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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.

That's great if you never need to|want to travel.

What about the time you happen to end up in transit through an airport in a country where they've put you on their watchlist, they grab you airside and hold you for hours while they look at your devices....?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal...

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If the EU is really coming down hard on people who do mundane stuff like host a Mastodon node and chat with their friends, then I’d avoid them just like I’d avoid North Korea or any other authoritarian country.

As indicated in that article, the UK kinda sucks, so, like, don’t go there. Whatever, they don’t have any good beaches anyway.

You can lay many faults at the UK's door, but they do have some very nice beaches.

Sadly outside summer the weather is usually to bad for them to be worth enjoying, but in summer they're pretty nice.

We used to have some very nice beaches, but unfortunately the Tory government thought it would be a great idea to allow water companies to discharge sewage into the waterways at will (because shareholders), so I personally wouldn't take the chance nowadays, although it doesn't seem to bother everyone.

You make it sound like the EU is the only one interested in stuff like this... but you do know that all your communications are already monitored and recorded by the NSA and that the person who revealed it is in hiding from the US government, right?

Theoretically a valid risk, and when the first person gets arrested over a cookie banner, I'll take it more seriously.

Let's not mix contexts. This legislation was (and is) pushed by European security services. If it passes, I guarantee that it will be (ab)used widely.

It was mostly pushed by people (Ylva Johansson) linked to American organisations (Thorn) who are in the business of selling chat monitoring software.

And their customers are...?

Currently random companies [1], if the shitty legislation gets passed then every EU government.

[1] https://www.thorn.org/solutions/for-platforms/

Their website lists oracle, slack, ancestry.com and others

Security services typically don't publicize what they use, for obvious reasons.

Unless you can point out links between the Hungarian government (who announced they will re-table the directive in a few months) and such companies, I'd say Occam stays with the security services.

I'm pretty sure Orban and his scumbags just use pegasus to spy on anyone they like, I don't think this adds anything for them.

The chat scanning stuff isn't a realistic proposal either for its intended purpose or for spying, it's just grifting.

I’m not going to live my life worried about hypotheticals. What if my plane goes down, I get rescued by North Korea, and they get mad at something I said about Kim Jong Number Un? That’d suck, but the possibility isn’t going to make me self-limit in the mean time. There are enough real concerns on my plate.

Yes, there are a lot of people living their lives like that. Live fast, die young kind of mentality.

Hypotheticals in tech pretty much always come true in the end. And especially fast these days.

The world is gearing up for something, and personally I smell a global war and a reshuffling of world powers in my lifetime.

Do you comply with PRC law, or even know what it asks of you? If not, why?

I don’t know and don’t care because I don’t have to. I live in a sovereign nation and I’m not obligated to follow their rules, any more than their citizens are obligated to follow mine. That’s how countries work.

If my country signs a treaty with them, then I have to obey that specific law. Absent that, I don’t.

Hell no I don’t abide by laws of the PRC.

If they had all the things I’d ever said in my life time they’d probably execute me. I speak my mind all the time. That’s what terrifies me though, because in 20 years time they could be running the show. So why would I want to make it so easy for them to know everything I have ever said, why would I want that data stored about me.

People need to stop treating other countries as if they're just the next town over. When you visit a place or do business with them you are in part endorsing how they behave and how they govern themselves. If you have a problem locking people up for blasphemy, don't spend money in a country that does it. If you have a problem with arresting people for illegal gestures, don't fly there to take instagram photos. Stop ignoring behavior you find abhorrent for the sake of personal convenience.

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