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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

This article reads weird to me.

Definitely appreciate the depth of this - thorough research was definitely done. Secondly, I’m definitely quick to blame the US policies for a lot of things.

However, this article is mostly about casting shade on the US about the EU’s mass surveillance. I don’t think anyone is to blame for what the EU does other than the EU, and for sure attacking the US isn’t going to prevent the EU from doing this.

I wonder if there is a better way to go about bringing awareness and taking action?

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The article explains how Ashton Kutcher backed non-profit "Thorn" was a cornerstone of the Chat Control bill that was to be passed a few years back ; it also explains how Palantir pushed for the bill behind the scenes and how at least one former FBI agent and other members of non-EU security agencies participated in meetings to kickstart that new version of the bill.

>I don’t think anyone is to blame for what the EU does other than the EU

Well, some charade aside, the US usually says jump and EU politicians say "how high?" - the EU population be damned

I think the EU has been better in that regard than individual European countries. The Wikileaks diplomatic cables in particular showed US coercion on a country by country basis. In Sweden, Wikileaks showed US diplomats gave a list of laws and executive actions (at the time around IP - the Pirate Bay was based there), with veiled threats about getting gray-listed as a “partner” which can affect trade etc, and they said how high. Now to be fair, at least Sweden was unofficially a NATO/US intel/security collaborator. But EU is in a different position, mostly oriented around trade, and notably lacking in security and military bodies. But the EU has absolutely stood up against US interests, especially their predatory corporations.

However, if the EU is collaborating or even aligning with the US on intel gathering, it’s pretty far outside their openly stated mandate, afaik. Especially since the UK left, who were the most hawkish on mass surveillance, it’s creepy to think there are clandestine efforts to push for aggressive monitoring and even worse aligning with the US without oversight. If Mullvad is right, it’s also an absolute failure of MSM to not properly cover such geopolitically crucial issues.

> the EU population be damned

For sure it’s a concern, but overall many/most Europeans think the EU is a net positive today. Things have changed a lot since the crises of Greece etc. And with increasing geo-political tensions (Russia in the short term and China in the medium term), there’s an argument to establish stronger security and military efforts independent of US-led NATO, which have quite different goals.

> But EU is in a different position, mostly oriented around trade, and notably lacking in security and military bodies. But the EU has absolutely stood up against US interests, especially their predatory corporations.

I think this understanding of the EU's behaviour may be insufficiently cynical. There's one pattern in politics that is very hard to not see everywhere once you have been primed to, which is "high + low against middle": the faction that is in power allies with one(s) that is so far away from power as to never become a credible threat to it, in order to put the squeeze on a third faction that is actually a serious contender for the position of the first.

A canonical example that's sufficiently historical that it hopefully won't be too incendiary was the practice of early communist states to elevate individuals of peasant/worker background into positions they were unqualified for, as in the famous case of Lysenko - here, high (party brass) supported low (peasants/workers) at the expense of the middle (bourgeois intellectuals, represented in that particular instance by academia, who could have been organised and experienced enough to orchestrate a palace coup).

Within the US, the federal government/military/foreign policy complex and tech-based New Money are widely recognised as two distinct power centres, with it at times being unclear if the former can actually fully dictate terms to the latter. Under normal circumstances one would expect the former to champion the interests of its industries on the international stage, and indeed the US is known to have very sharp elbows in this regard (from the famous oil wars in the Middle East via the slightly less famous fruit ones in Central America to the backdoor arm-twisting in copyright matters). The picture for the tech industry looks quite different - far from starting a war or even merely successfully lobbying the EU to drop its regulation, the USG is looking away and whistling. As it happens, out of the four industries mentioned (oil, fruit, media, tech), the tech industry happens to be the one that is by far the most autonomous and misaligned with federal government interests (Apple randomly grandstanding on privacy, everyone wanting to keep their Chinese supply contracts and market access, general abundance of politically engaged progressives and libertarians...). Wouldn't it make sense if what happened was that the USG (high) actually gave the EU (low) a tacit go-ahead for their anti-US-tech measures, and perhaps even indicated to everyone involved that they may let them crack down even harder if the tech industry (contender for high) keeps falling out of line?

> the faction that is in power allies with one(s) that is so far away from power as to never become a credible threat to it, in order to put the squeeze on a third faction that is actually a serious contender for the position of the first.

Makes sense. I’m sure it happens. However, it’s an advanced construct and just one out of several incentives in a complex system, so I wouldn’t necessarily blanket attribute it to explain things.

That said I also think you’re right that the USG does seem less imperialistically engaged with tech than say oil. That could have other explanations, such as less cozy relationships around subsidies and historical geopolitical interest. I mean, I think it’s entirely possible that there’s enough inertia in these systems to explain why one looks different than another. It doesn’t have to be a delicately played 4D chess by a bunch of boomers who don’t even know what encryption is. Don’t attribute to malice yadda yadda.

In either case, from my European perspective, I’m not looking so much what the end goals are for the Americans, but rather how the countries in Europe can stand up to geopolitical winds, ie protect their interests. And in my lifetime, there’s a noticeable increase in alignment and strength, at the expense of a (imo) much less harmful set of compromises between individual countries.

It all depends on what are the hot issues of the day. When it’s pollution in the Baltic Sea, or the Greeks treating the euro-wallet as a gift card, then we were all like pissy siblings. But now when the issues are war (Russia), economic hollowing (China) or having big brother deciding what’s best for you (US - although this is old), it’s better to set the differences aside, and band together.

>or the Greeks treating the euro-wallet as a gift card

You mean the Germans treating the Euro and ECB as a monetary vehicle to boost their economy and milk the periphery, side-stepping any "hard rules" imposed for others when it was convenient for them, explicitly carot-and-whiping the South to de-industrialize over decades, and then strong-arming the indebted states as a means to pad German investors by moving money from the taxpayers to their banks and investment firms, while buying state assets (from airports and roads to utility companies) for themselves (with a few bones thrown to the French)?

At the same time imposing stupid austerity policies (against the advice of expert economists) that made recovery impossible and amounted to war-level destruction for the economies involved?

All the while cheerfully reviving racist language and imagery (like "rats" in the european kitchen, and other such niceties, of which calling the southern economies PIGGS was among the most prominent).

Right. I don’t see any conflict with that and Greek corruption and mismanagement. I was always on the side of the Greeks in that battle. If you lend you take risk. If you lend to a state you can’t take their democracy as collateral. The bean counters can kindly piss off, as always.

A big part of the problem is democratic.

There's nearly nonexistent political accountability in the EU. If the EU decides something, there's really no effective way for its citizens to do anything about it even if it's a fairly unpopular change. There are too many layers of indirection between the elections and the decision making to hold the responsible politicians accountable to the voters.

This in turn makes the EU extremely susceptible to lobbying from special interests inside and outside of Europe.

More so than these campaigns, big reason why these laws have been hard to push through is probably Germany and their strong influence in the EU. Since the Germans still have a living memory of the DDR and the Stasi fallout made a significant impression in the public conscience, being seen as moving back in that direction is a really tough sell. 1984 is fiction, the east germans lived that shit.

It reads weird perhaps since it’s written by a provider of VPN software.

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