The chat control proposal does not belong in democratic societies
mullvad.net
mullvad.net
"Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."
I'm probably in the minority on HN, but I think this is a good thing. It should be a matter of course, in a democratic society. Free speech doesn't live solely in digital communication (universally owned by some company) any more than it does in the classified ads in a newspaper.
Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
> Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
That's an interesting 0-100% (eclipse all possible free speech possibilities!) imaginary scenario. I don't subscribe to it.
In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?
It is repeated often, but is this really true?
Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion - and I don't think that you can increase that factor, just with throwing more money on them. Then you maybe just get more smart people, who are in it for the money and use their smarts and cunning to extract even more money. I think politicians should want that job, because they primarily feel the call to achieve something bigger.
So a adequate payrise is alright in my opinion, but I don't want the top managers who run a big compony for profit to also run states. As states are (or should not be) profit orientated, but to serve the greater good of its people.
These folks really are in fact deplorable and you need to appeal to at least a substantial minority of awful idiots to be elected president or if on team red most of them.
This is why every Republican president in half a century has been an embarrassment and every democratic relatively conservative because nothing else flies here and upping the ante won't help.
If I look around at (a) politicians and (b) people I respect for traits needed in politicians, then those sets are not fully but largely disjoint.
> Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion
There are other necessary traits though. Empathy. Diplomacy. The ability to compromise. Keeping an eye on the big picture. Current processes don't always select for those traits and there are tons of BS-ers and populists out there while I see people with the desirable traits outside politics and not having any desire to get involved. Putting a camera over their head 24/7 is not going to improve that.
Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd. The decision-making process including all talks being recorded and publically available would also be a massive factor to restore trust in politics.
Citation needed. Actually, a lot of citations needed.
When's the last time you spoke to an "average Joe" ? The average joe can't even make the right decisions regarding their own life and health, and is probably struggling to keep their family together and make ends meet.
What in the world makes you think they are qualified to make decisions on behalf of millions of constituents? I would drop dead before I let someone like that be my voice in politics.
> Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, none is provided.
In the novel it is extremely disruptive, but perhaps that is what is needed.
I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.
If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up.
It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem.
More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.
Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.
Not that I am defending corrupt politicians, I just really don't know what to do about this, and looking at all the bad things corporations do i can't comprehend how they would suddenly become good when even less regulated than they already are
They do not improve your life objetively, usually they do not pay for the price of them when there is a mistake but get benefits from trafficking favors.
That would be fine if you had hundreds of CEOs competing in a market. Unfortunately they tend to merge and create monopolies. And some people salute this because of the growth at all costs mindset.
What else in nature grows at all costs? Oh right, cancer.
If there is benefit in a regulation, the person imposing it is not the person paying the negative outcomes of it. Never. So no, CEOs competing cannot get more than what they generate unless they distort the market in some way.
Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.
So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?
Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.
I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.
For the following examples, bare in mind that neither I nor the general public understand the actual laws, so any nits you pick need to be the kind that even a non-lawyer will accept:
I'm old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about his affairs, and yet Republicans (collectively) are defending Trump for lying about affairs.
Or vice versa, Trump's classified documents at home vs. Biden's.
Probably the same elsewhere, but I don't trust that I'm not part of the problem with regard to UK politics (where I'm from), and my German isn't good enough to pay attention to what's happening where I now live.
Humans are violent too. If we tried as hard to train it out of people we'd make good progress.
The old Ted Kennedy maneuver
On both sides. It's all theater like WWE. You have the good guy and you have the heel. Each side has their own story with this format.
This is fundamental to loss aversion and compromise. There was never a "before." Open "negotiations" reward posturing, not compromise.
I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 (https://archive.ph/fabjP)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_salaries_of_heads_of_s... (https://archive.ph/XGbpO)
Of course it's hard to find the "actual corruption" figures, but that doesn't mean the perceptions index is of any value.
These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.
But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.
On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!
A horrifyingly large amount of UK political decision-making that should be minuted is instead carried out secretly on whatsapp.
If a politician votes for a law that reduces the speed limit to 50mph then is caught speeding is that corruption?
I think corruption is when someone abuses their position of power. This isn't abuse they just violated their own rules.
If more laws were objective (like speeding) and politicians were as surveilled as everyone else it wouldn't be an issue.
Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
> Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
That's why I said "and surveilled".
If at the same time they are breaking the law they created - that is corruption. For the people prosecuted for said crime with trials pending, it is information that is useful for them to know that the lawmaker conducted themselves in this manner.
That is, who's collecting kompromat on UK ministers, and for what purpose, and in exchange for what? (It's the press, isn't it)
Yes. Once one meets a journalist or two, you become aware that every scandal that comes to light was known by everyone for a long time.
There is someone else, however, the Whip. While the end recipient would ultimatley be the press, the power they hold is by collecting up little secrets like which Prime Minister was having an affair with their Chancellor ...
https://www.politicalite.com/exclusive/dirty-dossier-full-li...
2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
Yes. I never said otherwise.
> then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all
That's the funny bit: they won't. They - and their family - will have the same if they use the same platforms. Which is why I firmly believe this isn't about corruption, this is about false beliefs and zealots who genuinely believe the internet and open communication is bad.
See, I can make up truly stupid neologisms as well. But at least mine isn't an effort to subvert foundational democratic norms.
Because unequal application of the law isn't law.
Whataboutism's necessity increases as the parties and potential charges under scrutiny are ever more alike.
In Whataboutism's novel sense, it is a brain-dead effort to try to get away using the law as a politicized cudgel.
You can tell by the need to invent a new word in order to describe an old concept.
Insofar as their is not any legal jeopardy involved, my explanation still applies however adjusted.
I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.
Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are.
Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains".
If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there.
<personal pain point>
One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful.
In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences". The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind.
Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense.
I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out.
If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds.
Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion.
</personal pain point>
Nobody I know would run for state office. They pay poorly. You have to work in the state capitol, which in most state's is awful. You lose your privacy. And for what, a marginal legislative role?
The historic benefit was pride. But with nihilism in vogue and trust in government low, that reward is non-existent. Our intelligent and ambitious don't aim for public office. (It even feels trite to call it public service.) That's a problem.
I have friends who ran for and won local and federal offices. I specifically called out state because it min-maxes the power-honor trade-off.
That said, I’ll stand by my broader point. Normalised derision has made public service more taxing than it ever was. This is true globally, and has been called out by high-profile resignations in e.g. New Zealand and Scotland.
No, they become lobbyists instead. They have more power as they are the ones controlling the elected officials.
>That's a problem.
I would vote yes.
Beware the peculiar human creature who craves attention from strangers.
If we required politicians to stream their lives 24/7, then the unintended consequence would be a government run exclusively by Instagram influencers who already stream their lives 24/7. I get your point about sunlight on secrets. But limiting our governance to the pool of people I see on TikTok seems like a high price to pay.
(This is just a 2023 rephrasing of the age-old concern of electing someone willing to be a politician.)
For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards.
If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.
I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member.
I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
Fallacy =/= thing I don’t like.
Any law voted yes by a politician would have:
A 6mo cool off period, and in that interim periodthe following would apply: the law in question would be Tripled (3x) and both ways (I.e. retroactive and future) to the elected officials, his immediate parents, sons, and siblings, as soon as the law is passed.
So if they pass a tax increase, the entire tax applies immediately to their family before it applies to the public.
Same would be surveillance. Same for healthcare changes. OR draft etc. They would eat their kill.
Its about time no?
Any regulatory body unelected chief + deputy should be subject to the same rules with a tidy bonus: agency rules would also impact the portfolio (materiality can be set at say FV in excess of 300% poverty line), or business relationships past + present for the "czars" and family members.
So If you want to run FDIC and want to make rules for banks, thats swell, but those rules will apply to bank X where your brother works, AND to bank Y where you were CEO. The new rule would apply to those banks first, the changes would be tripled, AND that would be applied retroactively.
Have fun with that revolving door!
We should also start to judge them based on outcomes rather than pointless metrics like GDP. How much did poverty decrease during your governments? How about crime? Life expectancy? And so on.
Government is NOT a job. Government is Public Service. Emphasis on 'service'
If you are not ready to do your service or duty, you are not fit to work in government.
The honor and duty of being a king came with the downside of the risks (beheading) to you and to your royal family, if you did a particularly bad job.
Current government officials have all the upside (revolving door) with almost zero downside. Some plebs break into congress and they get their pants in a jiffy.
We need to make them accountable. Them, and their families.
Yes that's exactly what I said. How about we forbid them from ever trading in stocks or participate in any investment where they might even have a remote conflict of interest?
I feel that would be the best way to keep crooks like Pelosi out of politics.
> Them, and their families.
This is nonsense but you must hate politicians apparently. I don't, I hate corruption.
I hate the kind of people it attracts.
We dont need politicians. We do need statemen.
I think you live fantayland if you think restricting their investment options will result in less politicians. Whats simply going to happen is that they will shift their activities to other income avenues. Less stock trading. More board jobs and speaking fees. The river of corruption keeps flowing even if in a different direction.
Instead, id like less incentives to corruption. That means eat what you kill. Id like more lincolns that take tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families, and declare wars against global superpowers, to then "close shop" and go back to their farm to retire.
Instead we have pelosis, mccains advancing the war lobby, or obamas making bank on "speaking fees"
Stock prohibition wont do a thing. You need to cut the incentive to sell favors. You need to re-introduce risk.
Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
...but yes, this is why in the US republicans are constantly floating all sorts of batshit regressive policies on social welfare programs, LGBTQ people, voting rights, immigration - it shifts the ultimate compromise closer to their desired outcome, and even if it doesn't, it still is virtue signaling to their base, something to shout about at campaign rallies.
"See what I tried to do for you? But those evil liberals shot me down! I need your support!"
If I'm reading [1] correctly, we're just picking up momentum down a decades-long slippery slope.
1. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/FIW_202...
It is discussed by Charlie Munger as part of what he calls the "reciprocation tendency", after the studies from Robert Cialdini in the practice of "«ask for a lot and back off»".
It’s just tiring
With time the EU Parliament has seen its powers increasing, and there is reason to expect it will continue to do so.
Parliament approving what the Commission does is of no use for repealing laws.
The President is not elected by the Parliament. They experimented with that in the Juncker era, now it's back to being controlled (in theory) by the Council. The Parliament was given a "vote" that consisted of a list of options with one name on it. They could literally vote for von der Leyen or not vote at all. Even then she only barely scraped past quorum.
The Council meanwhile isn't democratic. Everything it does is secret. How did von der Leyen get the top job despite being manifestly unsuitable? Nobody knows. It's secret and never leaked.
that's how confidence votes work on most parliamentary republics.
Moreover, even at the universal suffrage, “democracy” doesn't mean electing a dictator with no popular oversight every x years.
In the case of the European commission:
- No EU citizen gave them the explicit mandate to enforce chat control
- If the initiative is repelled, and they continue to force freedom-reducing initiatives, they'll face 0 consequences.
- At most, the parliament can do is strike down a law. There is of course a very unbalanced distribution of power – the elected people have no initiative.
- The EC is corrupt: many commissioners cash fat checks from the private sector after their term, with 0 consequences.[0],[1]
- Lobbyism is everywhere. Corporations with unlimited money bribe officials, harass them, and push their agenda. Anyone close to the EU will tell you that it's much worse than you think.
“Democracy” is not the power of the corporations, and citizens, maybe, if we have time for it and if it doesn't eat into our profits.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/15/european-commi...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/former-eu-digit...
As long as there are people there will be struggles like this. Being on the winners side makes things easier, so losing once makes it harder to go back, but it isn't impossible since we have gotten here from much worse situations.
Realistically current EU countries are locked in. They aren't allowed to reintroduce their own currency, but doing so is step one towards leaving.
By the time a regime reaches "existential threat" level it's too late. You're already far gone, any and all political opposition has been driven underground and the regime has loyalists in place in all institutions and positions of power. There is no way to organize any resistance because attempts to do so are crushed immediately, the press is controlled and you're in the minority anyway because the majority are propagandized and kept in fear of instability or supposed external threats to their way of life.
The EU is frankly far too close to that dystopian end already. It constantly justifies its own power via reference to external enemies of various kinds e.g. capitalist America, the European press barely challenges it and the institutions are controlled by EU loyalists who are willing to rip up the rules rather than let the EU lose control. Even in the UK that was always more distant than other nations, they went through multiple severe constitutional crises triggered by Remainers fighting to overturn the referendum. It wasn't at all clear that the UK could actually leave despite the referendum result not being in doubt.
IMO the very fact that you think the UK left for "questionable reasons" is already part of the propaganda doing its job. The people who get out early are the only ones who actually can get out. By the time the case is unambiguous (to you), you're the one being labelled as questionable.
Also note that the EU don't like Montenegro using the Euro and tolerate it only because it's tiny/doesn't matter.
So yeah - if a country really wanted to leave - a shared currency would not stop it.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leader-approve-defense-mi...
"EU leaders approve updated military plan. The strategy envisions the creation of an EU rapid deployment force of up to 5,000 soldiers."
However the EU doesn't need a physical army to stop a country leaving. It just needs sufficiently good control of local politics and law enforcement via loyalists in the countries establishment, which it has already. The EU has already proven it can replace governments in Italy and Greece against the will of the electorate, simply via "soft power" mechanisms like access to ECB liquidity, ECJ judgements and control over local institutions.
In other words an inability to leave the EU doesn't look like an army crushing a well organized political opposition. It looks like that opposition being blacklisted from the press, being spied on by the EU secret police, found guilty of vague laws like "misinformation" with judgements upheld by the European courts, votes being tampered with or outright ignored and more.
This is no theoretical problem. Anti-EU referendums in European countries are frequently ignored, even when in theory they are constitutionally binding. In the UK the Electoral Commission, the supposedly neutral body that runs the election and referendum process itself, was run by EU loyalists who professed in public that they wanted Leave to lose and spent significant amounts of time prosecuting Leave campaigners (fortunately their cases were ruled harassment and tossed out by the courts).
The EU Commission also had a long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths". These days they'd call it misinformation and try to prosecute the journalists in question.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if a majority of the population want to leave, or reject a new EU proposal, if the people who rule them don't care about democracy and control the levers of power. That's how all dictatorships work.
Yeah, that's why the UK didn't leave in the end right? lol. Does "Non-biding referendum" rings a bell?
> long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths".
Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR. Yes
Yes, keep talking, I like to make a collection of anti-EU talking points (from Peter Thiel's think tank most likely).
For all the criticism the EU deserves, it's very telling when the narrative turns into manipulation
UK was the first where it wasn't ignored. After the vote I remember being told several times by Europeans they didn't really believe it'd ever be implemented, exactly due to the track record of European countries in ignoring referendums that didn't go the EU's way.
Even then it was a very close run thing. The Remainers in Parliament were willing to create a constitutional crisis to try and get the referendum overturned a.k.a. the "People's Vote", and were holding the government hostage to get that. It was only a a lucky break (the Lib Dem leader going full delusional) that allowed Johnson to break the deadlock, go the country and allow the electorate to purge the Remainer MPs who had lied to their voters about their true position. But make no mistake, that was the worst constitutional crisis the UK experienced in living memory.
>> Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR
That story came from the German press and was correct:
https://www.welt.de/kmpkt/article183978370/Weihnachtsmarkt-i...
You see how easily you're manipulated by the EU? They've convinced you and others that if the press criticizes the EU the press must be lying. But it's almost never the case.
The EU has taken down their myths site now. It was trash. Not only totally focused on the British press, but I remember quite clearly flicking through them back when the site was live and noticing that all of them were admitted to be true, with the "debunking" (such as it was) being always along the lines of, "this is true but it's justified" or "we prefer an alternative interpretation", or "we don't phrase it like that".
So one specific case where the lists are sent to the city government and shown in public now means "children can't write to Santa?" Way to blown out of proportion. (And they could, if their parents consented to it)
Thanks for showing how easy it is to be manipulated by anti-EU propaganda.
Yes, the Welt article is not lying, the propagandists are, as usual
"they could, if their parents consented"
double lol
It's funny that the results of WWII were for America to enable a soft version of the fourth Reich and the Japanese east asian coprosperity sphere. BUT we built it under our auspices, with the rule being that free speech was somewhat necessary for a free market. (skip the part about torturing Muslims and communists). Here we are. Will Europe now become Hungary or Turkey??!
Yes... this was the original comment I was responding to, which seems to have totally disappeared. Thanks.
> we have gotten here from much worse situations.
A wise remark. But we'll only keep finding better situations if we keep calling out bullshit.
Maybe people just need to take more care which leaders they elect, if they don't like the policies that result from it.
The Government is our voice and our strength, and we are going to need that voice heard and our will exercised in the coming years.
We need to stop undermining our governments, we need to get money out of politics, and we need to sort out our democracies.
That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. It's quite telling that some people are too fragile to hear even a tiny bit of criticism or slightly different perspective about their God, the government.
> It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No it doesn't, subservience and dependence on the government and viewing them as "the experts", the moral authority, to be implicitly trusted, and who aim primarily to serve others above themselves, is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency.
Look at all the wars America and "the west" at large has got into, because all "the experts" said we had to go to war, and you were a traitor, an expert-denier, "against us", etc., if you disagreed. The same exact strategy and rhetoric is used everywhere once you see it. Enemies are created, division is sown, critics are denounced... A little bit less blind faith and trust in government and their alleged "experts", and a bit more rational thinking and questioning would have gone a long way on many occasions. That is the dangerous apathy and faith in government that has quite literally caused the loss of millions of lives and trillions of dollars since WWII.
It's funny, I get a lot of this kind of pushback from people, with my simple observations of reality. Most of it seems to come from the same people who will simultaneously go on endlessly about how corrupt the government is, how much it spends on war, how racist and bigoted it is, how subservient to corporations and lobbyists, how it doesn't provide good healthcare, its police forces are brutal and unjust, justice system provides favorable outcomes for the wealthy, it doesn't do enough to solve climate change, doesn't make billionaires and corporations pay enough tax, etc.
... And yet when I point out the obvious, gee maybe that's because the government care more about themselves than they care about you, these same people suddenly lose their minds.
And I'll bet dollars to donuts I know where you and OP and anybody who criticizes me for making that comment generally on most of those above issues.
The thing about the sad truth versus a happy lie is that the sad truth doesn't prevent you from taking any action, participating in the system, trying to improve it or make it work for you. It's actually the happy lie that does that. Sure there are those who will become paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to and essentially worship is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.
That does not require it to be 'the' government and for it to cease being 'our' government. Further, a sense of ownership and a desire to work constructively with the parts that improve our lives does not require me to abdicate moral judgement to its authority. Finally, believing that public office can and should be an honourable pursuit does not imply or require that I believe that my current representation comes anywhere close of meeting that standard.
You are correct to assume that I believe my current government enables or even engages in injustices against certain cohorts of the population. Yes, I even believe that I benefit from significant inter-generational privilege that others were actively denied. No, that neither means that my life is a cakewalk, nor does it compel me to plead forgiveness in the gutter. It does however instill a duty to raise those less fortunate up when I have the means to do so. It also compels me to advocate for collective action to do the same.
Ultimately, I don't see embodying alienation between a democratic government and its citizens to be a reasonable source of tribalistic pride. It's fucked, and fixing it should be almost as existentially compelling as eating or surviving the elements.
Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people.
Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well off, and lobbyists will rarely fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective.
Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.
In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.
There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these.
I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.
It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics.
Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies.
Understand this.
There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people.
Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society.
Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake.
Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face.
More generally:
A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy.
There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind.
The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few.
No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever.
At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable.
We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past
Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead.
Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.
Still, it is disturbing to watch all of Orwell's ideas getting implemented in real life
It’s tiring. They hope to wear people down.
GDPR achieved nothing notable for data security and privacy, except by spamming cookie prompts and training users to accept anything.
The EU is an incompetent, lumbering, bureaucratic hellscape. It expanded FAR beyond its original remit of a customs union, and in turn created horrific legislation and usurped the power of national governments to centralize power in Brussels.
The EU used its newly seized power to crush all free speech, freedom of expression and dissent, along with explicitly campaigning for censorship. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-ha...
As far as I'm concerned, GDPR is great.
I'd be more fine with that if they only regulated narrowly defined inter-state issues in the EU.
But stuff like this... There's no mandate. And there's no reason this couldn't be done locally in every member state where the population wants that.
In the EU we have the Parliament, which is elected by the people, the Council which is composed by Prime Ministers, Presidents, whoever rules each country and the Commission, which is proposed by the Council and elected by the Parliament. Not so different from what I see in my country.
EP elections are well publicized and every EU citizen has the right to vote on it
"Every five years EU citizens choose who represents them in the European Parliament, the directly-elected institution that defends their interests in the EU decision-making process. The next European elections will take place in 2024."
I always vote in the EP election.
I just find it incredible that when the results are in the people at the top are some guys I've never heard or seen before. And I don't believe I'm uncommonly ill-infomed.
Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
that may happen when many separate countries merge their candidate pools to form a single parliament, and its up to the parties to distribute their seats - I would think that an exact representation of members from all countries within the available seats for the party would be hard to achieve, though.
> Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
This is true to some extend, however you have to somehow ensure that all individual pieces work in a collaborative mode and support each other, because once you get in competitive mode, its a race to the bottom for everyone.
I don't understand / buy that argument. I find it quite neo-liberal in the sense that it assumes countries will deterministically mindlessly engage in a race to the bottom.
The "prisoners dilemma" is a problem of course. But people and countries can and do cooperate despite that.
For this reason, it's not clear to me that EU countries would automatically slash their environment regulations and corruption prevention efforts in a "race to the bottom" if the EU wasn't there stopping them.
Democracy gets diluted when the electorate becomes too large and too diverse. It's important that decisions stay as local as possible.
Like, image some county that needs energy, has no natural gifts regarding that but has land to farm upon. Instead of exporting food and importing coal from somewhere to fire up a new plant, it could also exchange energy with a more gifted county that has plenty of green energy but doesn't need something from them.
To make this work, a higher level entity can force the exchange, and ensure that the whole area doesn't suffer from pollution despite that being the cheapest or even only possible way for the individual county. It COULD be solved there, but everyone is worse off by not cooperating.
Actually, the EU has a huge power potential if only the member states would finally cut back on individual national interests so that mutual agreements and shared legislation/taxes/military/... could be setup properly - which might worse some situations in the short term, but ensures greater wealth for everyone longterm. The "I I I" egoistic thinking of individual member states is the greatest weakness the EU has - unified we can achieve so much more!
So they migrate to non-democratic sections of the political sphere to assert themselves, and EC is one of those. The EU has a significant "democratic deficit" as a whole, too much indirection between people and the ruling Eurocrat class.
In other words: The European Commission is the autocratic reservoir for conservative politicians that were to extremistic for national audiences.
Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming.
Or Israel.
There are lots of good things coming out of the European Commission and some really great things. Obviously there is going to come some crap to, and a few really really bad things, like this one. I agree that it's tiring to fight those, but there is no sunshine without rain.
This pushing, forever persistent, accretes ever greater power to departments and their bureaucrats until the people have no say, and the highest elected offices have no say. Of course, the EU was initially designed this way, so you're fucked any way you frame it.
I am sorry. There is mostly vile hate and vitriol for her in the entire country. Her entire career was a show of the Peter Principle.
Large scale surveillance while abusive and harmful has historically been limited in scale by the ability of those in control to trawl through data.
Automated "moderation" of dragnet communications collection with modern AI holds the potential for a scale of abusive privacy invasion at unprecedented scales.
My personal ability to generate millions of real-looking messages has now exploded and I wonder how these proposed structures will function if everyone sends each other 1k suspicious messages every minute of every day ?
Maybe attach a zip-bomb to every message just for good measure?
Let's assume you send 1000 automated messages periodically, and they contain a mixed bag of normal looking (so that your genuine comms could hide in plain sight) and malicious messages (to make their detection systems sweat).
All the messages are sent from the same origin (e.g.: a messaging app capable of this), with a specific interval (the genuine msg is timed accordingly), etc..
Let's see a small sample of normal looking messages, with an added genuine manually written message:
- Let's meet up at the Riverside Park soccer field at 5 PM sharp.
- Hey, can you grab a gallon of milk from the corner store on your way back?
- Good morning! Wishing you a fantastic day ahead, especially during your 11 AM meeting!
- Just a reminder: our dinner reservation at Luigi's Italian Bistro is at 7 PM tonight.
- Could you pick up the kids from Maplewood Elementary at 3:30 PM today? Work is keeping me busy.
- Caught in traffic near Main Street, but I'll be at the coffee shop in about 10 minutes!
Which one is the genuine one?
Just like you cannot discern which msg is genuine (are any of them?), you can generate plausible maliciously looking messages as well.
Spam meanwhile is defined as messages users don't want. If users can't tell the difference between spam and non-spam then, by definition, the messages are not spam.
If you send lots of "legit" messages to people who don't want them you'll be reported as a spammer and get banned. Doesn't matter what the messages say.
I understand you know how real world spam filters work, but this is a different use case.
I'm not trying to generate spam, I'm talking about an IM app, where you have your contacts, and you can talk with each other and only see the legit messages.
I can elaborate, but please continue in a non-adversarial way if possible.
The equation is more like # of ppl × # of msgs in a time period = noise
We can increase the # of msgs to bring down the other side from "billions" I think.
Remember "Hacking Team" that got busted a few years back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team One of the services they sold was the ability to plant incriminating data on a victim's computer.
Although I've seen enough HN comments in recent years willing to gamble on giving their kind an inch as if they won't take the whole field given the chance. History's only reliable lesson here is humans having a short memory of trusting these systems to do what they initially promised they would do, for longer than the well-intentioned's term in office.
On the other hand though: Europeans kinda suck as a blob. See Italy electing fascists again, Germany stagnating for decades under Conservative control, basically everything east of Germany etc. Etc. The parliament is dominated by Conservative authoritarian forces as well. In that sense EU legislature is just too good at representing it's people.
I gave a speech to my computer science course when the new copyright directive was about to go into its final trilogue round in 2018. Wide agreement in discussion afterwards, but not a single student cared enough to make their wishes known to their MEPs. If even they don't do it, i can only say we're getting what we asked for.
That’s because when some of them do they get threatened with sanctions while others can simply dictate policy. The eu is not an equal members club.
Like many other system in the World, elections are to chose people's representatives, not to chose the government nor the technical apparatus (like the EU commission).
The US president is one notable example of non elected position.
Anyway, the proposals must be approved by the parliament, which is elected directly by the EU people in number proportional to the population of the single countries and then ratified by the single EU parliaments, which are again elected by the people.
I wouldn't exactly call it "abundance of unelected regulatory positions".
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/21/meta-wont-allowe...
Oh.
[0]: https://www.thorn.org/about-our-fight-against-sexual-exploit...
She is appointed and vetted by the parliament, who is elected directly by the people.
So the commissioners do not come from Mars, they are emissaries of the elected parliament.
Show me another place where 27 countries live peacefully together and jointly govern an entire sub continent, by collaborating together and discussing publicly about their political proposals.
Of course it has its problems, of course it takes a lot of effort to bring 27 countries together on a subject, of course there will be controversial opinions among its members, depending on the POV (a lot more people in EU agree with the chat control proposal than those who disagree), but that's the price of democracy.
Switzerland is very democratic. People get to vote on individual laws, instead of having 3 different layers of abstraction between who you vote for and what laws are passed.
The price is having to make compromises every day.
It means putting together and listening to the people who say "immigration must be stopped" and "countries should have no borders" and everything in between, but no side tries to silent the others using violence.
What you're talking about is the tyranny of the majority, which is not democratic and is not categorized as democracy, in a democracy the effect of the majority taking it all is moderated by a carefully balanced separation of powers.
For example in a democracy the justice system is usually independent from the government.
> Not having privacy is a consequence of authoritarianism, be it for a greater good (to find child abusers) or not (to find dissidents).
But we have privacy in Europe, unlike most places in the World.
Blindly repeating that EU is authoritarian doesn't make it true.
Yes, Europe is big, but those "dramatic decisions" need to be ratified by your "local" government, that it's probably more distant than the EU commission.
At least in the EU commission they do their job, which is to write proposals, local governments lately have only been preoccupied by their own chairs.
And it's basically the only place where "dramatic decisions" can be discussed right now in Europe.
I would love that my National government focused on "privacy" and "E2E encryption" and sparkled a discussion about those topics in the parliament, instead of doing this:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/italy-migrant-deaths-mini...
We all know who these people are.
It's a public discussion.
> and help with anything that gets them far from public and government
It simply means winning the elections at the EU parliament, which, unfortunately for Mullvad, it's not something they will ever be able to do.
Mullvad posts might be popular here on HN, maybe, but they move no more than a few thousands votes in the EU (we are 450 million people).
> The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and Article 24(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (‘the Charter’) 1 enshrine as rights the protection and care of children’s best interests and well-being. In 2021, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child underlined that these rights must be equally protected in the digital environment 2 . The protection of children, both offline and online, is a Union priority.
Literally, "it's for the children". I don't need to read any more. Get fucked, big brother.
The system is used to hide content, change content, shadow ban and the like.
Even by its own standards it's typically used incorrectly, but most users have no workable way to appeal.
The content reviewed is often visible to low paid workers in various countries. Similar systems have been infiltrated by hostile governments. (Twitter is a case in point.)
(If you use FB you can sometimes probe the system and better establish the details.)
The system is also used to prevent one user informing another that they've been squelched.
My guess, this would give rise to even less competent implementations and actual elimination of political opponents and the like.
Also freedom of speech it's about the possibility to express your opinions, not that the opinions would receive no post-expression control nor that the people expressing them should bear no responsibility for what they say.
Monitoring and auditing have always been integral to democratic systems, they are called law enforcement and as such they have broader access to information that must be authorized, it is by design.
In the end it's all about different ideas supported by different parties here, that are discussing a proposal, which is the essence of democracy.
It will resolve in a compromise, as usual.
Those who are discussing it as "evil" VS "good" are missing the point of the democratic process IMO.
Mullvad is in fact urging politicians in the EU to vote no, they are not proposing to attack the EU institutions with guns and those supporting the chat control are not saying that Mullvad "supports online pedophilia".
In liberal theory, the tyranny of the majority[1] was supposedly solved with rights (encoded in constitutions.) The problem here, according to the theory, is that we don't have a right to privacy.
What is it that you think I proposed? I support the defense of that which you consider natural rights, because if they aren't defended they will cease to exist in any meaningful way.
These rights did not exist since the big bang in some sort of metaphysical space, nor does human society gravitate towards them. These rights were formulated by people, and insofar as they're recognized presently it's because people risked death to make it so.
Democracy and legalism are orthogonal concepts, though both tend to be (rhetorically, if not always as much practically) ideals of liberal government.
The particular blend where each limits the other that has come to define liberal democratic government is not the same as the broader concept of “democracy”.
I don't think there's a real argument that, somewhere in our DNA, exists a list of personal freedoms every human being ought to have. Feels like an ad absurdum more than a genuine engagement, tbh...
You can say that for most moral statements.
That, sadly, is a uniquely American concept. I fully agree that these truths are self-evident and universal.
But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want these freedoms (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.
Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0].
So it does seem these ideals are appealing to the young, educated and smart people in Europe. Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic.
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
This allows to propose conditions that "Men" would never accept. It is the very idea that is fading.
...In fact, for a number of today's common practices we suggest the proposer to think whether [prominent figure] would have ever accepted it.
====
Which language are you speaking? Before something "«comes across»" to you, do you have your duly interposed cold-minded understanding modules on?
-- A "Man" is that entity which has a mind superior to that of e.g. monkeys. (In the context, the nuance is that of Dignity.)
-- A "person" is that entity which expresses a particular side of the possible expressions of being.
...Your proposal would be translated as "People with their own special ideas and leaning would etc." - it is not only hardly relevant to what was communicated, but possibly even stating the opposite. The original post, like in general the rest we post, was not meant to be written in demotic.
====
And again to another reply, now hidden, if the above still needed:
'Man' has the same root of "mind", it means "having a mind", but so many things have it, so it must be a special one, must it not?
'Person' is a mask - that thing in which the voice "per-sonat". It means the mask, the specific one - crying, laughing, irate, whatever.
No, you cannot use 'person' if you do not mean "that with a personality" - because that is what it means.
====
Edit: Oh, and incidentally - "why not just sticking to invented groupspeak?"
Well, paradoxically, also because it is not inclusive, is it, if some demand the normalcy of speaking actual Language, or maybe just when dealing with individuals from other groups! A convention is limited to convention adherents; this public is varied!
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
* 10 countries being: Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden and Ireland
From the start of the proposal itself:
"At least one in five children falls victim to sexual violence during childhood 3 . A 2021 global study found that more than one in three respondents had been asked to do something sexually explicit online during their childhood, and over half had experienced a form of child sexual abuse online"
I am (obviously) against child sexual abuse. I can also say, with very high certainty, that those numbers are being blown completely out-of-proportion, with the widest definition possible used.
To justify such a wide-reaching proposal behind this thin veneer of justification is absolutely nuts to me.
Don’t tell me, it’s to “protect the children”, the excuse under which all draconian citizen monitoring laws are introduced.
“To protect the children”….. no one can argue with it without sounding like a pedophile.
And it always comes with an assurance that the dramatic power overreach will never be used for anything else but hunting pedophiles.
But it’s never too long until they’re using it to hunt copyright breakers and all sorts or ordinary crime.
Of course the reason is because god or X or Y or national security or Z but they'll do it and we'll believe their reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/pgp_at_30/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
[4] https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-the-cyphe...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094627
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329368
Everyone has rights or no one has rights
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:13e33abf-...
Besides that, how about educating people on how to do exactly that: Set up their own chat service.
That would put control in the hands of those people who are not only responsible for protecting children but also have the most leverage to do that: The parents.
It won't.
I can only conclude that some utterly dystopian tech needs to be developed to uphold this law.
Why is everybody so focused on the "Oh this is so bad!"... What if this law passes? It's completely impossible right?
And if I do use encryption, am I a criminal now? Will they come after me, hit me with a $5 wrench [0] to force me to give up my keys? Only to find me telling my wife I love her with that special feeling of nobody else listening in? You know, like from my mouth to her ear. As we can do at home? Will they soon start to listen in on my home to prevent key exchange parties with my friends? I find the (imagined) consequences of enforcing this law insane. I just don't see it happening in this society. And if it does happen, society will be very different.
> And if it does happen, society will be very different.
Indeed, but I barely recognise our society from 20 years ago when having a palmtop made you a weirdo.
emphasis mine.
If anyone comes up with such a solution, he will achieve two goods:
- protect children
- remove a motive for surveilence
1. Honeypots. Special agents sit online pretending to be children. The abusers found captured immediately, real time. This requires very quick legal aid channels between countries and organizations. To prevent the abusers from anonymizing (e.g. Tor), strong identification is needed in chats and communication systems - ID card or passport. That's a strong requirement, but better than surveillance, probably.
2. Strong identification of children. At least, children should be reliably identified by chat systems, and all communication with them should require the other party to be strongly identified. Or even full recording of communication, but only when communicating with children. By default chat system assumes user is a child, and to be off the record, user has to prove very reliably he is not a child (and the other side of the communication is a proven grown up as well).
3. AI-generated child abuse videos. Real children not harmed, perverts are satisfied. Although, people enjoying child abuse content deserve punishment anyway, probably. Also, encouraging production of such content increases the danger for normal people (including children) to be exposed to this content. However, the exposure possibility problem exists anyway.
The last 8 or so years has taught me otherwise.
When you are for free speech, you have to actively protect that with which you disagree. That’s the only way it works.
If you don’t, someone will eventually come for what you think should be protected…and there will be nobody left to defend it.
Consider the logic that a government has an ever-greater interest in promoting its Nation as quintessentially democratic the more antidemocratic that it becomes.
In this case, superficial public participation and the government's elusive visible validity scale together.
Whereas in the archetype of a truly democratic society (I say archetype because it may not exist), the government arguably has a motivation to discourage the promotional image of and participation in democracy.
Because in this case, democratic participation is an actual threat to power.
This theory only holds for nations that have any democratic pretense. Which likely has more to do with foreign policy than anything else.
How many Western Nations fall over themselves to align themselves with democracy?
People are elected sure, but they are all pretty much socialists, it’s not like you can really choose.
Candidates who have different worldview don’t have access to media.
Oh, and last time we got a say about whether we wanted to wanted to abide by the European constitution we said « no » at 55%
Apparently it did not make any difference whatsoever.
European countries should be treated like anything else.
A bunch of people who seized power and use democracy as a way decentralised power so it’s harder to overturn
Switzerland and Costa Rica might be candidates, but I don't know enough to be sure.
LatAm there are a good few places left where you have a paradisiac nature/weather and no psychopaths trying to control your every move.