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Comment by renegat0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Until next time...

We must win every time...

Is there any reason this couldn't be made into a right to prevent the constant legislative onslaught? Is it a lack of organisation/will or is it something intrinsic to the way the system is setup?

The right to privacy is in quite a few constitutions. The reason nobody wants to stomp Chat Control for good is because of how it has been framed: it’s to protect the children. Parents are fiercely protective, and I suspect that for a majority of them, mass surveillance and a police state is not too high a price to pay for the safety of their little ones.

It's called democracy. It's better than the alternative.

More "democracy", where you must win every time and the issue will keep coming up again and again, but if you lose once whoops the matter will never find its way back onto the docket and you will never get a chance to have it reversed.

There are certain protections against the government of the day taking away fundamental rights with a simple majority. In the EU, these constitutional principles are enshrined in the treaties that can only be changed unanimously.

On that basis, the highest EU court (CJEU) has ruled several times that mass surveillance is unlawful. Governments are still trying to find a way around these protections, but it's not a certainty that whatever ultimately passes parliament will hold up in court.

What you failed to mention was that the rulings against data retention for example which were indeed invalidated by the European court happened 8 years after the fact.

So what do we do for 8 years while the courts decide which side is right?

Several replies say passing and repealing legislation (and regulation) is technically symmetrical. Who really thinks that's more than technically true?

> if you lose once whoops the matter will never find its way back onto the docket and you will never get a chance to have it reversed

The same dynamics govern passage as reversal. You keep trying until they slip up.

Yeah but these people make laws for a living while ordinary people are usually busy trying to feed their families.

And this is the main problem. Lawmakers and corporate/nonprofit/activist groups (who write bills for them) just repeatedly abuse the system in violation of unwritten democratic norms to get their way. I see this over and over where I’ve lived (blue states), for example with unconstitutional gun control laws that rely on exhausting opponents or waiting for them to not pay attention. The worst are when they submit bills with no text and substitute the text in at the last minute (so no one can oppose it earlier) with a late night weekend vote soon after. Or when they label everything an emergency measure (which makes it immune to reversal from voter initiatives in some states).

Probably a bad counter example but:

Abortion got reversed recently.

Which is why laws should be made through legislation, not judicial fiat. The majority in Dobbs v. Jackson made it very clear that a law requiring the same principle as Roe v. Wade would be legitimate.

This is life. Most of the things humans value require constant effort and maintenance. And things are reversed all the time.

Can you think of literally any law in modern times that granted a government significant power, yet was proactively reversed (as opposed to the handful of laws that were made with time limitations and allowed to expire)?

> but if you lose once whoops the matter will never find its way back onto the docket and you will never get a chance to have it reversed.

Why? It's normal legislation, it can be repealed the same way it's passed.

The EU doesn't pass legislation trough it's supreme court.

I think - with 5G warfare being what it is - that we need to go more granular. Democracy is a given when information is a weapon [1]. What kind of democracy serves our interests best?

I like the theory behind liquid direct myself, but it would need extensive field testing before it's the de facto governance model for, say, Mars.

[1]I realize that's a strange statement - I elaborate on my reasoning here https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/an-optimistic-loo...

Have you talked with the average voter? Most don't even know (or care) who their representatives are. Direct democracy works for small countries with high education and social cohesion, like Switzerland. And even there it's only used for specific hot issues like pensions.

direct liquid democracy still has vote delegation, it's just possible to reassign your vote in real time. Representatives vote on issues based on how many people assign them their vote, but people can reassign their vote any time.

I actually favor something with a more Bayesian twist that I haven't heard a catchy name for, where I could delegate my vote to different people depending on the subject up for debate. Essentially fantasy sports but for cabinet ministers. That would also be good because someone I trust on most issues might delegate both our votes to someone they defer to in a particular field without me needing to study whose expertise I trust in that field. If someone's heard of a name for that system I'd be interested to hear it. Hard to research innovation in a field when you don't know the buzzwords.

I think the names of systems is largely secondary to what's happening within those systems. James Madison has an excellent quote on this: "The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

It's from Federalist Papers #47 [1].

[1] - https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp

Your parent comment is alluding to how "we" have to win every time (the proposal is made) but "they" only have to win once (because once surveillance exists its extremely hard to undo).

Thats not democracy. Democracy isn't one side wins - it's the means by which societies balance the needs and contributions of everyone. Valuing the "needs" of spy agencies and corporations over the rights of natural people is the opposite of democracy.

The tools that maintain democracy, such as media and communication, should not be vulnerable to undermining, even through democratic processes.

And who decides what undermines those tools?

The media should not be owned by the state, private communication should not be readable by the state.

Simple.

If you don't think western media has been undermined by governments, I have a bridge to sell you.

It's not called democracy, democracy just means rule by commoners (the demos.) It's called parliamentary democracy. And there are not only many alternatives, but also multiple types of parliamentary democracies, of which the EU is just one.

which systems do you think are better?

I'm wondering if at this point its more of an autocracy of systems. And whilst you can vote for the top layer that (nominally?) governs the system/institution, the system itself is permanent and continuous.

Still, there should be a mechanism to avoid bringing up the same issue every year or two. Maybe 5 or 10 years.

This mechanism would be prone to abuse: a group that opposes a particular issue could effectively time that issue out to prevent a replacement group from pursuing it.

The adage about “being the worst system except for all the other ones” applies well here: your (and my) participation in democracy is a required component, not just a nice thing to have. Devising hacks around our participation will ultimately result in a system that doesn’t allow our participation.

The mechanism is for people to vote for representatives who don't bring up those issues every year or two. The problem is that people just vote along party lines, and then vote for incumbents within those party lines. Without the threat of losing their office, politicians have no incentive to change their behavior from year to year.

Think about how your suggestion would work for other topics, like crime, immigration, social services, etc. It would undermine the government's ability to respond quickly to changes in the external world. It's not worth doing that over this one issue, when the real solution is to just vote for better candidates.

That'd slow down decision making a lot. Imagine the effects this would have at the current pace climate changes are affecting the weather

It will only be brought up again if there's a chance that the representatives you vote for will back it.

It's still disappointing that after all this time, nobody's been able to implement a less bad option.

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