Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to:

"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.

View on HN

Idk...

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?"

You probably call the CCC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club

Or the European Pirate Party or similar. They have a handful of elected MEPs at any given time.

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.

> There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement.

https://edri.org

They seem to have the right idea. Do you know much about them? Are they good/effective?

As of October 2022, EDRi is made of more than 40 NGOs, as well as experts, advocates and academics from all across Europe.

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

Let us have a look. That page features Corporate Memphis-like artwork picturing a black crippled man, a blonde woman, and a woman wearing a headscarf. It talks about decolonization. The about us page lists a few organizations I wouldn't trust anywhere near policy in general.

Which organization you wouldn't trust?

> recreational politics

This. Fringe parties tend to do much better in EP elections than in national elections.

Isn't that mostly due to different electoral systems?

yes..

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.

There is certainly corruption in the use of EU funds within the programmes but do you have evidence of actual corruption in the institutions in recent years? The only cases I'm aware of were all in the parliament, which is unsurprising if national parties send good "party soldiers" chosen for loyalty rather than quality. Corruption at national level seems however much more common, see recent stories on Bavarian backroom deals and kickbacks during COVID. Nothing at that scale or brazenness seems to ever happen in Brussels.

Yes, corruption at national (and subnational) levels is much greater.

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.

To be an EU public servant, you need a PhD. Many, many of them have “fake” PhDs, written by PhD candidates for money. How do I know? I used to date a girl that was writing one for an EU servant.

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.

Yes it is.

The pertinent question (to me) is the relative corruption and/or other dysfunction to national and/or subnational governments. That's the competition.

Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship.

But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.

> We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship.

Well, I actually do.

Can you expand on why, please? From the outside looking in, most European countries seem much better at most things than where I live in the US (unless you're very wealthy, I guess).

You are on forum of temporarily embarased billionaires (now coping with mass FAANG layoffs), so what do you expect?

This is kind of a lazy answer.

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.

Not OP. But some of us have seen how the life can function "just fine" even without the huge amount of control and laws that the EU has.

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.

> Land I probably won't be able to do what I want on exactly, anyways.

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.

That is so objectively wrong, I don't even know where to start... Utter Liberitarian none-sense...

Land ownership has literally fuck all to do with the EU.

There is now a pretty big wealth gap between the US and the "rich" EU countries. I expect it to keep growing. As the EU economy further stagnates, it will become a zero-sum game with, I expect, ever increasing level of government control and eventually repression.

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.

I’m wondering why didn’t you leave yet? The US doesn’t want to give you a visa or something?

Or is the tyranny here stopping you from leaving?

The big desirable thing about the EU is it's strong social net and relatively modern urban infrastructure. If you like the city or don't have a safety net from some other auxiliary source such as family or church it's superior. Otherwise the US wins out in factors such as an overall more vibrant economy, more personal freedoms, not having a major landwar on its borders, etc.

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.

Have you ever been to Serbia? I’ve been living there for the past year and to me it looks like a great place in terms of value for the money.

If it's anything like Poland, it may enable a great material standard of life, but the parochial culture and overall nastiness (and they support Russia, so they must be nasty) will grind you down over time.

"Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. "

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.

The principle of subsidiarity was supposed to counter making laws affecting individuals like this would, this sort of stuff should be up to individual countries. The bureaucrats are trying to expand out of their remit.

"The bureaucrats are trying to expand out of their remit."

Which, to be frank, was totally expectable and the fact that the system wasn't prepared enough for this behavior constitutes a significant weakness.

Hungary and Poland don’t strike me as very lax governments, so it’s not obvious to me that people in Eastern Europe would actively fight that kind of legislation.

Locally, such a proposal would immediately become subject of the local cultural war. Journalists would hop on the news and make clickbait of them incessantly.

But few people, including the media, pay real attention to anything that happens in Brussels.

> We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship.

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 would be beneficial to understand the underlying mechanics (very untransparent centralization of power to an unelected commission) and the risks involved before smugly dismissing concerns about it.

The commission has a member of each EU country and those members come from the elected governments.

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.

If the EU worked like a normal parliamentary government then parliament would have the right to initiate legislation. And it would be able to nominate whoever it wished for president of the commission as long as there was a parliamentary majority. The EU has confederal aspects that don't really work in the ways normal modern democracies work.

Which kind of makes sense, as the fear isbthat the emeber nations loose their sovereignty. Hence, the elected governemnts of those memeber states agreeing on things, with the directly elected EU parliament approving theom, or not. Seems like a reasonably balance here.

As long as the parliament is against a very specific clause chances are low that legislation passes. However, recent EU acts are therefore a mixed bag of incoherent clauses: Comission, council and parliament all push there parts through with lobbying all over the place. In the end it seems that hardly anyone understands the overall mechanics anymore.

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.

>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.

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.

As much as the Commission is undemocratic in nature and should be curbed, from what I understand the recent privacy fiascos are largely the fault of von der Leyen for allowing this nonsense to be presented and voted on. We just have to hold out until next year when their term is over and the witch is gone. I mean how much do you have to suck to make people think that Juncker was good in comparison.

The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations.

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 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.

> The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations.

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.

Also it's important to notice the "European Commission" is the fancy name for the representatives of all the EU countries

Of course, it has a structure, executive, etc, but essentially they are composed of representatives of the EU27 countries

It is a very complex system, and I say that as a US person who is used to a very complex system. In fact, I'm not really aware of any democratic nation with anything quite as byzantine.

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.

Both, the European parliament and the European Council are voted for, the first directly by EU citizens, the latter by citizens of the individual EU countries everytime a new national election, and subsequent goverment formation, happens.

And what about the Council of the EU?

The Council of the EU is a meeting of ministers of various national governments, all of them elected by their respective electorate.

So the organization that selects the majority of the Commission Members (26 out of 27) is also the one that is the most distantly tied to the voting public. None of the CotEU are directly elected. The council also appears to have a complex rotating Presidency and multiple "configurations" in which different ministers hold varying amounts of power -- all of which adds abstraction and makes it more difficult to hold members accountable at the level of the voting public.

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.

All the commission members are elected in the respective member states elections... Ehy isn't that democratic? Rotating presendency, nice thing for an organisation made up of 26 member nations. And all those ministers are nominated following democratic elections in each member state. And as such, they are very much accountable to their electorate every 4-5 years.

>> I don't know.

I can confirm, you don't.

> 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.

Defining structures of government is not engineering, trying to apply the principles to both doesn't work.

I don’t agree with that statement at all. I think it encompasses a very myopic definition of engineering, and implies that humans can’t build or evaluate government structures on the basis of specific design goals.

Just checked, it is made up of the respective ministers / secretaries of the memebwr states (foreign affairs, interior,...). So, also democratic as, as those ministers are nominated by the national governments after elections.

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.

I didn't say it was some kind of dictatorship. I do note, however, that the bulk of the EU executive is selected by an organization that is maximally disconnected from the voting public. And this seems to be by design.

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.

You absolutely do not understand the role of the European institutions and give the Commission much more power than it actually has. And you fail to understand the EU states are actually souvereign nations and states like Texas or California.

Heads of states and the ministers very often don't represent the populations of their states, only a very small part of it.

You mean like most GOP presidents in recent history not winning the majority vote? The US are not part of the EU so...

The differences are much bigger than that. The head of state/leading party that formed the government has only 15% support in my country. That's possible because it's a political compromise of the parliament majority, and they're severely limited in whatever they can do here by the parliament. It's very different political system.

Like in Germany, were absolutr majorities for one party basically do not exist. Hence coalition governments (we never tried a minority government like in Spain for some reason).

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).

35+ years ago, the ancestors of these people tried to force OSI on the world. The Feds in the US even "mandated" it with GOSIP.

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.

Honestly a quite funny post. You offer strong emotion wrapped in a story lending supposed crédence but give no single fact of what this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing. You read one (extremely technical and niche) regulation and it's horrible, in what way? And the European commission does not adopt regulations, it's parliament and council that do (the commission only proposes them).

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.

Since you flagged the other comment, let's try again.

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.

Some keywords for this: "Bin Laden. Bin Laden. Bin Laden"

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.

probably "overthrow"

I’m not sure I understand : European Commissioners are nominated by elected National governments, and approved by parliament. How is this not democratic ? Whether you agree with these policies or not is a different matter altogether.

Perhaps the sentiment is more about how our expectations of democracy are completely out of line with the results of democracy.

That is because of the fatal flaw of democracy: The demos is people and the majority of people are stupid.

Indeed, you’re most likely right.

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 !

National government is a very different thing from national parliament.

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.

No, the EC can’t do anything unless it’s approved by European Parliament.

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.

Indeed - they can do whatever the EP approves, which is usually very different from what the few EP seats and the entire national parliament of our state vote for.

European societies have more fractious populations and a far more elite-mediated society than the U.S.

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.

Anyone who needs a less abstract impression, check the feed of EC Thierry Breton [0]. A painfully clear impression of how those people think about freedom of speech.

[0] https://x.com/thierrybreton

Twitter and Musk do not equal free speech, not even in the US let alone Europe...

> The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer

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.

> As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights.

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.

Because an algorithm isn't a human, so the usual "fair use" and inspiration arguments do not apply 1:1. The possibilities opened by e.g. film studios recording voice actors, trainign algorightms on them and then just reusing their voices, or deepfaking actors' faces, or Copilot giving verbatim copyrighted code are endless and quite different than what was currently possible.

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?

> [examples of supposed problems]

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.

> Those who believe it's "for our own good" are out of their minds.

Very glad to see some of the sheeps aren't completely clueless over there!

Yea, but the lack of world wars is pretty nice.

Oh man, I’m so glad my country (the U.K.) left the E.U. and no longer have to worry about all that government corrupti- oh…

there's a major difference

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)

That’s total gibberish. It’s not easy but it’s absolutely possible to amend EU legislation. It works in exactly the same way as the UK: by enacting new legislation.

> That’s total gibberish.

okay, so how can the parliament do it?

By passing new laws with the EC.

You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t.

> By passing new laws with the EC.

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"

You’re confusing theory and fact: in theory, private members bills can be passed. In practice, that rarely happens if the government doesn’t want it to, irrespective of what Parliament wants. Denying parliamentary time is one way, simply disregarding it (HS2) is another.

It’s interesting you cite as evidence a time where LITERALLY NO LEGISLATION WAS PASSED and think it supports your argument…

> You’re confusing theory and fact: in theory, private members bills can be passed. In practice, that rarely happens if the government doesn’t want it to

right, so your previous statement: "it can’t." has now changed to "that rarely happens"

I'm done here

No, I pointed out that they ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PASS if government doesn’t want them to. They RARELY pass most of the time anyway.

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.

Parliament doesn't have initiative and is only consultative (0 power). It can mainly give its perspective on the curvature of cucumbers (yeah it's regulated in the EU, don't mess up with that).

where are your details? specifics? references to issues or particular documents..

It seems like over the past 10 years there has been a global retreat from freedom and democracy.

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 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.

The whole public opinion shifted towards security over everything, unfortunately. As a result, the institutions follow.

No, not the whole. There are entire states in the EU that are against that. Unfortunately these are the smaller ones so they can't do anything about it and it's being forced upon their populations, regardless of what anyone says about how sovereign they are.

All states have a right of veto.

Rather more the local media. I can't think of a mainstream newspaper in my country (France) that is publicly pro-freedom of speech.

> 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.

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.

Your neighbor denying the holocaist, sticking with your example, are the people that would allow a government to become oppressive.

Here’s an analogy:

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.

Thanks for sharing. I really like this analogy.

> 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.

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.

The Eurocrats are only accountable to other eurocrats and it shows. The EU also has a very large publicity budget.

The EP s vice president for Blockchain and AI was found to take bribes from qatar last year.

They already 'know everything' (or enough) to control my life.

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'...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com