Stop Scanning Me
stopscanningme.eu
stopscanningme.eu
https://www.dw.com/en/german-opposition-to-probe-defense-min...
"The investigative committee will examine irregularities in a contract awarded to McKinsey and a €390 million ($442 million) IT contract given to another company that failed to pass through the company's supervisory board as required.
It will also investigate whether von der Leyen committed nepotism by hiring Katrin Suder, a former McKinsey consultant, as her deputy to oversee the ministry's arms procurement section."
I think the presentation in stopscanningme.eu is too kind. We should not have to beg for our constitutional rights.
Mind, I am not under EU law and don't know who these specific politicians are, let alone whether the allegations against them have merit.
She of course is opposed to waiving patents on covid vaccines.
As Italian I'm ashamed that my country voted against patent waiving, which would have benefitted Cuba and other poorer countries, after we received aid from Cuba.
If we want to help Cuba then we should buy those doses for Cuba, not sabotage a company to maybe help but then not actually follow through and make sure people benefit. By negotiating a sale for all 7b of us at once we could get the best deal without any games.
An example is AIDS and other medication in South Africa. There is just no way South Africa could pay the prices dreamed up by pharma companies. But any plan by South Africa to manufacture drugs or import generics and provide them at cost domestically was fought tooth and nail by pharma companies and by the highest instances of the US government on behalf pharma companies.
Millions died preventable deaths but at least nobody was a dick by waiving a patent.
There was no real will to pay for AIDS drugs for the world regardless of how it was done, save your sarcasm for the lawyers who fought saving people no matter the excuse they used.
We don't have the will this time either, that's why we opened the patent rather than actually helping. It'd be like if your house was on fire and I threw a box of smoke detectors through the window, to help. Like Robin Hood stealing from the rich and forgetting about the second step.
If we want to save lives we'd have the factories that are already producing keep going rather than expecting new factories to tool up. We did this patent grant because we didn't want to help.
If we do decide this is how patents should work then we should set the rule now, for next time.
"The plot thickened further after the European Court of Auditors published a report today, accusing the Commission of refusing to disclose any details of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's personal role in the talks." - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-stonewalls-over-von-der-l...
We have a saying here - everyone are equal but some are more equal than others, which doesn't fit very well in a union that is supposed to be a beacon for democracy and human rights, quite the opposite it is slowly becoming into something very grotesque.
>Das Briefgeheimnis sowie das Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis sind unverletzlich.
>The secrecy(privacy) of correspondence and the secrecy of mail and telecommunications are inviolable.
And it's more or less the same in Switzerland....but honestly in what country do you live where privacy is not a fundamental right?
It even part of the UN Human Rights Convention:
>Niemand darf willkürlichen oder rechtswidrigen Eingriffen in sein Privatleben, seine Familie, seine Wohnung und seinen Schriftverkehr oder rechtswidrigen Beeinträchtigungen seiner Ehre und seines Rufes ausgesetzt werden.
>No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her private life, family, home and correspondence, or to unlawful impairment of his or her honor and reputation.
I'm guessing the answer is 'both' but I was hoping someone might have insight if it leans one way or the other.
If that's unbelievable to you, look up what happened to Kim Brooks, then read what she wrote about it and the other cases of alleged "child neglect" she and Lenore Skenazy (of Free Range Kids fame) found people getting persecuted for. The exact details vary, but the scenario above is quite plausible if you consider the things that have actually happened.
There are definitely people who will stop at nothing to do what they view as protecting children. What their motivations, whether they get some kind of sick sadistic pleasure out of their "virtuous" actions, I'm not sure. But they're out there.
https://www.salon.com/2018/08/21/kim-brooks-left-her-son-in-...
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2015/05/16/skenazy...
https://reason.com/2020/10/14/colorado-couple-adoption-plans...
https://reason.com/2022/06/02/child-abuse-and-neglect-regist...
https://reason.com/2022/08/17/arizona-central-registry-park-...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scottpham/child-abuse-a...
> "Why are you against fighting terrorism?"
And so on. You can pass all kinds of crap if you make the people who oppose you look like monsters. Plus, business and products will need to be created to support those new regulations. Its supper lucrative!
It's possible to be for some strategy or aim, but against an individual tactic which could fulfil that aim.
This tactic (pervasive surveillance) has significant, proven fallout. It also has a history of fuelling long-term pervasive discontent that ultimately lead to the collapse of regimes which used it. It should not be on the table.
I gotta be somewhere. Takes 10 hours to get there by car. I’m flying. 1h45. Plus transport to airport and security I’m still at 1/2 the amount of time.
Politicians seems much older in united states: "The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 117th Congress was 58.4 years; of Senators, 64.3 years."(2)
(1) https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/...
Be careful: for every argument you make about the ignorance of older people, another argument can be made about the ignorance of younger people. Valid or not.
There is no need for thoughtless stereotypes.
As for plausible excuses to violate people's privacy ... I am not so sure about that one. It certainly may be true when you look at things at an institutional level. It may also be the cases that everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer, which is to say these organizations may be looking at evidence gathering as an exercise in data harvesting since information technology is currently the most popular tool at hand. While I don't think there is a clear-cut answer at an institutional level, I do believe that having the data at hand opens up many avenues for abuse. Institutions lobbying to collect that data may not have the intent to abuse it, yet individual members of the institution may find excuses to violate people's privacy since the data is at hand.
They always think everybody is like them and also has those secrets. But because they are ashamed about themselves, they need to prove to the rest of us they don't have any of those well hidden dirty secrets. The best way they see to do that is to go all hard on everybody else while they always feel there should be exceptions for themselves. The kids are just a good pretense for this, they don't give a damn about them.
Source: I grew up in a catholic country, where the right wing province leader had a secret gay relationship while going hard against homosexuality.
Basically it is a sales technique. You want to sell X that does Y which fixes Z. Well turns out Z does something that can be used to emotionally manipulate people. If it does not directly emotionally manipulate them you can craft a story so it does. So you start putting out puff pieces about the dangers of Z. How it is killing you, your children will be worse off etc. Even better if you can get news stations to pick it up (easier than you would think). Then you start a second round showing you doing Y fixes Z. Then you introduce X the fix all that does Y and cures Z.
Do not think this method is effective? We eat bacon for breakfast and an entire generation of women took up smoking because they thought it empowered them. This 3 step sales method is used every day in many goods and political narratives. It is not 100% effective but when it works it is stunning in its effectiveness.
You are seeing this method in action. Once pointed out it is totally obvious it is happening. But most of these sorts of campaigns are not obvious unless you are well versed in the particular field they are selling into.
aren't these same "e2ee is protecting child predators" the same argument as "bitcoin is used to buy drugs on dark web"?
did child predators not exist before e2ee that suddenly they have emerged and they need to be stopped ?
suppose tomorrow ALL e2ee is stopped and everyone is chatting in cleartext. what will happen? will suddenly all child predators be unmasked and the world be free of them in an instant?
i am not no where supporting those predators. they are subhuman creatures that need to be slaughtered with a rusty sword but why are 99.999% of human population not going to reap the benefits of e2ee when the "risks" outweigh the beneifts?
why do these people believe all those people will not move to lesser known platforms away from the public eye and continue? what will happen in the end?
I worry that at some point people will grow too weary to nip it in the bud.
> Child sexual abuse often happens in bathrooms. Therefore, all bathrooms should have cameras. The video feeds should be stored and analyzed for illegal behavior, and law enforcement should have access, ideally in real time and without a court order. The risk of leaks, hacking, or abuse by law enforcement or system administrators is negligible, so citizens need not worry.
Historically, law enforcement has been chronically understaffed and generally ineffective enforcing these heinous crimes. Even credible and actionable reports that could lead to arrests often end up on a pile. When this system is deployed, the amount of flagged behavior will be 100x more than the reports of today, most of which will be false positives. This is ultimately what makes it obvious that these are bad faith arguments, and that the ulterior motive is good old mass surveillance.
Crimes, like sexual abuse, do happen in private spaces like bedrooms. Some people propose or request that all private spaces have surveillance, for example with cameras. Data should be stored, analyzed and made accessible by law enforcement in real time and without legal process like court orders. However law enforcement is understaffed and won't be able to act in timely matter on flagged behavior, which will be hundreds times more than before. Citizen are told that risks like leaks or abuse are negligible or manageable. However people are bad at security and mistakes are unavoidable. Proponents don't understand this outcome or are in bad faith with hidden agendas like mass surveillance.
In my mind EU focus should be on trade efficiency internaly and globally.
The more the reach into people's daily lives the more people will look for a door.
And absolutly it can be corrected. I also find it incredible a rule like this got so far. It means there is a significant amount of people in powerful positions supporting it. That makes it hardee to correct and generally shows the people in power seem out of alignment to my views towards citizens privacy anyway. Even if not passed its amazing it got so far, at least to me.
edit: typo
Not only this, but closed source software in general, since the black box makes it harder to disable anti features
Once they put this infrastructure in place, it's just a matter of time before some "crisis" occurs and it gets used inappropriately
But our politicians seem to think that if we do it, it's to help people.
Unlike the ussr politicians of course, because they were evil.
The actual recommendations of the OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Right), who wrote the report, are as follows:
" 56. With this in mind, OHCHR recommends that States:
(a) Ensure that any interference with the right to privacy, including hacking, restrictions to access and use of encryption technology and surveillance of the public, complies with international human rights law, including the principles of legality, legitimate aim, necessity and proportionality and non-discrimination, and does not impair the essence of that right;
(b) Conduct human rights due diligence systematically, including regular comprehensive human rights impact assessments, when designing, developing, purchasing, deploying and operating surveillance systems;
(c) Take into account, when conducting human rights due diligence and assessing the necessity and proportionality of new surveillance systems and powers, the entire legal and technological environment in which those systems or powers are or would be embedded; States should also consider risks of abuse, function creep and repurposing, including risks as a result of future political changes;
(d) Adopt and effectively enforce, through independent, impartial and well- resourced authorities, data privacy legislation for the public and private sectors that complies with international human rights law, including safeguards, oversight and remedies to effectively protect the right to privacy;
(e) Take immediate measures to effectively increase the transparency of the use of surveillance technologies, including by appropriately informing the public and affected individuals and communities and regularly providing data relevant for the public to assess their efficacy and impact on human rights;
(f) Promote public debate of the use of surveillance technologies and ensure meaningful participation of all stakeholders in decisions on the acquisition, transfer, sale, development, deployment and use of surveillance technologies, including the elaboration of public policies and their implementation;
(g) Implement moratoriums on the domestic and transnational sale and use of surveillance systems, such as hacking tools and biometric systems that can be used for the identification or classification of individuals in public places, until adequate safeguards to protect human rights are in place; such safeguards should include domestic and export control measures, in line with the recommendations made herein and in previous reports to the Human Rights Council
(h) Ensure that victims of human rights violations and abuses linked to the use of surveillance systems have access to effective remedies.
57. In relation to the specific issues raised in the present report, OHCHR recommends that States:
Hacking
(a) Ensure that the hacking of personal devices is employed by authorities only as a last resort, used only to prevent or investigate a specific act amounting to a serious threat to national security or a specific serious crime, and narrowly targeted at the person suspected of committing those acts; such measures should be subject to strict independent oversight and should require prior approval by a judicial body;
Encryption
(b) Promote and protect strong encryption and avoid all direct, or indirect, general and indiscriminate restrictions on the use of encryption, such as prohibitions, criminalization, the imposition of weak encryption standards or requirements for mandatory general client-side scanning; interference with the encryption of private communications of individuals should only be carried out when authorized by an independent judiciary body and on a case-by-case basis, targeting individuals if strictly necessary for the investigation of serious crimes or the prevention of serious crimes or serious threats to public safety or national security;
Surveillance of public spaces and export control of surveillance technology
(c) Adopt adequate legal frameworks to govern the collection, analysis and sharing of social media intelligence that clearly define permissible grounds, prerequisites, authorization procedures and adequate oversight mechanisms;
(d) Avoid general privacy-intrusive monitoring of public spaces and ensure that all public surveillance measures are strictly necessary and proportionate for achieving important legitimate objectives, including by strictly limiting their location and time, as well as the duration of data storage, the purpose of data use and access to data; biometric recognition systems should only be used in public spaces to prevent or investigate serious crimes or serious public safety threats and if all requirements under international human rights law are implemented with regard to public spaces;
(e) Establish robust well-tailored export control regimes applicable to surveillance technologies, the use of which carries high risks for the enjoyment of human rights; States should require transparent human rights impact assessments that take into account the capacities of the technologies at issue as well as the situation in the recipient State, including compliance with human rights, adherence to the rule of law, the existence and effective enforcement of applicable laws regulating surveillance activities and the existence of independent oversight mechanisms;
(f) Ensure that, in the provision and use of surveillance technologies, public- private partnerships uphold and expressly incorporate human rights standards and do not result in an abdication of governmental accountability for human rights."
However, many of the recommendations only make sense for countries that recognize the supremacy of international law over domestic law.
It feels its not the normal people who made the GDPR and DMA are the ones writing this, rather Secret agencies pushing for more surveillance.
EU parliament is staffed by elected officials from all over Europe, while EU commission is staffed by ministers from governments of member countries.
It is pretty obvious that the latter will be pretty corrupt.
I get the impression they are being compelled.
How can a grown adult be this naive?
Remember: the goal of political speech isn't to convince reasonable people of anything; reasonable people don't need convincing, they just need facts. The goal of political speech is to (somehow) convince unreasonable people of things. Which requires, for a start, showing deference to what they already believe.
I think this says less about political speech and more about the time we're living in
And that's what political speech does: attempts to shift or reprioritize the mental toolkit people are using, at the same time as giving them information to apply this (temporarily) reorganized mental toolkit against.
Usually, this process of temporarily rearranging someone's mental toolkit using speech is referred to as "rhetoric." (Which is really annoying to me personally, because that's also what you call things that don't do that, but rather just attempt to confuse people by activating the bad, naturally weak or biased tools in the human mental toolkit, using e.g. ad-hominem attacks, equivocations, etc.) Thankfully, "political speech" (at least when used as a jargon term) can capture the nuances of "rearranging someone's mental toolkit" without the default implication that the speaker is committing professional malfeasance as a communicator.
Also, in case you were presuming that I was attempting to insult "unreasonable" people: actually, "unreasonable" people are the vast majority of people, and always have been; and that's not really a bad thing, per se. "Reasonable people" are extreme outliers — they're people who will take raw facts, explore their implications, and then use those implications to argue themselves into having different political beliefs, grinding the facts against their mental toolkit until the mental toolkit is what gets broken and reshaped. They're people who are willing to accept and internalize "repugnant conclusions" if they're inescapable due to the facts at hand; without first requiring a lens through which the conclusion can be made non-repugnant to them. Even people who can sometimes think this way, usually don't. Anyone who can manage to think this way most of the time, could get a job as a professional philosopher.
(And sometimes, the goal of political speech is to activate the dormant "reasonable" mental tools in these sometimes-reasonable people — a.k.a. to "get people to see reason!" Usually not, though; due to quirks of personality, "reasonable" people are rarely also thought-leaders in such a way that swaying them becomes key to swaying others; so they're rarely the targets of political speech.)
If I could offer a different perspective: reasonable people are people who understand and see their own irrationality for what it is. There is no process of breaking and reshaping, they simply see their broader thought pattern in a way that is unchanging. While different phases of thought come and go (along with political beliefs that follow), reasonable people understand the temporal nature of their current configuration and the inherent irrationality of the world and themselves. Out of this they create an unshakeable sense of direction for themselves that transcends any attempts to sidetrack it
It's quite obvious they use these tactics to make people have a hard time arguing against the laws and it's honestly a disgusting tactic I wish people could recognize.
[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-on-e-sn...
I thought it was clever. Also any counter solution has to address this to survive scrutiny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It seems at least equally naive to me to ignore the strategic value of choosing the ground on which to make your rhetorical stand instead of charging forward blindly.
why does it render slightly wider than the screen, causes an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar? I see this quite a lot lately.
I tested on two browsers (Firefox, Chrome), same issue. It only happens when I full-screen the browser. I use Windows if it matters.
@media (min-width:1920px) {
.responsive-width {
width: 1920px;
}
}
Even if you don't buy the argument of turnkey tyranny (the above concept), it is also important to remember that nothing is unhackable. So if you're the "well I trust X" or "what is X going to do with it, sell me ads?" type, you should also question "What ,,could'' my enemies do with this data?" (Foreign or domestic. State sponsored or run of the mill hacker)
While governments can be the most egregious abusers of this data, they aren't the only ones that can abuse the data. We have hundreds of reports about cops stalking their (current and former) partners, hackers blackmailing high profile people (including politicians), and plenty of reports about how nation states use this data to influence your countrymen. You may be immune (you aren't) but is everyone else?
I think pigeon holing this conversation to governments is wrong. There's a whole laundry list of potential problems with data collection like this and checking off any item on the list is generally enough to be against this type of policy. For example, I don't think anyone wants a national repository of children's IP addresses. That's not only valuable to nation state actors (who want to influence the next generation), but also pedophiles.
With intentions to protect children you end up actually putting them in more danger. We should HIDE children's personal data rather than gather it. But the only way to do that is to hide everyone's data.
Edit: I do believe in turnkey tyranny. I'm just saying that the argument isn't effective to everyone (as time has shown). I'm saying that when you run into these people don't keep talking about turnkey tyranny, shift your argument to one of the other many issues to choose from. One of them will (likely) be something they care about and use that as the baseline for your argument. If you keep arguing something that someone doesn't care about then I'm not sure how you all expect to convince anyone. Our exclusively turnkey arguments have been ineffective, let's adopt a better strategy.
My point is that we should include several arguments. Pigeon holing means having a strict focus. I'm arguing that ONLY talking about turnkey tyranny is not a good argument. Let's be real, we've been having this discussion since long before Snowden. Clearly it, alone, is not effective.
So I'm not arguing to abandon the turnkey tyranny discussion, but expand our discussion to include issues beyond it.
I'm not saying it's not good to have a complex argument. I am questioning whether it's ultimately going to be the most effective strategy here.
I would also argue that part of the reason we've gotten to this point is because we try to hide complexity from people. People are both smarter and dumber than you think. But people don't like to be treated like they are dumb, so don't.
> But also you're complexifying my argument.
Assume good faith, I'm not trying to argue against you, but reach a novel conclusion by discussing with you. This is why my reply began with "I don't know".
> But people don't like to be treated like they are dumb, so don't.
I don't assume a given individual is dumb, and I reject such a generalized classification. Very intelligent people can have extremely simple perspectives about issues outside of their expertise. Simplicity/complexity is not strictly related to intelligence. It's far more a function of time and available energy one has to spend learning about an issue. I'd prefer to dispense with the metric of intelligence altogether and focus on reduction of wasted complexity.
I would expect them to cover multiple points, not just one. The news's job is to distill complex topics to a wide audience. I fully expect them to talk about the major points: turnkey tyranny, nation state actors, and how this harms children. Assuming good faith. Covering a singular aspect is not in their cards as they are disseminating information to the masses.
> I'm not trying to argue against you, but reach a novel conclusion by discussing with you.
I misunderstood the sentiment, sorry. But I'm not trying to call you dumb or attack you.
> I'd prefer to dispense with the metric of intelligence altogether and focus on reduction of wasted complexity.
I'm totally fine doing this.
> It's far more a function of time and available energy one has to spend learning about an issue.
But this is also why I am advocating for this strategy. If the news isn't going to distill this information to the masses then it is our job as the tech literate crowd to do so. Since it specifically is a topic we are willing to spend more time and energy on to understand. Unfortunately that also means we need to spend more time and energy understanding our perspective audiences and take extra care to make arguments that are both informative and relevant to them. The advantage of our position, over the news, is that we have smaller audiences and so it is easier to be adaptive. But our disadvantage is our smaller audiences, lower reach.
In this day and age, everyone talks past each other, but nobody hears the other regardless of the topic.
I also have had an abortion so I have seen the protests from the other side as well. Almost got in a fist fight with a grown man who spit on my girlfriend, but opted to get a security guard to call the police instead.
My experience led to me oversimplifying the argument to make a point, but it's definitely more nuanced.
I'm finding that as information is becoming increasingly accessible that this seems to be becoming more common: oversimplification. Maybe this is through attempts to understand more about our world but not having enough time to learn the nuance. Maybe willful ignorance. Maybe the disseminators of knowledge are bad (quality) or bad actors. Probably all the above and more. But I do know that there are plenty who use these concepts to deceive us. It is easy to see that authoritarian powers love to overly simplify concepts and create hard boundaries: defining good and evil. I do think the cure to this is encouraging nuanced discussions. But the cure is much harder to take than the poison. So I'm not sure if there's a better solution.
To bring up another very clear example of people talking past one another is whenever anyone discusses "capitalism" or "socialism", as the two main groups are typically using different definitions for each word. While one may recognize this, neither is willing to discuss with a more unified definition or listen to the other's arguments under the definition that they are using. Which breaks down communication.
After all, communication is in 3 parts: 1) what you intend to say (the idea in your head), 2) what you actually say (the thought embedded/encoded into language), 3) what is head (the language decoded into the listener's brain). The system is highly noisy at each step and assumptions are made by our minds in attempts to extract the signal from the noise. But this is probably just fancier language to explain the concept of good faith.
I think you should avoid the phrase "avoid the phrase" because that indicates that you just don't want to talk about the phrase due to childhood issues.
But does it really?
I would think it is the opposite. Focusing on turnkey tyranny puts focus away from the more fundamental point of privacy of personal data/communication to just some possible negative consequence. But the privacy is value regardless of these consequences. If my communication is scanned then my privacy is violated, that is bad even if there is no tyranny and no negative consequence to me.
regardless of your stance on abortion, and the extent to which law enforcement seeks this data, it's woken up a large chunk of the population to the risks of their personal data.
https://lifehacker.com/why-apples-period-tracker-data-is-mor...
Do you have a source on that? I’m not American so this is astounding to me.
I know you only mean that figuratively, but I think it would be more evocative to say they are looking up at us (from below).
While I fully support lobbying efforts like stopscanningme, because they rise awareness in people that ultimately vote governments so that they might do more informed voting choices, I just don't condone all of this whining about mass surveillance on privately operated companies:
remember that gmail, facebook, whatsapp, etc.. are for profit, privately held companies that are held accountable for the content that circulates on their platforms. Companies, like any other citizen, must abide the law and not become a free field for Child Exploitation or Adult Exploitation Imagery.
You want total privacy, which in your mind is the word for "unaccountability"? Use different services or setup your own.
The topic is very vast, but it can't really handled by just saying "bad government, want to wiretap!"
In all of (Western) history, those services have been considered one of the most private, like it or not. So changing that status (in the West) should require very public and very clear discussion, not just hand-waving about "child molesters".
Facebook: that is something totally different.
The fact that mail is handled by a private entity does not make it less mail than the official post. At all, and this has been understood (in the West) since, probably, the Roman times.
I'm not sure who considered these services to be one of the most private.
Also in those days, one could make use of a secure private mail service, bypassing the normal processing facilities and have grantee that the letter remained sealer the whole journey. To be even more secure, basic encryption could be used, or even invisible ink.
Today, things just got more sophisticated.
Government is proposing bills not have messages read by officers (something that not even inside Meta can be done due to EU's Electronic Privacy Directive) but to "scan them": have machineries check for violating content, pretty much as a parcel is put under xrays in the airport to check for bombs or drugs.
The law protects also the right of a company to protect itself against being blamed for misuses of its services, not only individuals' rights.