Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance
dannymekic.com
dannymekic.com
Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit.
To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing.
So far it sounds good but after the dust settles the same politicians and lobbysts bring the thing again this time with another name or sneakily group it into some other law. Perhaps something bad happened and that momentarily gained public support, of course with lots of emotions involved and very little context given to the common folk.
The politicians and lobbyists are literally being paid for this. You are not. They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.
In which world do you live?
This theory presumes that when people have more money, their desire to have even more money diminishes. This presumption is not true.
(It might be somewhat true for common sorts of people who find pleasure in simple things and only want enough money to satisfy their basic material needs (food, shelter, medical care). But it's definitely not true when you're talking about people with high levels of ambition, which includes virtually all politicians.)
"No abortion after 49 days."
"No abortion after 50 days."
"No hospital shall be used for abortions."
"Doctors cannot perform abortions."
It's not an easy thing to do but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. Maybe something like defining it as a limit on the total sum amount of text in all laws?
A limit on the amount of new laws that could be passed would make it much easier for citizens to keep up with the proposed changes and oppose any they disagreed with; they couldn't be ddossed by the legislators.
I think for reality we should still remove power out of politicians
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission
Similar system is for WHO. They are not elected organisations, yet shape our laws. This bother quite a lot of people and don't bring a trust in system.
The government cabinet has some more democratic legitimacy in so far as that they generally comprise of elected representatives.
So your statement is a non-sequitur.
No idea why don't bother to read the wikipedia articles for all of 5 minutes before repeating objectively false things.
Besides, even if the defense secretary is an MP, he wasn't elected on a platform of national security by the population. So if there's a non sequitur anywhere, it's in application of any democratic legitimacy to the job of holding a significant cabinet post by winning the votes of a few ten thousand people for commons seat.
When it's established that they don't, they end up getting ousted (as happens with no confidence motions).
Thats fine because the EU commission also doesn't pass laws. It proposes them and the EU parliament & comittee pass them.
If you want all European institutions to be directly elected you essentially want the EU to no longer be a confederation and instead be a federation.
National governments having power in EU affairs is by design because otherwise the EU would never have formed.
victory of the executive branch
EU should be more lightweight a kind of European (United) Nations.
The European Parliament who approves the laws is directly elected. And as noted by sibling, the Commission indirectly also is.
I'd kill to see The Machinery of Freedom by D. Friedman in real life
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...
"Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland."
There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
If you want people to vote meaningfully on issues, you have to empower them to cast the very best vote they could cast, and demarchy is basically the only way this could be done practically in a large society. The concept of a general election or general referendum is aberrant.
If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrators would have to provide all that.
That would be bureaucracy in the literal sense of the word.
Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Ac...
In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.
Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.
It's the same thing as with elections. You can trust the elections without trusting the government running them, because the party you vote has its own people overseeing the elections. And it's always a party you vote, even in systems where you nominally cast your vote for an individual candidate, because individuals acting on their own are too weak to challenge the system.
The experts you are aware of may be members of a political party, participating in the internal processes of the party to varying degrees. It's one way to be an active citizen. You usually don't know that, because it's not your business to know. Political affiliation is a private matter, after all.
This isn't necessarily true. Politicians aren't selected for understanding; their ability to obtain and retain power is entirely due to their ability to attract voters and make deals with other politicians. If you assume a normal distribution of traits, then when people are selected based on scoring a high percentile in just one trait (in this case, political charisma), on average they'll be worse at other traits than if you'd selected a similar number of people completely randomly.
People have done some research on that in Finland. Due to mandatory military service, the vast majority of men have taken the same intelligence and personality tests. The research found that male politicians performed better in the intelligence test and were more likely to have favorable personality traits than men in the general population. The effect was already present among the candidates in local elections. The higher up you went, the more significant the effect became.
In real life these people do not produce legislation/recommendations that are of less quality than politicians.
I recommend a book called "open democracy" that goes into detail about this kind of decision making processes. The OCED has also done a lot of work and has a few reports on the matter too, if you look at their recommendations for "the future of democracy".
Some big experiments in this area have been done in France as recent as a few months ago, in Ireland, in Iceland and the European union as a whole did a very big one a few years ago.
This reminds me of Varoufakis wanting to take the issue to the Greeks, during the Greek bailout negotiations, being told that he was "putting [his] people in a difficult situation of having to make a pivotal decision on complicated matters". He replied "Yes, it's called democracy".
of corrupting lobbyists, that the main thing they are missing.
The average age in the Senate is what, 65? The percentage of people with degrees in science, architecture or engineering is like 10%.
These people are not keeping up with changes in the world, they are not more informed than an average Joe and are definitely less capable of processing new information.
There is no formal qualification required to become a politician and they are not selected based on intellectual merit. In fact my local politician is a ex-convict.
How could the US collectively decide the eligible population of representative candidates for a demarchy?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
> New Law: "Propaganda is illegal"
> Turnout: 93% for 5% against, 2% abstained
> Law approved.
Well boys we did it, propaganda is no more.
There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition.
The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict).
If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.
For evidence of this, consider how many suburban boomers are eager to hire illegal immigrants to do lawn work around their McMansion for less than minimum wage. Most would probably tell you that minimum wage laws are good or that illegal immigrants should be deported (one or the other, depending on what side of the aisle they're on...) but when push comes to shove they both choose the lowest bidding contractor to do their yardwork. After all, they aren't yard-workers, just like most Californians aren't uber drivers.
Second trouble is the dictatorship of the majority - you'll never get minority rights or issues of the disenfranchised addressed.
This happens a lot in the US in the primary elections. Everyone complains about the poor quality of Republican candidates and how they wish there were better options but the primary voter has already limited the field.
Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023...
But it sounds like you don't actually understand anyone's views, at is often the case for young people. There's just your initial reaction (correct) and "fear" (incorrect). Emotional politics at its greatest.
There is a better way: Checks and balances.
Suppose that in order to pass anything of this nature it had to go through more steps: The union legislature had to agree, then a majority of the member state legislatures had to agree, then the general public had to vote in favor of it too. But to repeal it, it only takes one of those.
That doesn't make it impossible for something terrible to happen -- in waves of populism everyone will vote for something terrible because to do otherwise is seen as siding with the "enemy" -- but it helps. Raises the threshold before something dangerous makes it into law.
And it's the easier path to repeal which is the thing we most lack. It should be much easier for bad laws to be removed.
We're really lucky that slavery was mostly abolished before we regressed to this stage.
Full disclosure, I’m originally from a EU country but I am now a resident in Switzerland.
Everyday I feel blessed to be living in a country where my fellow humans are in charge and not some ignorant fools who’s primary skill is to elbow themselves to power.
Of course, they'll always have an interest in enriching themselves and their friends
In my opinion this sentence straight up does not make sense. The EU and the US federal government are dramatically different, you can't even really compare their roles meaningfully. The EU is, and behaves like, a club of seperate individual nations. The US federal government is a real national government in ways the EU simply isn't.
Even restricting attention to the EU it doesn't even really make sense. Which part of the EU are you complaining about? You're writing this in response to a proposal from the EU commission, so I guess you're pissed with them, but the commission can't make its proposals into law without parliament voting on it and the European Council agreeing. The EU parliament is (overwhelmingly) unlikely to pass this proposal into law and the European Council also has big problems with it.
This proposal is essentially one country (Sweden) sending a particuarly idiotic comissioner (Ylva Johansson), and the rest of the EU apparatus resisting the shit she is trying to push.
True. And because of this, you need to increase the incentives for your side: create a website that lists all politicians that are in favour of the dubious law by their individual names. Use a wording for these politicians that is not punishable by libel, but near to it. Even after such a law becomes passed, make sure that the politicians who voted in favour of it will spend the rest of their lives deeply regretting their decision in sorrow so that hardly any future politician will dare to vote for similar laws.
Summarizingly: do everything in your power that the reputation of *every* politician who voted in favour of the law becomes *destroyed* in important segments of the society.
Of course, you’re not the first person to think of it - in fact, many people have tried this strategy, it’s one of the most common ones in politics. “Attack ads” are an example of it. And they’re effective, to an extent.
But they also have a major negative aspect, which is that they reduce the importance of reputation - it becomes an unreliable indicator, because almost every politician’s reputation ends up “destroyed” as you put it.
The problem is that people who disagree with you are just as capable of slandering the politicians you agree with as you are for the ones you disagree with. So you end up with a race to the bottom, with accusations becoming more and more hysterical, completely drowning any real signal, and teaching people to ignore it all as noise.
NIMBYs are usually suburbanites, and if they're in a smaller municipality they can exert a large amount of control over the city government and planning process. The auto dependent single family suburb has been heavily propagandized and ingrained in American culture that many times no one questions it, and those advocating for some walkable, or mixed use areas are in the minority.
Just look at California, the state requires every city adopt and update a multipart plan for various purposes. One of those parts is called the "Housing element", it requires cities to plan and zone for a minimum amount of growth and affordable housing. over the last year or two many of these plans have come up for renewal and lots of the smaller (and especially more conservative) cities have been reluctant, or out right refused to meet the states requirements. They want to keep their car oriented suburban small community, affordability be Damned.
The state did pass this fun law that created this thing called "the builder's remedy". Where if a city does not have a compliant housing element the city loses its discretion and must approve any permit that meets its building code, sans any density requirements. And these rights vest, so even if the city latter approves a compliment those builders can still utilize those permits. (Carrot and stick approach to getting cities to comply)
But this is only after decades of the California housing affordablility crisis growing and yimby advocates fighting for less restrictive zoning.
https://openscopestudio.com/californias-zoning-holiday-what-...
TL;DR NIMBYs are ussally the majority (or at least the louds and most engaged).
The minaret ban is popular within the actual Swiss population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_directive_on_the_pate...
https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/20/patents_vote/
I had to look it up because it sounded bizarre, but it's true.
They sent it through the fisheries Commission because the board that had the responsibility for it wasn't due to meet for another 6 months.
I guess some people care deeply about the details of which commission sends the proposed legislation to the parliament to be debated & amended / rejected, but in reality I think it doesn't really matter. In either case the correct thing for the commission to do was send the legislation to the parliament.
This is as good as it gets when money has any influence on policy.
I agree with this but I think the problem is bigger than "capitalism" and "democracy" (quotes because it seems none of us can agree on these -- to be fair -- vague definitions). Capital is more than money, and capital is what is abused. Capital can be your house, where you live, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and so on.
Regardless of ruling systems there are no (other than short lived) cases where this imbalance does not exist and creep larger. The reason I hate these "yep that's capitalism for yah" comments is not that there aren't things to criticize about capitalism (if you can't criticize a system you're in trouble) but because it hinders the ability to have this conversation. I'm sure the conditions will relax as we approach post scarcity but there is no possible means to have true equality on all levels. Capitalism, socialism, whatever, all need to have a real discussion about how to place people into power while minimizing the ability to influence those people while maximizing the ability to do good for people. Which some of these seem to be in direct opposition from one another.
A part I see clearly missing is the temporal factor in all of this. It does not matter if you elect someone who is a saint if the environment will corrupt them. Nor is there a way to have an environment that is not rapidly changing. So how do you create a system that can adapt (be iterative) but not be influenced by those with more power/capital? If we can't have this discussion it doesn't matter much which system we choose because the truth is that you can't maximize both because they're not orthogonal.
https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...
In a year or two, they'll raise it again, except then they'll know what the opposition thinks and what arguments resonated with the public, so they'll be smarter.
"They can't bring it up again for five years!" -- also not serious. They can resurrect the least controversial parts and call it something else.
The only answer is to fire every single person associated with this, such that they can never work for the EU in any guise, ever again. I'm not optimistic about that happening.
(1) massive retaliation, i.e. everyone connected with it is fired and can never work for EU again
(2) a Constitutional amendment, forcing a supermajority referendum result for any such laws in the future.
(1) unlikely. But imagine that the EC put out a proposal mandating a swastika underneath the EU flag, everywhere. Most likely those people would all be blacklisted permanently. So it's not inconceivable.
(2) probably doesn't exist in the EU, but maybe it's in a bylaw somewhere.
I think the issue is of complexity and energy. The world and a lot of these problems are often extremely complex and there are no optimal solutions. There is always slap, noise, and limits. Many of these things are also hard to understand and take a lot of time and energy to actually understand what is even seemingly simple.
But the cost I believes to a lot of apathy. For example, how difficult is it to switch people to tools like Firefox or Signal? The noise is quite high and non-experts will not know how to navigate this. Even mentioning these two tools will cause controversy on sites like this with people pointing out the imperfections. But the truth is that these always exist (same thing politicians exploit) and the complaints just make non-experts confused. Yeah, there are things better than Signal but there's no tool that is better for the masses and communication systems rely on people being on the same platform. The network effect.
Which getting into the network effect is the quite disappointing part of many things in politics. We have a lot of people that operate under the notion "if you don't like it, then don't use/participate/whatever." But this is not a realistic notion. As an example, I've used Firefox for over a decade and a lot has been to simply push against the Chrome domination. But that happened anyways and the thing is that Chrome still took over and Google has a lot of control over the internet. The truth is the differences in browsers isn't really that large, but we become quite passionate about defending our decisions. The same is exactly true for political concepts. We can point out flaws in other systems/ideas but do not weigh these equally when they are the thing we chose vs the other option. But the entire landscape is exceptionally complex and there are no optimal solutions. Until we can at least remember that it's difficult to solve anything.
This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck.
Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm.
But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.
It won't fix it, but it'll help.
The problem with this is then the only people that are able to meet with / influence your representatives are the people that are independently wealthy enough to travel to them and take the time off from work to do so. If you can't pay someone to speak on your behalf, and you can't afford to take the time to speak for yourself, how do you get heard? Are you personally willing to fly out to your representatives offices every time something comes up that the EFF lobbies against or for on your behalf?
"here have 200k and swing that bill my way". That's just borderline bribery.
>"here have 200k and swing that bill my way". That's just borderline bribery.
Agreed, and if you have evidence of that happening I'm sure there are plenty of people at the FBI and the FEC that would be quite interested in seeing it. But that's also not anywhere near the same as paying someone to lobby on your behalf.
There should ideally be a rule that if an idea doesn't pass it can't be brought up again for 4 years. If defeated again, not in 8 years. And so on, each defeat doubles the number of years it's not allowed to be discussed again. Still not perfect but at least slow them down.
I did the activism. I did the walk so I'm going to talk the talk here.
The problem is only an utterly microscopic number of people will actually do anything. A larger proportion will, to some degree inform themselves of the issue but still do nothing. An even larger number will simply complain on a forum and call for other people to get stuff done but do nothing (looking at you@irusensei).
It takes a remarkably small number of people to make a difference, but IRL the number who will do something is even smaller so nothing happens. Those that do, like me, end up exhausted and despairing, feeling we've wasted a fair chunk of our lives, and had there been just a few other people willing to involve themselves things might be different, but that didn't happen.
If you want change it's there for the taking. But you won't.
[1] Despite what people say, this works, if slowly.
If what you say is true, It could be very persuasive to inform about the expected impact a single person could have by just doing X.
For example, describing how contacting MPs work, why would they care about what I say? giving a specific example, with rough estimates of number of people that need to contact or if it's more important the words chosen to achieve impact
I would be interested in reading a good blog post describing the expected impact of activism in politics, especially on topics that I really care about, like privacy and freedom.
I want to know what powers I have to change the things I care!
Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.
If only for this reason, we must stop targeted advertising and messaging, before it is too late. Because, for a minimal social and political alignment, everybody must be allowed to be informed of what is on the market, that of goods and that of ideas. Modern democracy is built on mass media and communications and not on in-group messaging and arbitrage deals. (At least, in the more idealistic and not-entirely-cynical version of the narrative.)
Governmental organisations buying advertisement is the real culprit. They would find a way to do it even without targeted advertising, so let's cut it out completely.
For example:
- buying space only in some paper/digital magazines and customizing the message for each of them
- placing posters only in some locations, e.g. capital city areas with significant universities, or business parks predominantly used by organizations funded by the EU
- sending letters to selected people
...
but we’re not discussing slippers. we’re discussing democracy. the EU should be forbidden from targeted advertising because of their democratic mandate.
It's especially annoying since many people who vote in the EU are a bit more... extreme? Like when you're marketing to "Beligum" or "NL" whatever... the people who've been there multiple generations are the right wing parties.
The folks obeying the spirit of the laws are like the students in America, oft not registered locally.
It's a feedback loop of the same sort who Brexited being sent other things in their feeds.
I agree with the author:
>If there is insufficient support for a proposed legislation, the only proper democratic response is to withdraw it
I'm tired of this fraternity brother model of public policy -- ask until you hear the "yes" you wanted from those who didn't block you from being heard at all.
The voting was then changed so that actual votes where made public in favor of more transparency. While it did indeed make the vote more open and visible to the public, it had the effect of showing lobbyists exactly which members of Congress were voting for and against the lobbyists' interests. This in turn led to funding going to the pro-lobby Congress members and the vicious cycle accelerates.
This video lecture goes into much more detail about the process and the impact that this had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg
As a post script, I forget if it's in the video or somewhere else but experiments in real political bodies (I believe it was the Italian parliament) with both a public and secret vote for the same legal bill led to two completely different outcomes.
Thanks for sharing!
At the opposite, the European Commission is probably the worse that we can have. It is totally corrupted (see the vice president with bags of cash given by the Qatar and co) or at least morally corrupted by lobbies. And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way.
Good things to wonder is why America got shared access to all financial transactions of European citizens but the opposite is not true.
this is a very tired meme, they have been nominated and scrutinized by the people elected in what you called probably the best thing that we have in Europe i.e. the EU Parliament
edit: elections solve none of the problems people think they solve. proof is governments are corrupt even though they are elected by the people. if the objections is "we can't let them chose because they will meet in a room and exchange money for the position" well, how is it different from "they will meet in the same room exchanging the same money to decide who you can vote or not"?
elections are a consensus strategy, they do not solve social and political issues.
yes, in 2019 the Parliament were allowed to pick from a list of exactly one person (selected by another part of the EU)
it would be like electing the people in the HR department because the board of directors cast votes.
The idea that they would be legitimate because of being nominated by someone elected by proxy looks like to be a broken model in my opinion.
Especially, because, never an European had to vote for someone that had in their program or proposal anything said about the person's that will be nominated at this position. So this is different, in my opinion, of a model like US.
If that's the main objection, the POTUS is not elected by the people, is it undemocratic?
The result is a bunch of dodgy appointments in exchange for political favours. The whole process reeks of corruption, but it’s tolerable because the Lords don’t have the power to originate or block law (although they can frustrate the process).
The appointed EU Commission is much worse. The appointment process for commissioners always seems to select failed/tainted/alcoholic nobodies. The current EU Commission Chief is a failed German politician whose stewardship of the defence ministry was condemned from all sides.
And the EU Commissioners have a LOT more power than the UK’s Lords. For example, the EU Commission is responsible for coming up with all new EU Directives, setting budgets and representing the EU internationally.
The European Parliament is a charade of representative democracy, in that it waves through pretty much all legislation that the Commission comes up with, and if it votes “no” it tends to get asked to vote again until it says “yes” (see Copyright Directive, 2019)
how elections can fix that?
suppose politicians are chosen directly by the people, a corruptor could simply pay the people who decides the single candidates for each electoral college or could buy the votes directly. it has happened before and it's also way cheaper and easier than getting an appointment in some room godfather style.
> For example, the EU Commission is responsible for coming up with all new EU Directives, setting budgets and representing the EU internationally
that's the norm everywhere. technicians make the rules, the Parliament job is to discuss and ratify them.
In Italy laws are not written by the Parliament, but there are so called "commissions" that work on budget, directives, proposals etc
it's always been like that since we invented modern democracies.
Corruption is hard to conceal if your strategy is to literally approach a majority of the electorate and try to bribe them directly!
> that's the norm everywhere. technicians make the rules, the Parliament job is to discuss and ratify them.
In that case, the question is: is the EU Commission staffed with good technicians?
My field is computer science and I can assure you the EU's digital laws are egregiously incompetant.
European Parliament literally does not have right of initiative.
Yeah, she was also behind the infanous cyber resilience act!
The corrupt politician in question, Eva Kaili, was not a vice-president of the EC, but of the European Parliament. She was elected.
That sort of undermines your argument.
A lot of things are unequal between US and Europe. Eg., US bearing most of the cost of Europe's defense.
Euroskepticism is a virus, but OTOH the Five Stars had a good idea: politics should not be a profession.
I'd love to see more folks do good work then pivot to entertainment if they want bags of Qatari cash in a way that doesn't involve destabilization
It was the vice president of the Parliament. Btw she was the vice president in charge of AI and Blockchain because ... reasons (she didnt have any qualifications)
The problem with both EC and EP is the lack of accountability , it's a very indirect system
I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?
My interest is not one sided. I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. But I also have an intuition that institutional privacy for a government is harmful to democracy. I think most would argue that a reasonable amount of governmental privacy is important to national security. I tend to favor the bare minimum. Most people I know disagree with me on that. I enjoy exploring both sides and trying to move beyond intuition for my position.
Any links or references to reasoned arguments on all sides are appreciated.
I am strongly in the pro individual privacy camp FWIW, but I'm bored so I'll take a stab at steel-manning the premise that governments are entitled to privacy while individual people are not:
One of the obligations of governments is military defense. Governments are required to protect their people and the reality of war necessitates the keeping of some secrets. Failure to recognize this reality would constitute an abdication of their duty as a government. On the other hand, private persons are not permitted to wage war (this is why governments are obliged to defend their people, because they forbid people from doing it themselves.) Since people are not allowed to wage war on their own, the "realities of war" justification for governments keeping secrets doesn't justify people keeping personal secrets.
Rebuttal to the above: throughout history and particularly in the 20th century, tens of millions of people were killed by their own government. While governments may need to keep some secrets to effectively defend their population against external threats, people also need the right to keep secrets from their government to defend themselves against that domestic threat, which is every bit as real and concerning as the external threats.
Counter point: You characterize military actions as "defense", but personal actions as "war". If individuals are not permitted to defend themselves, neither should governments be allowed to wage war.
In fact, individuals are allowed to defend themselves. Even something as simple as a door lock is a means of defense. Are they not allowed to keep their lock combination secret? I think this is the type of secrecy most people are willing to afford the government. They don't want everyone to know the launch codes for the nuclear weapons.
But let's take some different examples. I think that the government should have to disclose how much they pay to develop a new park. I don't think I should have to disclose how much I paid for my new patio. But if I don't disclose that information, how can we be sure the lumber supply store is paying its fair share of taxes?
I think the government should have to disclose that they produced and distributed specific propaganda. I don't think I should have to disclose the same. Is that fair?
I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to cooperate. It could be positive pressures like getting positive feedback from peers, or negative feedback in the form of shame from peers.
Authenticity is important here, to ensure that one's peers can provide accurate feedback (both positive and negative). Anonymity breaks this model, allowing people to pretend to have one viewpoint in order to reap the positive rewards, while simultaneously allowing them to dodge the negative feedback for antisocial behaviors.
You needn't look further than the behavior of pseudonymous commenters on the Internet to see this play out. So many "normal" people are capable of being complete assholes online because they're able to hide those actions from those who can impose social consequences.
I mean, if I found out a close friend was the kind of person who demonstrates the kind of casual cruelty that online trolls exude, I might stop being their friend.
That's not too say that the benefits of privacy are all bad. Vulnerable people certainly benefit greatly from privacy, especially in adversarial environments... But perhaps the answer in less adversarial environments (i.e. direct/indirect democracies) more often isn't "more privacy", but "less judgement"?
The other framing for this question involves trust. Anonymity undermines trust, but trust is _required_ for coordinated action. From this perspective isn't pretty obvious that democracies and privacy pursue opposing goals.
Put differently, when it comes to voting, I don't think it's a good idea to incentivize lying--or worse still, actively promote it as a positive. If making votes public causes negative externalities, perhaps there are solutions other than "let people lie about how they vote"?
This quote from George Bernard Shaw highlights the value of some "antisocial" behavior and seems like a rather democratic ideal:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Some people can be publicly unreasonable. We have unpleasant names and consequences for such people, as you demonstrate. Other people can be privately unreasonable.
If all progress depends on the unreasonable man, isn't there value in facilitating cowards to be unreasonable? Obviously a great deal of damage is also done by unreasonable people. But I suspect that the balance of a few heros outweighs the many villains and it is better to err on the side of individual privacy.
I just wonder why I promote individual privacy while discouraging government privacy. What arguments can be made for or against that seeming contradiction?
The most important one should be: Every citizen is free to express his opinion.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
And if their opinion is that, all Jews are subhuman and have to be exterminated? (real life example)
Most EU countries have "hate speech" laws explicitly banning hate speech such as Nazis and Anti-Semites. Nobody sheds any tears over their opinions being restricted, and nobody should. Debating with pidgeons doesn't work.
Now, I agree in practice many (most?) people using this phrase don't mean it in just that sense, and actually mean it as a call for the abolition of the State of Israel. But it doesn't seem impossible that some people who use it actually do mean it in just the literal sense I suggest. The phrase is inherently ambiguous–which is one of the reasons why I think the potential criminalisation of an ambiguous political slogan (one which I myself would never use or endorse) is rather problematic.
I agree that we shouldn’t criminalize political slogans.
The meaning of a phrase is not fixed by its origin. A lot of people using the phrase today weren’t even born then. I’m sure many of them mean it in the exact same sense that the PLO meant it in 1964-but can we be sure that everyone who currently uses it means it that way? I don’t think we can, it seems entirely plausible that some of its users have reinterpreted it to refer to a more moderate position
Once you make it a crime to express certain opinions, all opinions are up for negotiation. It's not hard to imagine an ultra conservative getting elected and what that would do to discussion around LGBT, for instance.
Noam Chomsky - Should Neo-Nazis Be Allowed Free Speech?
You should be a bit more careful about your word choice, since making hate speech a crime would make Neo-Nazis criminals.
I also realize that there is no clear demarcation between speech and criminal action and that my position cannot be upheld in the strict sense.
Nevertheless, I seem to be orders of magnitude more liberal than the mainstream about what is permissible speech. And I continue to find the extent to which speech is monitored and regulated disturbing, and it's getting worse.
The STASI (GDR) were amateurs in comparison.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/swiss-lgbtq-groups-...
Wrong, wrong and in my experience the people most similar to pigeons (e.g. shitting on the table rather than debating) are the young teens on reddit with vaguely leftist ideas with no foundation (proper communists are generally good debaters), the actual heriditarians and ethnic nationalists might be wrong, but they do try and actually debate rather than insult.
you are, but if you commit a crime in doing it you go to trial.
which is fair.
edit: libel is a crime punishable by the law, everywhere in the west. Doesn't mean you are forbidden to say what you want.
democracy without a justice system as a counter power is not democracy as we intend them in modern era.
This confuses me.
Saying someone is "free to do X" normally means that X is allowed by law. Or else what could it possibly mean?
That is to say "free to do X (under the law)" is a subset of "free to do X".
it's the basis of every modern society.
many things allowed by the law are not really "free". police forces are allowed to use weapons, that doesn't mean they can shoot randomly whenever they feel like it.
Any nation can have stronger free speech protections if it chooses to and the EU bodies can’t prevent it.
Your argument is nonsense.
A and B implies B. Scan all chats and only look for CSAM implies scan all chats.
Moreoever, will the government actually just look for CSAM and ignore everything else? Does this law punish the government for looking for things other than CSAM? If not, then there's no reason to believe that "only look for CSAM" is true as long as "scan all chats" is true.
You can see it with all these laws that bypass the judiciary system when censoring content on the internet. It's not a judge who decides to ban or not Russia Today or Twitter.
This is basically Michels' iron law of oligarchy unfolding under our eyes. They create the laws, they execute them and they punish if you don't follow.
I think it’s this hegemonic power to undermine fundamental rights of not only europeans clandestinely through convoluted bureaucracy and media suppression and under the pretext of child protection, even more harrowing than the proposal itself. It is absolutely important to fight against child porn and other criminal activities, but mass surveillance is not the answer.
America is also experiencing similar problems of censorship and hate speech laws, the difference is in America censorship and hate speech laws are banned by the First Amendment and thus there's at least a chance that the Supreme Court can restore Democracy. In Europe, there is no hope of Democracy being restored because there is no legal protection of the freedom of speech.
Those two are not conflicting statements.
The excuse of reducing crime is just… an excuse
The state can absolute ban anything. It bans certain plants! This surveilance doesnt have to be 100%.
Big nets catch many fish but never all.
However, if you find a way to defeat this on a scale that matters like if too many people started using VPN then they'd just ban VPN, too.
Goto 0.
You're defending the ability to commit crimes because the law isn't perfect. The law _cannot_ be perfect, so no law will ever satisfy your requirement.
Following this line of reasoning to it's conclusion: because all laws are imperfect, and criminals can always find ways around them, your position is that no laws should be enacted.
After all, you can't have crime if nothing is criminalized, right?
What correlation is implied?
On a purely objective level, the bank made the wrong decision, as it backfired rather badly. On the other hand, Farage as a neoliberal-populist should have been thrilled to be fired by his bank. Capitalism in action!
I don't disagree with your broader point, but it's nothing new. There are always things that you can't say. The creator of this website wrote an essay on the subject 20 years ago and it reads as true today as it did then. Before it was forbidden to say bad things about LGBT, it was forbidden to say good things about LGBT, indeed in many parts of the world that is still the case.
The thing that has changed is that while in the past people's political opinions would be something shared in private company, now we voluntarily broadcast them to the world. So people are more likely to find the limits of what you can't say today rather than in decades gone by.
The difference is that I actually read their report, you didn’t.
There is a fine line between criticism and insult that is entirely up to the discretion that enforces laws.
And with this new law, we won't have to worry about Meta selling our data, the governments will take care of that.
It's looks like history seems to repeat itself. It's a just a matter of time. Social credit, the Ministry of Truth and whatever else they can think of, that's just around the corner.
But it's for the children ammaright?
"Undermining Democracy: The European Commission".
The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer.
I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be the good guys. But the EP is tiny compared to the EC and the EC is pulling the strings: the EP is supposed to bring some kind of democracy but there's none.
All these rules are benefitting people in power and they're all ever more intrusive.
For example the MiCA one (Markets in Digital Assets), which is not at all only about cryptocurrencies/crypto-tokens (it's also about upcoming centralized "euro coin" emitted by EU central banks), is sheer horror too. I've read it all and it's madness. Insanity.
It's all about control. Complete, total and utter control over every single aspect of EU citizens' lives.
They want to know everything about everyone: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Those who believe it's "for our own good" are out of their minds.
But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.
Well, I actually do.
Who said anything about billionaires? Many people see the benefit of a more vibrant growing economy in the US vs the EU and at the end of the day, end up personally benefiting from it to with (much) higher wages.
I'm gonna be a bit crass here to convey my point. I currently live in a "shithole" country, and I'd still not want to live in the EU in comparison. I've had this discussion with many people that came back, with family that lives there, with my wife seeing if we want to move there "for our kids future", and always it ends up being a "No", or "let's see if it looks better next year".
Sure, maybe there is a pocket here, a pocket there, or a city/state/province etc that I would want to live in, or is "Okay". But the rest looks positively horrifying.
For starters, I don't want to live in a place where I either have to be ridiculously wealthy or a slave my entire life just to own land that isn't a tiny capsule apartment in an overcrowded city. Land I probably won't be able to do what I want on exactly, anyways.
Anywho, I'm biased. I see Europe as the "pathetic" and "weak" West that is basically slowly killing itself out of some sort of collective cultural guilt for who knows what. It's killing itself in the name of some noble good, whilst the world filled with state-level bullies is destroying the world. No thank you.
I can confirm this. One of the myriad of reasons that made me leave the EU for good.
Land "ownership" is a joke in the EU. Worse, it's actually a scam: if you own property in most of the western EU, you have about the same rights a tenant would have.
Even now I don't agree with your assessment that European countries are much better at most things. Even the glorified "free" healthcare turns out to be neither free nor universal when you actually get to use it.
Or is the tyranny here stopping you from leaving?
Also all this just applies to the actual good parts of each region. There's no point in comparing rural Alabama to Serbia cause we already know they're both shitholes.
More like slow addition of smothering layers of bureaucracy upon bureaucracy until your breathing space is severely limited. Combined with our ghastly demographics, I think our growth is a thing of the past.
In many individual EU countries including mine, something like Chat Control 2.0 would not fly and the attention of the public would be very negative; especially east of the Iron Curtain, memories of authoritarian regimes are too strong for people to trust their politicians with this kind of power.
Brussels is distant enough that EU politicians can pull off such legislation without the general public being aware of it.
The distance between the EC and a random European is way too big. Even bigger than the distance between the Feds and a random American in USA.
Which, to be frank, was totally expectable and the fact that the system wasn't prepared enough for this behavior constitutes a significant weakness.
But few people, including the media, pay real attention to anything that happens in Brussels.
some of us have managed to, it is possible
> But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.
it will eventually, it always does
It‘s just like the government is not elected in many countries but instead the parliament is elected and that votes for a prime minister who chooses his ministers.
I would even argue that we sometimes even have too much democracy (well rather too many levels I guess). We would actually need better legislative techniques and a more coherent vision. The EC and their DGs are often understaffed and underqualified IMHO.
The EP s vice president for Blockchain and AI was found to take bribes from qatar last year.
Can you tell me what is the correct number of laws? What's your threshold? And what happens when a new thing appears / enters the mainstream, do you have to remove an old law first before creating a new one?
As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Should we have to remove e.g. the rail packages to be able to legislate on them? Or screw it, anarchy?
> But the EP is tiny compared to the EC and the EC is pulling the strings: the EP is supposed to bring some kind of democracy but there's none.
You know that the European Parliament has to vote on EC proposals, right? And if they refuse them, they don't pass.
Why the heck is any new law needed at all for copyright? The only accusation is that LLMs did not respect current copyright laws, not that the current copyright law is insufficient. Specifically, there was a commonly used corpus of pirated copyright material (books3) that was used to train many LLMS. Its hosting was withdrawn when challenged by copyright holders. That's the system working as intended.
Does Microsoft violate copyright by training a model on copyrighted works? A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does?
Why the heck do people think laws should be warped to try to be applied to things the writers of the law couldn't even conceive of? Are planes regulated the same ways that cars and horses before were?
None of those have anything to do with LLMs which was the issue stated in your original post.
> A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does?
Yes.
China is returning to at least a superficially softer version of Maoism. Russia has returned to Stalinism. The Middle East never had much of a liberal tradition but it’s certainly not gained any ground. The US is flirting with populist strong man rule with Trump and RFK. South America seems to keep oscillating between authoritarian socialism and their own forms of right wing strong man rule. Not sure about Africa but from afar it still seems dominated by strong men or illiberal theocratic states.
The UK and EU felt like an exception but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are trending toward undemocratic bureaucracies in service to either the bureaucracy itself or the powerful.
Surveillance is everywhere and is barely challenged. After all we get cute videos on social media and apparently cute videos are more important than freedom or human rights.
One problem might be that we teach everyone about the dangers of fanatical explosive totalitarian movements like Hitlerism and Stalinism but not enough about “softer” creeping authoritarianism that is less easy to identify or oppose. Both are a risk but the strong man cult type is easier to mobilize people against.
The whole public opinion shifted towards security over everything, unfortunately. As a result, the institutions follow.
This is entirely the problem in my opinion. When you talk to Europeans you'll notice they tend to be very concerned about the dangers of things like extremism and hate speech, but not at all about state authoritarianism. But why is that? I'd argue that today your life is much more likely to be ruined because you hold the wrong social opinions or political views rather than your neighbour denying the holocaust[1].
And there is an ugly righteousness developing here too. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to defend people's right to dislike Islam or be homophobic, for example. A lot of Europeans genuinely believe these views are so evil that people deserve to be punished for holding them.
But how can I really blame them? The media here constantly reminds us about the dangers of terrorist and and extremism. It constantly tells us how evil it is to hold certain opinions. And most people don't reason about this stuff from first principles. They just assume that the extremism is a threat so end up contributing to the problem by demanding the state does more to suppress our freedoms.
It's difficult to see this getting better and if it did it would be because we put equal effort into warning about creeping authoritarianism. Obviously this isn't going to happen, but that is the solution.
[1] I'll note that I'm referring explicitly to the illegality of holocaust denialism here. I'm not talking about people who deny the holocaust and are planning to commit mass murder. The difference here is someone who holds unfavourable views vs someone who's genuinely a danger to the public.
---
Legal note: I do not support any hateful ideologies, but I do believe people should be free to express views which may be considered hateful. My comments are not intended to undermine how awful holocaust denialism is in any way.
Populist demagogues becoming dictators or the rise of fanatical cult ideologies are like hurricanes and tornadoes. They can start quickly, hit hard, and do a ton of damage. They are also easy to spot and there are known ways to respond to them.
Creeping bureaucratic authoritarianism and the slow erosion of democracy is like climate change. It ebbs and flows but mostly flows, but the trend is slow and on any given day it feels like everything is fine. By the time it gets bad enough to really hurt your democratic institutions are pretty far gone and the situation may not be easily recoverable.
They’re also not mutually exclusive problems. As climate change progresses you can get more and stronger hurricanes. In the same way the erosion of democracy and the growth of unchecked autocracy creates a situation that is ripe for the rise of demagogues.
Indeed, and I find it quite strange that it's usually the same people blindly defending Islam as are fighting homophobia. If they'd taken even a cursory glance at what Islam actually preaches, they'd see it's one of the most homophobic religions out there.
Of course, it has a structure, executive, etc, but essentially they are composed of representatives of the EU27 countries
The EU Commission President is nominated by the EU Council, which is itself comprised of the heads-of-state of the member states. The President is then confirmed by the EU Parliament, which is directly elected by voters. So far this seems straightforward.
However: the remaining Commission members are selected by the Council of the European Union (CotEU), which is apparently not the same thing as the EU Council! Except that the Commission President also gets a vote in their selection. I tried to understand how the CotEU members are accountable to the voting public, but frankly the Wikipedia article is too hard to understand. The elected Parliament does not appear to get a say in this part of the selection.
Then the Commission President selects the policy direction and assigns policy areas to the Commission members. The articles I found hint at the idea of consensus voting, but don't state it very explicitly. In any case, the President seems to have overwhelming authority within the Commission, given their role in selecting the members and the policy initiatives. At the same time, 26 out of 27 Commission members are selected by the CotEU and presumably the President depends on their good graces.
I assume this makes more sense to EU citizens, who must learn about it in school. In total, power seems to be distributed in confusing ways across seven different governmental bodies, of which only one is directly elected? It's an interesting system, but maybe not the one I would choose given the current outcome.
If I were being cynical, I would assume that this was a deliberate attempt to insulate the EU executive selection process from any sort of direct electoral accountability. But maybe that's good? I don't know.
>> I don't know.
I can confirm, you don't.
I'm sorry if I insulted or embarrassed you. That wasn't my intent.
My view is that the design of governing bodies is another area of engineering, and you can learn a lot about design goals by looking at the resulting systems. But I realize this can also become very personal.
EDIT: There seven institutions of the EU:
Parliament (elected directly), European Council (assembly of democratically elected head of state / government of memeber states), Council of the EU (see above, only for ministers), European Commission (nominated by the European Council, approved by EU parliament and thus democratic), Court of Justice (not voted for, but who votes for judges?), Central Bank and Court of Auditors. All in all, pretty democratic and taking into account the fact that EU is compossed of souvereign nations with their own democracies.
Complex, sure, but no idea why people think that it is some kind of dictatorship.
Consider the situation described in TFA. Let's say you, as an EU citizen, wanted to change the makeup of the Commission to rectify this. You could vote for a new MEP, but this would have relatively little impact since the Parliament doesn't select most members of the Commission. You could vote for a new national government (assuming this was your highest-priority issue!), and then hope that the heads-of-state would appoint a new President. But this would not replace the remaining 26/27 Commission members. Finally, you could hope that your new government would appoint new Ministers to the CotEU.
But the CotEU has many Ministers and a complex rotating presidency. The Council also has policy "configurations" in which different national ministers have varying degrees of influence. So in the worst case, it could take years for your new Ministers to reach a position where they could influence the composition of the Commission. Even if voters in many countries felt as you did, it might be very difficult to turn this into concrete changes the makeup of the Commission. It is hard not to see this indirection as the key design goal of this structure.
And maybe in the end that's a good thing. TFA, however, makes me worry that it can facilitate some very bad outcomes.
But claiming that 85% voted "against" the leading party getting 15% is quite a stretch. Usually coalition parties have enough common policy goals to work together, meaning interests of the electorate overlap enough as well.
Butvthisbis just like representative democracies are suppossed to work, there is nothing illegitimate or undemocratic about it. We talk about national governments and parliaments here, not the election of the student speaker for a class in elementary school.
And you said it yourself:
>> it's a political compromise of the parliament majority
And that majority was dully and democratically voted for. The the results are somewhat ambigious is to be expected, not beong able to cope with that isbone of the reasons wannabe-authocrats can gain so much traction by promising "strong leadership" (a promise that never materializes besides oppression and cleptocrats on behalf if the government party and its members).
While there were giant Interop conferences in the 80's and early 90's for TCP, where every vendor had to demonstrate they could interoperate with everyone else, OSI never managed anything remotely close, because it was too complicated. Like the EC's structure.
Instead, the tech community just proceeded with TCP and the Internet suite of protocols. Even when forced to buy "OSI-compliant" equipment, they actually ran TCP on their networks. Eventually OSI just died. Some vestiges survived, like LDAP and the notion of the "seven-layer model" (mainly 1-4).
It's deeply, deeply ironic that, now that the Internet is global, the Eurocrats are back trying to take it over.
You think I can rob a bank tomorrow and not be known? Past a certain 'crime threshold' and the three letter agencies take a keen interest in everything/anything I do... I'm out of trouble right now, that's all.
Let them control everything... in the long long term it will be flipped against them. 1984 oppressed the political class.
And when the political class flees visible power... the same 'cybersecurity' folks will occupy the power vacuum, trapping themselves in their own tech bubble.
I've never seen someone so Secure.. as someone who constantly preens his security cameras, his up-to-date door locks, his impenetrable garage walls....
The whole state of tech right now is a racket, designed to make those pigs 'more equal than others' feel emotionally safe in their data centres.
The only way to get the pigs off our back is to manualize tech and make all the average joes on this planet, able to control tech from top to bottom, completely transparently and completely separate from the System.
When my son can trivially modify the instruction set on the CPU in his Smart Chainsaw, and reconfigure every single bit of code and enter every abstraction layer - as easily as we change capacitors on a dishwasher - then the guy in the security bunker analyzing every single molecule entering his 'secure enviornment' is laughably 'secure'...
Honestly this kind of post serves no purpose or benefit. I certainly disagree (e.g. the commission is very useful in fighting against authoritarianism in Central Europey research funding, data protection, trade, ...) but there's not even facts to disagree with, just an emotional fact-free rent. If I was a troll that's how I would write.
You are critiquing his tone and pooh-pooh'ing his concerns. As I said above, this is only the opening shot in the war. In a year or two, they'll be back with a somewhat smaller, less ambitious plan, removing the parts that were most objectionable while keeping the spirit. Repeat, until the opposition is too worn down to be effective.
As for "this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing" - there are plenty of other comments here explaining what's abhorrent.
And now the competition gets a copy of their competitors' communications.
Is there a one word phrase that exfiltrates and obscures sensitive communications when there is state censorship?
That's a critical vulnerability for secure operations.
Notice that similar law attempts were made by UK or pretty much any state. UK is trying real hard to make encryption illegal.
This trend is not something European, EU based or about bureaucracy or anything like that.
Governments by default want to know and control as much as they can and now the technology is advanced enough to actually let them do that. It's everyones desire to know and control everything.
We are in an era where we have to fight that back and make that unfeasible again. IMHO that would be through encryption.
The EC pushes through controversial decisions, that are not controversial between states... the bar is generally something high in this regard.
National Governments get a buffer between them and discontented citizens, because "it's the EU." There is also a lot of pressure to conform to EC "consensus," parties/individuals that want to be seen as government material.
EC totally discounts digital privacy especially privacy from state actors and there is corruption, carve out a and such. I disagree with a lot of their agreements. I agree that they make far too many laws and are way too bureaucratic but....
EP is a shitshow on another level. It's literally the star wars senate. Endless factions, recreational politics. No about to act in a way that might result in anything but show. It's trump, but boring.
National governments also don't lack in corruption. Politics sucks.
IMO, what is badly missing is an active electorate. Civil society. There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. ATM, EC is taking advice from tech industry,dirty insiders and spooks. No one speaks for "The Cause" because, to paraphrase americans... "When I need to speak to Europe's digital freedom people, who do I call?"
That is the problem though. That's not very serious politics. If it's a coalition of tech companies, law enforcement and whatnot vs pirates and anarchists... guess who wins?
A normative, liberal movement/coalition that is for digital freedom is not far fetched. It just doesn't exist. That's why we're losing.
This post demonstrates the problem quite well.
This. Fringe parties tend to do much better in EP elections than in national elections.
Also, MEPs are often elected differently allowing otherwise unlikely or fringe candidates to succeed.
And, parties/people just don't treap. EP seriously. Everyone knows it's a clownshow. Treat it that way. EP can't have more power because clownshow. Cycle.
It's a perfect 19th century steryotype of upper house (Council) and lower house (EP). One is a club. The other is a square. Public square, atm, are a hard place to do anything but show off and fight.
EC institutions don't control enough programs, funds or building permits to rival states on this front.
I do think there is "soft" corruption (as OP alludes) in the "EU as a regulatory powerhouse" complex. Lobby-adjacent corruption, like in the US. A lot of that is very dirty money, with foreigns states or industries literally buying a seat at the table. The cleaner end is Google & Apple getting a seat at the table via ireland (and others) who simply have a national interest in giving it to them. The dirtier is Qatar, China or whatnot getting proxied in for political donations, payola, funding of specific nonprofits/etc.
Anyway... that exists. It is (IMO) almost entirely contained at the top level, and it mostly bleeds in from national politics.OTOH, competence and professionalism also exists in the EC. That means the can actually deliver on the job, if they're tasked with a good job.
The EU has very little advocacy or awareness of digital freedom. Foreign ministry staff don't understand it at all. We're just a stream of weirdo complaints that appears whenever they try to do anything digital related. I know it's hard to grok, but they do not have any idea what we are talking about... and that's kind of our fault. Democracy has some essential bottom up components.
On the positive side... a sound, rational and tactical movement can (IMO) really succeed and get stuff. The good thing about eurocrats, is that once they're mission is the right mission... they get it done better than most. EU consumer protection, for example, is quite excellent relative to any examples I know. EU infrastructure and transport projects were executed way better than national equivalents (see Ireland again for examples).
There is no serious political/factional/ideological barrier to EC adopting digital freedom goals. Just ignorance. There's hope.
And yes, there is plain corruption. Look at Mario Draghi that overlooked Greece's false debt accounting at Goldman Sachs (GS) and then became president of the ECB. Or Emmanuel Barroso, that went swiftly to work at GS after his mandate. Or the commissioner on digital economy that went to work for Uber. That's corruption.
The pertinent question (to me) is the relative corruption and/or other dysfunction to national and/or subnational governments. That's the competition.
I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.
How else could it work? Within the larger group, the majority rule means that someone gets voted down. Requiring unanimous support for all initiatives means nothing gets done most of the time.
In the US, the national Democratic Party doesn’t support everything that the Vermont Democratic Party wants. That’s just political reality.
Why you think that? It's the moderate conservative party. How many liberal democracies doesn't have one of those as a major party?
> I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.
I'm not sure this exactly you're complaining about, but isn't that the inevitable result of any quasi-federal system? The federal government will inevitably end overriding what an individual state wants sometimes.
I’ve seen around me a growing sentiment along the lines of ´ my views and candidates didn’t win so democracy doesn’t work’ coupled with ´this allows me to claim that violence / authoritarian regime with my views is ok’.
I wonder whether people are slowly realizing now that democracy has limits, whereas they used not to, and don’t like it.
Democracy essentially says that you have a say, but so does everyone else, so it’s going to be messier than expected !
In my state the national government came out of a political compromise. The leading party has 15% support. They are limited by the national parliament in whatever they try to do here - but not in EC.
Giving them control over the whole population through the EC is a spit in the face of 85% of the population.
And it's very visible right on this issue - the leading party supports what the rest of the population would label as totalitarian and oppressive. They tried but were unable to pass stuff like this at home, but they support it in the EC.
It’s another unexpected aspects of European institutions : most people don’t understand how they work.
Local, national political parties abuse this by essentially blaming the EC for just about anything. If things go well it’s thanks to them, if not it’s because of the EC.
Local politicians have no interest in making sure regular people understand how Europe works.
Note that this is all independent of whether the EC is good or bad - just about basic facts.
As a result, their union of states is both more fractious, in that it is a confederation and not a true federal government, and more elite-mediated, in that its function depends more upon the consensus among national elites than among national populations.
Put another way, it is more important that Paris agrees with Berlin than that Bautzen agrees with Lille.
Is that anti-democratic or just a more republican (small r) form of democracy?
I am not sure. But it is different.
Very glad to see some of the sheeps aren't completely clueless over there!
with the EU system is is not possible for the parliament to modify or remove previously passed legislation, once you have a bad law it's essentially permanent
this is not true of the UK system (see what happened to the Identity Cards Act 2006)
okay, so how can the parliament do it?
You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t.
right, so it can't, thank you
> You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t.
are you a time traveler from before the 1640s?
there was a civil war fought over this point, parliament won and is sovereign
the parliamentary majority and government are not the same thing
this should be obvious to anyone from the 2019-2020 mess where the government didn't have a majority
there is no government approval anywhere in the legislative process
most bills are proposed by government ministers (by the fact they also happen to be parliamentarians), but this is also not a requirement
bills can be proposed and passed into law entirely by parliament, they're called "private members bills"
It’s interesting you cite as evidence a time where LITERALLY NO LEGISLATION WAS PASSED and think it supports your argument…
right, so your previous statement: "it can’t." has now changed to "that rarely happens"
I'm done here
But you think a time that Parliament couldn’t do anything is evidence Parliament is able to overrule government in practice. I’m not holding out hope for your critical thinking so just take your victory where you can: in your imagination.
The recent Middle-East events had some troubling intervention (in Twitter/Meta). The "other side" wanting to voice its opinion is now being pushed more to other platforms. There aren't many (mainly Telegram and Tiktok) but nothing creates a market than sequestration. China did this to create a local market. The EU is forcing this on the global south.
What's next? De-platform such sites/apps from the major PaaS (AWS/Azure/etc...)? This might slow things down but it'll create a market for alternative hosting platforms. Then what's next? Ban hardware? This will boil down to chips. Maybe the US is ahead on this and realizes this is the only frontier that's left.
An oppressive internet that they can bully, works for them.
An internet that withdraws into itself and the EU returns to pen and paper + dumb phones works for them.
The US is all on this. As long as the US owns the internet and big tech, they are happy to let other countries do the dirty work of setting boundaries.
The long term solution is to 'manualize' tech. Make all tech we touch, open and ready to modify, run at full capacity and be easily controlled by a single man.
The only way to keep tech free, is to take it out of the System's hands and put it into the hands of the average joe, for his control.
And feed the machines silence.
In the Middle East and North Africa (and Russia) Telegram seems to be competitive with WhatsApp in popularity, because people trust it more than the US-owned WhatsApp.
Your claim that people trust Telegram more is a stretch. I daresay the masses in the Global South think little about where their apps come from and are poorly informed about tech matters, just like in the Global North.
It is just too difficult to make.
I don't think many people admit how differently we all think about software creation, all the tools that currently exist are shaped 100% around American big tech needs (cool i guess) and the American personality.
It is incredibly difficult to go off-piste and create a different paradigm on computing like Xerox did (which Jobs and Gates 'borrowed from').
The existing eco-system constantly updates/changes itself according to an American clock, so you get isolated and disconnected (from knowledge bases and relationships) if you try to go for a 'long shot'.
Even making small changes have to fit in with the existing eco-system.
99% of all the new ideas that could be made require radically different tooling and that is deeply expensive, constantly contentious with existing powers and disruptive to current services.
Sinply changing Google maps to list street names even when fully zoomed out OR to suggest vocaly three-moves-in-advance when driving.. is basically impossible.
Tech has clamped itself down and has no desire to allow anyone to tinker or tailor their own solutions.
It is deeply deeply frustrating to see what could be made better and to be arbitrarily locked out.
There were pushes for that since 2010-ish, and the cycle was: propose something that no citizen wants, riots happen, they push back. year later they repeat the same process again and again. First major one was ACTA if i remember right.
Btw., that has nothing to do with the EU. Domestic German criminal law and nothing recent.
This is normal.
Though the proposition seems to be technically faulty/unenforcable so we might be spared (this time).
Whether you voted for it or not - or in many cases never even asked - you will have your rights taken by the EU.
No one is really worried about the EU becoming some sort of Orwellian state because it isn't a state, it doesn't operate like that.
Edit: I should say that this shit also isn't going to pass the European Parliament, its just a proposal which is going to get voted down.
The council and commission can change stuff together without concent of parliament in very specialised areas (special legislative procedures), I think this only gets used for internal competion law and market regulation stuff.
In even more specialised areas the commission can change stuff on its own, as far as I know this is mostly restricted to agreeing trade deals and fixing specific tarrifs.
I can't comment on the corruption and alternative ways of pressuring MEPs. Those probably exist.
The reality is that that model is pretty innacurate, the EU has a lot less power than the US Federal governenment has. The EU still acts more like a club of individual nations than it does one overall government.
This one might not pass today but in 5-10 years we'll likely just be fine with it if the narrative continues to evolve on its current trajectory.
They have more local and pressing concerns, than this.
It drives them crazy that law enforcement is that incompetent to enforce law so the solution is to criminalize everyone instead of developing operational excellence in law-enforcement.
[0] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/ict-standards-procure...