the power of the state can be seen in two lights: 1) as a way to prevent tyrannies from arising or 2) as a way to let the good actors freely act within well defined boundaries.

I simply believe the second point of view to be much more fruitful and stable.

>I never said this, what I said is that is that societal figures of power exist with a benevolent purpose

Societal figures of power exist with a necessary purpose - there is nothing benevolent about them.

There is a significant difference in the relationship between parent-to-child and The State-to-Citizen. Children mature and achieve autonomy from parental control and can escape violence if present.

When am I ever allowed my autonomy from The State? According to its laws I am always subject to its rule regardless of my vote, intentions, ethics, personal values, or will. My only defense is the system itself and I have been given good evidence to not trust its outcomes or intentions regardless of how it is advertised.

There are many different answer depending on the situation. For once you can leave the state. You can take a boat and live off fishing in the middle of the pacific ocean.

If what you are saying is that you want to secede your person from the state then you are as free from your state as other states are free from each other influences.

> My only defense is the system itself and I have been given good evidence to not trust its outcomes or intentions regardless of how it is advertised.

This is essentially the prisoner's dilemma; my philosophical stance is that the only way to improve the world is by mutual trust, even if that means being betrayed.

Yes, it's based on binary thinking. Can governments be trusted (yes/no)? But we can't correct for this by taking the opposite stance because that's also binary thinking.

We should be able to say that some institution are useful and necessary, and also that we need to guard against corruption and abuse, looking at the possible threats and how to mitigate them.

It also helps to make distinctions between different governments and different employers.

Here is the fundamental flaw with the parent analogy:

Both the government and the citizens are adults. Don't treat me like a child. Government is not supposed to keep us safe from ourselves but protect our god given freedoms.

In the US the government is of the people, by the people, for the people.

The other argument that people in government are smarter is laughable, at best.

Government is a necessary evil, but it needs to be limited.

> Government is a necessary evil

Everything is a necessary evil, if you want to see it that way.

> Government is not supposed to keep us safe from ourselves but protect our god given freedoms.

A lot of the job of the state is to keep us safe from other individuals and other states. History proved that one of the best way to do that is to respect individual freedom in a very strong way.

Personally I am not convinced that personal freedom is an end to itself, I see it as the only stable principle that is able to fuel a civil and fair society. More freedom is good only insofar as it produces healthier societies.

I think we have quite different world views on this.

the fundamental flaw in your analogy is that there is an authority above both parents and employers - the state.

Who will watch the watchmen? Once the state legislates overreach into law, who will challenge them effectively?

This is only a flaw insofar as the child-protective services are effective in detecting abuse and the state is a monolithic entity.

My point is that trying to guarantee recursive watchmen does not work. It almost invites looking at that structure as a puzzle to be solved, as a game to played.

A power balance based on mutual trust and mutual responsibility is more susceptible to individual overreach, but also more stable in identifying them.

No, we do not. Problem is we have a lot of people that are a bit too critical and think everyone is out there to get them. In a most reactionary manner to those, we now have large groups that want to strengthen the state. In some cases that is justified as states loose out against companies when it comes to influence. But certainly a bad idea if you want it to control information.

A stereotype is that there is no gray in Germany and I start to believe there is some truth to that.

Political and social discourse in Germany is less partisan, less hysterical and less aggressive compared to the US. By whole orders of magnitude.

That stereotype goes away after living there - no worries :)

I live there, so nice try with this unblushing deception :)

> A company on the other hand, would have no issues fleecing people and abusing their power for profit if they only could.

Governments often abuse their power. They have absolutely no problem with that either. It's precisely because they do this that total population surveillance should be impossible rather than a standard government tool.

Abuse of surveillance powers could manifest in any number of ways. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

The only way to prevent abuse of power is to take the power away.

> Governments often abuse their power. They have absolutely no problem with that either.

The way I think about it is this. Governments and companies are both organizations made up of people. Governments have additional powers (for instance, military force, police power, etc.) over companies. The checks and balances for gov't abuse of power depend on the type i.e. representative democracy, republic, etc. And the checks and balances for company abuse of power are however the markets are configured.

There are different incentives at an organizational and people level both in gov't and companies. But in general, I tend to think its easier to prevent "company abuse" of power b/c ultimately they have to deliver a product which people can choose to buy or not - in this sense we all have a direct democracy with companies, unlike Gov't.

For instance, if I choose to not buy any more Google products, then however small and insignificant it may be Google is going to notice my change of preference on the bottom line of financial statements just as will the other company whom I deem better aligned to my preferences.

This type of direct control is currently not possible with governmental institutions unfortunately.

The difference is often referred to as 'voice vs. exit'. You have a 'voice' (your say/vote) with the government, but no right to 'exit'. In contrast, with a private party, you only have a right not to transact with them (exit), but no right to tell them what to do (voice).

Your desired scope of government usually reflects how much you believe in exit and voice. For practical purposes, this usually translates to how efficient you think competition is, and how effective you think democracy is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

Very interesting. Thanks for the link :)

> I admit that this is a, I guess, pretty european view of things (i.e. govs are good, since they keep greedy companies in check), while the american view might rather be that govs are bad because they get into the way of companies (which are considered good).

Here's another way of looking at it: Germany is adopting an incredibly hypocritical position on privacy. It's so hypocritical it's nearly identical to the American government's position that many here on HN rightly decry.

I don't think it is a fair point to say that the American view that govs are bad because they get into the way of companies.

The view is more along the lines of they are corruptible and frequently serve the interest of the business and political elite at the expense of the median citizen. Moreover, the government will use its power to thwart attempts at fixing the government. Therefore we should limit the power of the government.

I think we had enough evidence lately that the German government is corrupt and they all have their snouts in the trough, almost regardless of party. Talking about fleecing.

Corruption is relative. Something can be more corrupt than something else. Saying whether something is corrupt isn't helpful because most things are corrupt to a certain extent.=

Please feel free to provide the evidence you are referring to, thank you

he's probably talking about the wirecard scandal, where the german SEC equivalent didn't bother investigating wirecard despite the warnings, and instead went after journalists and short sellers.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23869480 There's also some discussion about german corruption in the comments as well.

Wirecard, Gazprom, McKinsey scandals. Not gonna name names.

I think most Americans agree with a more middle of the road approach: that both companies and govt can be evil and shouldn't be given too much power. Most disagree on where the lines should be drawn with both entities, but the root contention is that power can corrupt anyone, from a profit-seeking CEO to a power-seeking politician, and so the leash on power should be short and the barriers around it should be tall.

The idea that Facebook and other companies have so much data is often a bi-partisan point of concern, likewise the dramatic govt surveillance power of the Patriot Act is a pretty bi-partisan concern on the civilian level (as opposed to politicians, who are inclined to tow institutional lines even in disagreement with the current constituent sentiment.

The state is responsible for more death than any other group/ all other groups combined.

But is it not also responsible for saving more than any other group?

When you start a problem killing hundreds and save tens, do you think we should focus on the tens?

I think they meant how somewhat organising instead of anarchy saves lives.

This bold claim requires proofs.

We have no counterfactual than anarchy in a developed country would cost lives.

We can see that the government "organization" of covid tests, messing up their official tests while forbidding private alternatives, costed lives.

Humans congregate and organise, it's basically what makes us human.

A state has coercive power over you, a company doesn't.

From my point of view, the government can do (and does) 100 more damage to me than any single company could do.

A company can sell my personal data if I'm not careful. The state can send me to jail for saying things they don't like or doing things they don't like, even when those things don't do any harm to other people (e.g. using LSD). The state also steals a big portion of people's money, usually for no good reason.

The problem starts if the state wants to save money and skills in intelligence to work around common challenges of anonymous services. The real criminals attacking the constitution often can invest time and money into unbreakable anonymization, such things mostly hinder easy access to privacy by the normal citizen like me.

The german government has really a long record of distrusting anonymization starting with ISDN mixes and denouncing their users. But also little things like one time credit cards seem to be restricted only because it would take an extra step to link the data in a real criminal case.

And regarding data protection: it was big on paper in germany for a long time but only because nearly nobody was actually sued. Now everyone shits their pants here about the GDPR because you at least there are fines ( the rules did not change much). At the same time even with the GDPR we only trusted other german corps with data as corrupt or leaky they may be and not other Europeans.

I agree with the OP that there are double standards here. But mostly it is just a history great theoretical ethics combined with technical incompetence and the deep national feeling of moral superiority...

They're both orgs run by people. If the leadership is corrupt, there's not much of a difference.

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