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> Do you know what the difference is between reality and a conspiracy theory is?

Evidence is the difference.

> if you had told any random person on the street that the Tech and Security Industrial complex were secretly funding activists groups to try and be able to spy on all European data you would've been considered to be daft and people would look at you like your crazy

This reasoning is hindsight. People come up with lots of conspiracy theories, 99% of which are false. The difference is evidence.

You can only have evidence for things that have already happened. So warnings from "conspiracy theorists" can all be dismissed with that reasoning. Life is not a court of law however, and we as humans can use our common sense and intuition to discern what is right and wrong and plan accordingly.

When law enforcement publish a bulletin about how they've thwarted a terrorist plot, they act before there is complete evidence, instead judging the intentions of bad actors and the likelihood that they'll act on those intentions. We have to do the same with all bad actors, while realizing there will usually never be any evidence accessible.

(It's pretty depressing to see so many people defending conspiracy theories as a reasonable source of information.)

> You can only have evidence for things that have already happened.

Logically true and yet irrelevant. Why work so hard to defend conspiracy theories? Why is it so important to you?

> judging the intentions of bad actors and the likelihood that they'll act on those intentions

Based on evidence.

> Life is not a court of law however, and we as humans can use our common sense and intuition to discern what is right and wrong and plan accordingly.

Common sense and intuition are awful without evidence. That's why courts, engineering (metrics!), science, and anyone serious about anything, require it. Common sense and intuition produce witches and inject every bias we have. Intuition is well-demonstrated to be awful without expertise and evidence.

As an example of my last paragraph above, a random comment from a biologist:

> I actually thought it proven that the microbiota was seeded during vaginal birth and may lead to more issues for caesarean section delivered kids. I guess it all just sounded so logical. I know I know, that’s the most dangerous thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971625

It's a trick question, reality and conspiracy theory are orthogonal. Some conspiracy theories are true and are backed by evidence. Some conspiracy theories are true but nobody can find the evidence. Some conspiracy theories are false and have no evidence. Some conspiracy theories are false but there is nevertheless some evidence that seems to support them. Explanatory examples:

True conspiracy theory backed by evidence: Criminal prosecutors present a theory about a gang of bank robbers conspiring to rob a bank. They have a lot of phone records and surveillance footage as evidence.

True conspiracy theories with no evidence: Crimes with two or more participants which have successfully evaded discovery. Somebody smells a rat but has nothing but their gut to go off of. Distinguishing these from false conspiracy theories is impossible (so no example), but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Sometimes people get away with it.

False conspiracy theory with no evidence: wolverine876 is in league with Martians to take over Earth.

False conspiracy theory with some evidence: To understand how this could happen, you must understand that evidence is not the same as proof. Circumstantial evidence and eye witness testimony can often point in the direction of something that isn't actually true. In the case of the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident, radar and sonar evidence lead the Navy to believe that it was under attack from the North Vietnamese. Turns out they were almost certainly shooting at shadows. They believed something that the evidence then available to them supported, but it turned out to be wrong.

It is easy to believe something if you want to believe it.

"The National Security Agency, a subsidiary of the US Defense Department, deliberately skewed intelligence to create the impression that an attack had been carried out"

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

The NSA? Don't they do signals (and now electronic) intelligence?

That's a very bold claim.

What if you didn't find any evidence of something that indeed happen? What category does it fall into? Even courts will sometimes forgo the need to present evidence if they can establish means, motive and opportunity.

Also, of course parent didn't mean it literally. They were referring to a different aspect of how such evidence may be discovered... well, now I feel like I'm explaining a joke.

There is an appropriate level of suspicion to have from base rates and incentives.

For example, almost literally every war the US has gotten into after WWII has ended in disaster, with no useful goals achieved and lots of money wasted. There is a consistent pattern where they start off optimistic with an obvious bad guy to get, then over 4-8 years the grey reality sets in and the costs become obvious.

There has to be something I would recognise as a conspiracy going on there, hard evidence or no. It doesn't make sense to be that stupid unless there is a group of people making bank from the spending and organising to push the mad agenda. The decision makers have full visibility into the disasters they are pushing.

This argument seems to say: I observe a pattern, therefore it is caused by a conspiracy.

Every pattern isn't caused by conspiracy. The nature of knowledge is to first establish that there is a pattern (I've hypothesized the same one), and then look for what correlates with it.

In this case, it's been well-known - or rather the leading issue - in international relations for generations, if not centuries: How do people get into dumb wars (all wars are awful, a very few are necesssary)?

>> Do you know what the difference is between reality and a conspiracy theory is?

> Evidence is the difference.

Evidence is obviously not the difference between reality and a conspiracy theory. Were that the case, it would be impossible for a conspiracy theory to be correct.

Evidence isn't even the difference between admitting that a conspiracy happened and not making that admission, but that's the best case.

The writing makes it conspiratorial.

It’s law enforcement companies trying to lobby for increased chat control. They’re doing it via a scummy way of NGO fronts.

That is not really a conspiracy in the classic sense of something crazy. Lobbying via front organizations happens all the time. I don’t condone it. We should stop this effort. But it ain’t anything special.

>It’s law enforcement companies trying to lobby for increased chat control. They’re doing it via a scummy way of NGO fronts.

This is your hypothesis, and I agree it's a likely one. But frankly nobody knows because it's all being done with dark money. It could also be US national security contractors looking to maliciously exploit EU data networks, or even private data brokers looking for new revenue opportunities. In every case, these possibilities significantly change the tenor of the debate away from "it's just to protect children."

I'm not familiar with the way that EU governance works, but my impression is that dark-money-based lobbying is less common over there. Which is why there seem to be so few defenses against it. Here in the US such lobbying would be less effective, since our structures are more distributed and lobbying would be countered with corresponding lobbying from civil society organizations and the tech industry -- in some sense (and here I only half-jest) we US folks can be more cynical about this because our corruption is more mature.

I'm not convinced it's less common over here, but I do believe it's less blatant. Things operate more in the shadows here, but I'm not at all convinced there is less corruption in/surrounding the EU Commission than there is in the US Senate.

I mean, it’s literally a conspiracy [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy] of foreign interests (including foreign intelligence services!) trying to convince legislators to pass laws against their own (and their constituents) interest using deceptive and likely illegal methods.

I think you might mean that it doesn’t involve blackmail, assassinations, etc?*

Notably, a conspiracy doesn’t require those things - but some do. And they’re pretty bad too.

* that we are currently aware of anyway.

> That is not really a conspiracy in the classic sense of something crazy.

"Something crazy" is not the classic sense of a conspiracy. That's the modern corrupt meaning.

law enforcement companies

These don't exist in Europe for as far as I know, and should not exist anywhere else either. As soon as basic functions like this are outsourced, the state loses its monopoly on violence and a large part of its legitimacy.

if state loses monopoly on violence, violence is a valid strategy for entrepreneurship. crime no longer exists

They absolutely do exist in Europe.

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

I don't want to embroil in an absurd semantics discussion, so please, take this answer in a constructive way.

The term "private law enforcement company" is unfortunate. There are private providers of security tech, weapons, etc. for law enforcement and there are also private security companies.

But neither seem to really be law enforcement in my opinion.

We've reached a point where people don't even remember what conspiracy means. Let's take the very first line from Wikipedia

> A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement

There. It's a secret plan. But the word has been twisted into meaning crazy.

Really?? You had to take it that far out of context? You couldn't even quote the rest of the sentence?

"A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between people (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder, treason, or corruption, especially with political motivation,[1] while keeping their agreement secret from the public or from other people affected by it."

Yes, really. Someone went completely overboard with the qualifiers and I very much disagree with their opinion.

There's difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory.

I'm more shocked at Breyer's naivety (or his acting all naive) than I am at the efforts made by the tech industry. They're about as transparent as can be about this.

‘I’m shocked! Shocked! That there is gambling in this establishment!’

‘Your winnings sir’

Casablanca, 1942. (Had expected it to be a Yes, Minister quote)

I thought it would be The Simpsons - maybe there was a similar scene.

The Simpsons have referenced just about anything by now, I think.

Can you give some examples where they've been transparent about it?

They're lobbying all over Brussels, it's hard not to trip over a lobbyist or two when in the halls of power. They're not even subtle about it, full on fear button pushing.

It's a rhetorical pose, for the benefit of mainstream journalists. He can't come out saying "AHA I KNEW IT!!" because he'd look like a conspiracy nutcase and be ostracized even more than he already is.

Gotta play the game.

Yes, that would make some sense at least. Otherwise he shouldn't be there. I've seen people that actually were that naive in politics. It didn't end well.

Conspiracy theories have completely turned on their heads in recent years.

If you went back 10-15 years everyone was talking about how electric cars are being suppressed.

Now similar people are talking about how electric cars part of some vast conspiracy to limit travel.. oddly most of the people posting this kind of stuff don't really travel at all.

Another is UFOs, conspiracy theorists used to mostly say they are real. Now you are as likely to find conspiracy theories that say UFOs are a conspiracy to unify humanity against an outside threat.

Both of those things can be true.

The Illuminati deep state WAS suppressing electric cars until their puppet Elon agreed to normalize the extremely connected and remotely controllable car.

This way, the bioweapon defense mode built into the Tesla can be remotely inverted to invite bioweapon agents into the car remotely incapacitating the ones who know too much.

/s, maybe.

Connected car features were becoming common independently of Tesla and EVs. They're a function of the year the car was built, not the drivetrain.

They’re generally reactionary related to the current state of the world (even the gov’t funded actual conspiracies!) so it would make sense if you look at it that way.

It’s rarely going to be something completely unrelated to what is in the news or on people’s minds.

It's unlikely to be the same people subscribing to both of those theories. And furthermore, many of the people who were saying that oil and car companies conspired to suppress electric cars probably still believe that. Quite frankly, GM's insistence that all EV1s be destroyed or permanently deactivated without lessees being given the option to buy their car stank to high heaven. Maybe it wasn't a nefarious conspiracy, but I can totally understand why reasonable people concluded it was.

It's popular to dismiss conspiracy theorists as reactionaries (re: lazide's comment), but here you have a case where the people who allege a conspiracy occurred were looking forward to something new and were allegedly stymied by a reactionary conspiracy.

>It's unlikely to be the same people subscribing to both of those theories.

You are mostly correct here with this, but I definitely know of the odd exceptions turned anti-green the moment green became fashionable. Perma contrarians that can't accept that anything from government could ever be done for a good reason.

In the case of the EV1 the conspiracy wasn't to get you to keep buying gas, it was to get you to keep paying for repairs. Tesla squared this circle by abusing copyright, patent, and trademark law to ban third-party repair so they could make the repair experience worse[0] and upsell you on new vehicles.

The thing about swivel-eyed loons[1] is that they can be right for the wrong reasons. You can reasonably suspect a conspiracy exists without necessarily knowing who the conspirators are.

[0] e.g. by locking out more intricate repairs that require more labor training cost but are way cheaper to do, thus shifting more repair costs onto the owner of the vehicle

[1] in the sense Cory Doctorow uses the term

> In the case of the EV1 the conspiracy [...] was to get you to keep paying for repairs.

Can you expand on that? GM claims they took those cars back because they didn't sell well and so GM couldn't/wouldn't commit to providing spare parts and repairs into the future. Lessees countered by offering to release GM from such obligations and handle the repairs themselves but GM refused that offer. But why? It's not as though they might have set a dangerous precedent by allowing EV1 lessees-turned-owners to repair their own cars, since buying out car leases and third party repairs were already normal aspects of the car industry. GM were fine with this generally but in this specific case they refused to allow it.

To me it seems like some GM executives hated having been required by California into making the EV1 in the first place and wanted to destroy all of the cars for some feeling of satisfaction and finality. Pure spite in other words. Maaybe GM were egged on by oil companies who wanted to crush the spirits of people who thought electric cars were viable, but the oil company angle doesn't really seem necessary to explain what happened, unless you believe GM wouldn't make a decision like this out of pure spite.

Not exacly spite, but I think it would do just fine with GM not wanting to have living daily reminders of EV feasibility rolling on the streets.

What? 15 years ago was peak 9/11 / Holocaust denying era lol

The sad thing is that security services are being paid by the tax payer to protect us from such activity that is ultimately undermining security and democracy.

But who is going to arrest those involved and prosecute?

This should be a massive scandal that should lead to closure of security services and creation of new ones from scratch as these people are compromised.

Moral collapse is a real danger. In Germany there were Nazis in the Eastern bloc the communist terror.

We need integrity and civic duty to protect ourselves from the next totaliterian regimes.

Security apparatus power trips and the erosion of privacy is the wet dream of the Stasi.

I think asking the question what would the Stasi do with this legislation helps warn every day people about the privacy risks.