EU ChatControl is back on the agenda
digitalcourage.social
digitalcourage.social
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/two-agencies-...
"The Ombudsman accused von der Leyen and the Commission of ‘maladministration’ for failing to produce the deleted text messages, challenging the belief that such texts did not qualify as ‘documents’ under EU law."
It makes all the sense to have politicians %100 monitored %100 of the time. Store it in encrypted blackbox and if something big enough happens, then unlock it.
Imagine being an owner of a company, and having some middle managers talking stuff in secret and saying that you don't need to know stuff, just let them use the money, and you don't even get to see the contracts.
the government offers no such choice, it is a monopoly.
the government is not a corporation.
There is an awful lot of lobbying going on and given history of EU regulation this can only end up passing in the worst possible way at one point.
If you are interacting with those circles you will find folks who made it their life’s mission to protect children and who are lobbying for this. You donut need a large number of people to sway legislation, you only need determined people.
I remember that Google StreetView faced significant regulatory challenges in simply photographing people’s homes, and today, many buildings are blurred out. This is only one example. But you can see that everyone takes privacy very seriously in the country. A lot of social engineering-type phishing for personal data does not work because people understand which boundaries cannot be crossed intuitively.
More privacy does not mean more terrorism. There may be situations where reducing privacy does reduce terrorism, but privacy is not the cause. I wish governments would rather address the cause.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_i...
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/12/lithuania-pr...
Oppressive state surveillance in the USSR (commonly verging on persecution of undesirable groups) was a strong reason for countries breaking away from it between 1990 and 1991, when the union collapsed. Lithuania was arguably the first one.
The privacy protections we see today are a reaction to some extent, but Lithuanians enjoy them. It was not an over-reaction.
It would be wise to use the examples of heavy-handed state surveillance in history in arguments for privacy laws. The US did this to argue for their economic model quite effectively. Whether that ultimately is good — I mean that some people have become so afraid of communism that they can’t agree on some fundamental social welfare systems and duty of care for each other as people — I don’t know. But contrasting liberal capitalism with planned-economy communism was effective in galvanising people towards the former. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” and all that.
- Two months ago there were major arson attacks and failed attempts linked to Russians in multiple states like Poland and Germany.
- Russian linked agents at the beginning of school year dissiminated false information about bombs being planted at schools in Lithuania which disrupted the process in general and undermined trust of parents and children.
- They are also constantly creating false narratives about ongoing social events with ant-lithuanian anti-european spin and spreading them online.
- Lets also not forget that Russia is constantly using migrants to attack borders of European states.
Russians are trying to wage war in every gray area they can find. Why this paragon of free speech (kekw) constantly engages in anti-lithuanian policies?
Even more interesting recently they started mapping out locations of optic fibers scattered across the ocean. Lets hope they wont use this information.
All of these are real threats. Even the CSAM arguments have a grain of truth to it. What changes overtime is people’s relationship to these threats and their perception of what mitigating factors are actually going to be effective
The person was saying that you can use a “Russia” line to get the population to agree to a measure or chat control.
You just went in and basically proved their point.
You may think that Im pedantic or whatever but Russia has history of subtly playing with words and thus dictating the discourse. For example term eastern europe was hijacked by soviets to enshrine and justify their sphere of influence which was a completely made up term which descends from germans and their ostsiedlung--the settling of lands to the east of germans states by germans.
You do realize that Lithuania is supporting chat control?
Firstly, it is a working document that someone obtained through a FOI request. So it is important to understand that this was not meant for the public, and therefore the opinion Lithuanian representatives provided there was not scrutinized as such prior to release. This is not a comprehensive position of Lithuania's government or any of its branches.
Secondly, the document follows positions expressed in and around a police (LEWP) meeting. It is difficult to imagine that law enforcement would support E2EE or stand against Chat Control in principle, because it makes their daily work more difficult. This context should be kept in mind and is also pointed out by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society article I linked.
Thirdly, the opinion of a limited group of Lithuania's law enforcement workers does not impact Lithuania's constitution, nor culture. I also believe that it is not an opinion shared by many Lithuanians who have some distrust of authority following years of state surveillance, persecution, and the trauma this entailed. So it is important to understand that the culture, the constitution, and the opinion of law enforcement workers contributed to this working document are three distinct things.
Finally, this "let's sacrifice anything and everything to protect the children" narrative unfortunately exists in Lithuania as well. It's a polarizing political issue where people have very strong opinions on each side. It seems likely to me, as I read the document, that there was a strong bias towards one of the sides in the working group.
Overall, this consultation is not the overall opinion of Lithuanian people nor their government; law enforcement working groups will generally be biased towards access to encrypted information rather than privacy; and that no country can escape today's polarizing political debates, so individual people will sometimes have strong opinions without having ever thought them through.
This is not to say that Lithuanian representatives could not have acted more responsibly. They could have. Frankly, as the Stanford article illustrates, Lithuanian reps' opinion is naive to the point of incompetence. Many other countries did better. That is evident. But does this say Lithuania is against privacy? No. It is still one of the most privacy-respecting countries I have ever been to and done business in.
[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23819681-law-enforce...
[1] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/eu-member-states-...
it's always the terrorists and the children. It turns off the logical, rational thought centers in the brain, and convinces ordinarily rational people to accept these poorly thoughtout security measures.
As a civid duty, you must fight against measures like these that erode security and privacy. It sucks, because the reward is "nothing", and you must forever maintain vigilence against constant reproposals.
Criminals tend to not care about the law even making e2e illegal would do very little to stop anything.
End to end encrypted chat for the general public has only been available for ~15 years. On the web, SSL is ~30 years old. PGP is ~35 years old.
As far as I can tell people's way of living now is largely the same as it was back before any of those were around, so I don't see how it would destroy our way of living if much of that went away.
A transparent CSAM checking process would be funny..
Imagine a 18, 19 yo., relatively skinny girl with small breasts (or a guy with a small dick) sending such a picture to her long-term boyfriend (...), and then getting messages from the system:
- "hello, our AI thinks your boobs are underage, we sent the photo to police station in Cityville for a manual checkup"
- "hello, the photo has been transferred to inspection team of Bobby Robertson, Johnny Walkerson and Jane Jameson to inspect"
- "hello, by a careful inspection of your boobs, with a 2-to-1 vote, the team has decided that your boobs are most probably old enough to be photographed and sent around. The photo was sent to your desired destination and just in case, arhchived in the police arhives for possible further inspections".
"Google’s Scans of Private Photos Led to False Accusations of Child Abuse" (2022)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...
See "Senate passes bill renewing key FISA surveillance power moments after it expires"
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-renews-fisa...
Progress happens one funeral at a time.
vss8uATnfADT6Z/XN3yUcjq3R5e8P8HjIkm2GbS6e8CbOnQb5qx0112mmjgUezWbAMxSPegGo8TSMIj3rEEe9mG/JYzsDb9g2tm6zfeLEYA=
I mean, how does one prove that a message is anything but gibberish if they don't have the means to decode it?
I'm a bit curious why Netherlands would then hold a neutral position in this case, further weakening phone security.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2534226-schoof-over-telefoonverbod-in...
Park it till the outrage dies down then try again is standard MO for passing shady acts.
And if this round fails they'll be back in 3 months.
They will never stop pushing for this in public - what are they doing when we aren’t looking?
State power has grown steadily for centuries now, even in the US where there are strict legal limits on it.
Information age is upon us.
In order to "merry" digital and paper form data, they set up a system to send paper forms to Swiss post ("digitization-as-a-service") who routed them to (afair) Bangladesh where cheap workers (used to a wholly different alphabet) manually transcribed stuff as XML and uploaded it to some ftp directory. We SWEs then were supposed to build automated systems based on that handwritten XML data. Obviously, the cost they reduced with cheap labor they had to pay multiple times to have us building a resilient data ingestion system. Why again are we okay with having lawyers and MBAs making decisions?
In addition to this, how do they expect to implement this for non-EU companies? The DNS blockades that are already going on today are less than efficient.
I think the policy goal is to make secure chat non-mainstream. It's easy to imagine reasons governments might want that, and most of them aren't aligned with the principles of liberal democracy.
What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?
What social credit systems are you talking about specifically? Maybe I live under a rock, but I haven't heard anything about something like that in EU or Europe.
Maybe not exactly the same as China's, but the "common understanding" that your internet persona must be tied to your identity, and that this identity can be scored based on a bunch of criteria. - or that how you spend your money must be trackable and traceable.
It will begin to grow out of the places that are already used this way: things like insurances, then will grow towards "securities" such as mortgages ("where do you spend money, does it look suspicious to us?"), and afterwards to "luxuries" such as air travel. Eventually nearly everything will require submission of financial documents and social profiles for nearly everything and only when that's the case: with a whole host of people wasting time on re-validation of the same information and a huge bureaucratic mess; will someone come along and give it a government sponsored name and a centralised point of access and scoring. - and it will be sold as being better than what came before, and it will be.
This is how other forms of centralised identification have grown over time, so I'm not pretending to have prescient knowledge of the future.
It's one thing to be negative, other to act like everything is determined and resistance is futile. By saying things can't possibly be changed, we make it harder to change them.
I don't disagree with the gist of your analysis; the forces you describe exist, and they work towards surveillance. They can still be opposed and curtailed in a number of ways.
If you would be judged for spending money in one place over another, then it's semantics. It's effectively the same as a social credit score.
The new battleground is now the "essential" part of the GDPR, i.e. what pre-sorting is essential to arrive at a decision and what not. I guess we will see quite a few cases before the courts...
They gave me the results of their algorithm for me personally, but refused to describe the algorithm. Results were kinda non-sense, but when I wanted them deleted, they told me that I may have trouble in the future with their clients, due to lack of information on me in their systems. Probably a scare tactic, but still annoying and concerning.
All three are regularly used in sweden to deny people jobs, services and opportunities.
Cynically and probably realistically? A lot of them are busy implementing them either enthusiastically or “just following orders”.
> Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?
Likely both :(
> Likely both :(
These scenarios are indeed not mutually exclusive. But in the cyberpunk fantasy the counter culture would be more visible and also accessible for outsiders. Like having your social credit score increased by some hackers hanging out in a Chatsubo hidden in a dark alleyway in exchange for a couple of illegal chips. In the black mirror version it would be completely hidden and super dangerous to even speak or think about it.
Invasive conservative policies always see upticks in times of social upheaval. We live in a time with a high rate of change, and people want stability and control, and vote for politicians and policies that deliver that.
Make people feel safe and stable and they’ll stop pushing for laws to control other people’s lives.
If competent individuals will want private communication, they will have it regardless of what minor distopia EU politicians will dream up.
Do China and Russland have these people? Not more than anywhere else.
Support https://edri.de (EU) and https://eff.org (US).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The root problem is that those in government do not fear any consequences for acting against the interests of the people they supposedly serve.
A terrorist organization isn't going to use Facebook Messenger to discuss their plans, they'll use a vetted application that doesn't have a backdoor.
None of this is easy, and it’ll be met by the same suppression of protests that has happened in other instances across Europe in the last few years. But I think it’s the only way. There is no shortcut for political pressure.
That being said, he can probably get a copy of the document if he asks the right people.
> Originator: Presidency
Also let it be known that everybody is pissed at Hungary at the moment (I mean, ok, this is kinda constant, but even more now)
Same caveats apply here: this has to go through Parliament, a lot of people is against it, then this is against EU fundamental law, etc
(but yeah this BS does get annoying)
You can be sure Viktor Orban would use it to crack down on political opposition in Hungary, for example.
In the wrong hands, could be used to have these precious children or their parents killed or worse.
Authoritarian governments often do things, or threaten to do things, including sexual violence to children as a way to put pressure on and extract information from their parents. This type of surveillance tech would make it easier for them.
Hungary has by the way not even 10 million residents.
1. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarians-vote-orbans-...
Quite easy when you control the state media and suppress opposition... which is what the EU is trying to fine Hungary for doing, but Poland kept blocking it.
Source: https://europeanlawblog.eu/2024/07/01/evading-the-european-m...
Until literally this year, the UK removed the right to vote after 15 years of living abroad, and Canada even used to restrict that right to just 5 years.
Even now, civilian US citizens living abroad whose intent to return to live in the US is uncertain or who don't intend to return, and Canadian citizens living abroad regardless of intent to return, are only federally guaranteed a right to vote from their last in-country address in federal elections, but often can't vote in state, provincial territorial, or local elections. This is true even if they retain significant ties to the relevant state, province, territory, or locality, like having close family there (including kids too young to vote for whom they're a legal parent), owning property there, operating a business there, or being owed a pension controlled by the relevant level of government.
And the guarantee of a right to vote from abroad in US federal elections is purely statutory, not constitutional - not to mention it has a few gaps in it, like citizens who have never lived in the US and neither of whose parents last lived in a state that allows the right to vote from abroad to descend to the next generation based on last parental residence.
Et cetera.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_citizenship
Anyone living for more than 15 years was denied the right to vote but not denied the right to have their citizen forcibly removed against their will.
Obviously you can't, because there's no such thing as EU citizenship. It doesn't grant citizenship, and cannot because that would require it to be an independent nation recognized by other nations as such. There is only citizenship of member states. Playing with words doesn't make something real, it only confuses people.
But the other commenter is also right that there is not the kind of independently existent EU citizenship that would persist when one ceases to be a national of an EU member state - it gets lost in that case even if the reason for this change is not an individual loss of the member state’s nationality but because the member state withdrew from the EU. The ECJ definitively settled this last year. Nor are EU passports issued on the basis of EU citizenship, nor would EU citizens typically include “EU” as one of the answers if they are asked by a government to list all their citizenships or view themselves as dual citizens if their only national-level citizenship is from a single EU member state.
For several reasons like this, it’s not at all unreasonable for the other commenter not to view EU citizenship as a real citizenship of its own, despite the use of the term under EU law.
Personally, I view the term EU citizenship in part as a briefer shorthand for “national of an EU member state” - including in the definition whatever edge-case handling is appropriate for each country’s special-case territories, and therefore more precise in a predictable way. Beyond that, it’s just a symbolic reflection of the EU’s official aspirational policy goal of ever closer union.
"As of 2020 a total of 141 countries grant expatriates the right to vote in elections in their countries of origin."
That is pretty standard for EU voting; as long as you are citizen, you can vote, usually by mail or by visiting your embassy.
Otherwise, I happen to agree with you -- why you should vote, if you don't feel the impact of your vote?
> the people in cities are not voting for him
That's the common occurrence, people in cities are easier to influence due to density; US also has the Rural-Urban divide.
> he gets the votes from uneducated people
Yes, this is what the (modern|progressive|educated|whatever) tell to themselves to fell on high horse in their bubble.
Very strange attitude. I voted while I was abroad for two decades, because my family and friends were still there, and I wanted the best from them.
Meanwhile, you are abroad and do not have clear idea about the local situation; you are going to have one of game of telephone one (I know, I also lived abroad for a while). As a result, you might do more damage than helping.
You're walking a path you're almost guaranteed not properly equipped for. Probably nobody is but knowing not to charge ahead would already mean a lot.
If having a clear idea about the local situation is a prerequisite then what happens with locals exposed to misinformation? Do they lose the right to vote? Do you test people in advance to evaluate their level of understanding? If they vote for populist measures that are clearly unsustainable did they show a good understanding of the situation?
What happens if you're abroad but coming back in a year and are expected to live with a bad situation you could have helped avoid? Can you claim "sorry, I wasn't allowed to vote so the rules don't apply to me"? What about when you live abroad but (some of) the laws of your home country in which you're not allowed to vote still apply to you?
And more importantly, if you're living abroad and you can't vote in your home country because you're away but you can't vote in your country of residence because you're a foreigner, what happens to your right to vote? This right is given to citizens of a country just like many other rights, like the right to private ownership. If one can be taken away due to lack of proximity, can the other? Can that car or house that you haven't used in a year be taken away? What if you as a local didn't exercise your right to vote, should it be taken away because you don't need it?
> you might do more damage
You might too.
Nobody ever even remotely suggested to go where you describe. That when you live abroad you are not familiar with local situation is a fact; you get to hear only partial, selected info. Maybe you should try it sometime. I did.
> What happens if you're abroad but coming back in a year and are expected to live with a bad situation you could have helped avoid? Can you claim "sorry, I wasn't allowed to vote so the rules don't apply to me"? What about when you live abroad but (some of) the laws of your home country in which you're not allowed to vote still apply to you?
Here, again on another track.
Nobody is ever going to figure out, when you live when you vote. The difference is showing up in the polling station inside the country or not. I.e. with not being able to vote via mail or embassy.
Again, in our country, we have several different elections (just like in other countries). But in some, you have to vote locally, in others, you can do via correspondence. So when all of them are local only, no harm done. If you can bring your ass to the polling station, that's enough. Nobody is taking your right to vote, it is on you to decide, whether it is worth to you to exercise your right, or not.
Right, the peasants with no education and only watching state TV are clearly the ones without a bias, their children that went to university, got a good job, know english are the one brainwashed by CIA/Israel and the evil LGBTQ. I read so many cases of educated Hungarians or Russians ashamed of the level of brainwashing of their parents.
Case in point; any discussion involving policits here, on hn. Politologs are face palming at the naivety, when they see an extract.
Latest link from my father was a clip from some TV channel where some pretend doctor was claiming something super vague that is scientifically incorrect, this time I ignored it since I was not in the mood to try to find evidence that the guy is not a real doctor, that the vague shit is bullshit and find scientific shit to clarify things, and all would need to be in Romanian so he can understand.
For this old generation if is on TV or internet and some scammer pretends is a doctor and uses a few medical words they will fall for it, is the same with politics especially blaiming bad stuff on various groups, that stuff works well on the internet.
Give me an example where your or a friend uneducated pessant parents were actually correct in this kind of topics then their educated children that know more languages and read more media.
For the parliamentary, it is here for a reason. To prevent voting touristic. The delay of several years -- you have to live several years in the other country -- serves exactly that.
I know about the local ones but it's not that important IMO.
I could go to the trouble of obtaining Spanish citizenship after 10 years but it is incredibly difficult and long.
I understand the problem of touristic voting but then they should let me vote here after 3 years or so.
Right now I can only vote for the Dutch government which I have nothing to do with in my life (and which is an extreme-right regime since the last election anyway)
Before WWII, Hungary was much larger. After, a large portion was ceded to Romania. He used a sudden super-majority to grant those people the right to vote. Subsequently, his political party has even held political conferences in Romania.
Those Romanians are not Hungarian citizens. They mostly do not suffer the consequences Orban's policy decisions. Yet, they support him because he makes gestures to include them in the country of their cultural origin.
This is far different from allowing overseas voting. This would be like the UK allowing all Irish to vote in parliamentary elections.
I don’t see a big difference between that and Germany giving citizenship to all the people who were Germans prior to WW2, but weren’t after the war.
Those “Romanians” are absolutely Hungarian citizens, as it is a precondition to voting in Hungarian elections.
I don't know if you're double-trolling or not, but it's pretty dehumanizing rhetoric to say people who've left their country for work or other reasons are not real citizens and presumptively have no stake in their own country's future.
(It's even stranger you apply this kind of–nativist?–language to a member state of the EU, where transnational ties are a founding ideal of that anti-nationalist union..)
Maybe Switzerland?
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/federal-agents-mon...
That’s the difference from the UK.
Howver the US does not have free speech. It has some speech which is not allowed by law, some which is allowed in theory but not in practice, and some which is allowed completely.
Those people have freedom of speech.
They don’t, however, have the right to occupy private property against the will of the owners.
Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.
Free speech should not be an absolute. No freedom in a society is absolute. Living in a society is a huge compromise.
EDIT: I am not in favor of the Chat Control proposal by the way. It is poorly thought out and will only serve to harm innocent people. True criminals will use encryption and such anyway.
The US does not have absolute free speech. Laws exist against slander, libel, perjury and making terroristic threats. The FDA regulates the speech of food producers and pharmaceutical companies. The FCC regulates speech on broadcast television and radio. It's a felony to lie to Congress. It's a felony to call for the assassination of the President.
Even speech in "public squares" is regulated by public nuisance and noise laws and curfews.
Yes, what's considered "hate speech" elsewhere is (mostly) legal in the US. But that doesn't make free speech in the US absolute, just more amenable to forms of racism and bigotry the rest of the world decided weren't worth defending after the consequences of World War 2.
How do you know this?
The US government will have you jailed, tortured, or just ruin your life in other innovative ways if you dare expose their crimes, e.g. Snowden, Assange.
I'm not aware of any other country with stronger protections, on the topic of the thing going on in the UK, of heated and violent rhetoric than the US has. US jurisprudence explicitly protects advocacy of violence and lawbreaking (up to the Brandenburg test is a very high bar), and I don't know if there's any other country with comparable protections.
(By which I specifically don't mean "has 'freedom of speech'" written on paper somewhere; nor "doesn't typically hassle people over tweets (but has legal options to do so should they choose)". I mean binding case law that weighs quasi-incitement to violence against the right to hyperbolic political rhetoric, and deliberately chooses the latter).
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923733/douglass-mackey...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/politics/merchan-trump-gag-or...
There’s also a bunch of stuff that falls under free speech most people don’t realize (at least in the US): what you can or can refuse put in your body, what you can refuse to say, how you spend your money, what you can hear, where you can read/write/speak/listen, etc
All of which has been being curtailed substantially in many ways since the 80s in the United States.
What happened in the UK was exactly the same. We had violence and riots, millions of pounds of damages, innocent small business owners targeted because of their ethnicity. It was actually a much worse scale than the Capitol riots and thus people should absolutely be held accountable for their actions.
- In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)
- in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)
- in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)
People shouldn’t get a free pass on organising violence and riots just because they did it online.
Edit: I don’t normally comment on the peer moderation that happens on HN but wow there are a lot of people online today that believe free speech trumps all other laws.
Seems it’s ok to destroy people’s property just so long as you arrange to do it online. /s
Perhaps someone can explain why they think this way?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670
What the GP was referring to was those jailed for inciting violence and hatred during the wave of riots the UK suffered last month.
Their actions were a lot worse and had real world, tangible, effects on people and their property. It wasn’t just them sharing a meme (which is the popular trope some on HN describe the event as).
It’s worth noting that people in America get arrested for similar actions. In another comment I drew parallels to the Capitol riots.
The crux of the reason people get put in jail “for posting mean things” is because they’ve broken other, much worse laws in the process.
My friend, I didn't refer to that at all, there's no need to lie. You were referring to those cases, not me.
And please don’t call me a liar. You said it was recent, and they were jailed. I don’t know of anything else besides the incidents I’ve covered. Worst case is I’m misinformed. And if that’s the case then I’m sorry. But I assure you that I’m not a liar.
https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...
I’m not making generalisations here. The OP made a very specific statement about people being jailed recently for posting online and I’m saying they’ve completely missed the truth behind those actual arrests.
Just as all the subsequent posts yourself and others have made are glossing over the very specific claims the OP made.
I’m not going to argue that I think the UK gets things right with its approach to online content. But the OPs specific claim of people being arrested is missing the bigger story about why they got arrested. And that’s what I’m specifically calling FUD on — not the UKs wider policy. The uk is a shit show for a great many reasons (as a UK citizen I’m not blind to this at all). But that doesn’t mean we should exaggerate the truth for the sake of gaining a little extra karma on HN.
The simple fact is the reason for the recent arrests and jail time is for similar reasons people have been arrested and jailed for online content in the US (yes, it’s happened there too). This isn’t a problem with free speech, it’s actual criminals causing actual physical damage and thus who have broken other laws besides just communicating about it online. Hence my comparison to the Capitol riots.
It is preposterous to concede this. Orban has destroyed the independence of media and weaponized it to support his party and spread disinformation against his opponents. He's also weaponized the tools of the state to harass the family members of his political opponents with frivolous lawsuits and exhausting legal battles.
But overall he is one of the only European leaders which speaks with all relevant parties and tries to stop the conflict in Ukraine.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_the_Council_of... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/world/europe/orban-hungar... 3. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/07/08/hungarian-prim... 4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/viktor-trump-mar-a-lago-visit-n...
Afaik only cares about cheap gas, the rest is irrelevant.
I mean.. ask an average american, cut support for ukraine and in turn get cheaper gas.. what would a Billy or Bobby in texas say?
* Not an endorsement of this particular politician
They may not be making visits to Moscow to kiss Putin's hand, like Orban did. But the governments of all the major European countries are continually in contact with the relevant parties, and they all want to "stop the conflict in Ukraine". It's just a question of under which terms.
In the US you will see at least every 8 years a different name on top of the line.
I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years.
Anything below won’t be stable enough for mid/long term policy changes. Anything above will be good for the leader and her entourage but most probably not for the entire country and its democracy.
In the US, who currently has the power over your country? Is it your Biden (where is he?), your Harris? It someone else, maybe unelected?
He's currently at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware and he will be campaigning in Pittsburgh on Monday.
https://rollcall.com/factbase/biden/topic/calendar/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/us/politics/harris-biden-...
> I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years.
I’m saying that this democracy is an illusion as long as you have puppet masters controlling these “democratically elected” puppets like Biden.
Policy dictated by a single elected leader is better than policy set by a group of elected people?
Just because your cultural and educational background has told you that the relatively new US model of democracy is better than that of other countries doesn’t make it so.
What relevance does the size of Hungary's population have to this conversation?
He "gets bad reporting" because he has destroyed democracy in Hungary. Including but not limited to packing the courts, erasing the independence of media, and extreme redistricting that turned pluralities or slim majorities at the polls into super majorities in Parliament.
Recharacterizing that nightmare as if it is just 'reporting' helpfully introduces a layer of abstraction that implies there's nothing in his actions to condemn.
Erdogan had the majority of votes go his way in the last election. Also Putin. :)
Of course gerrymandering is an age old tactic:
> First, the party rewrote the entire Hungarian constitution in secret. Parliament passed the new constitution after only nine days of debate. Changes included a restructuring of Hungarian elections, such that more than half of parliamentary representatives would be chosen through single-member, American-style districts (the remainder are determined by a national proportional-vote share). In drawing the new districts, Fidesz abused a rule that allowed the government to vary them in size from roughly 60,000 to 90,000 people.
> The new map packed opposition voters into a handful of larger districts, diluting their votes, while pro-Fidesz voters were distributed among smaller districts. This gerrymandered system would allow Fidesz to fall short of a popular-vote majority but still win a two-thirds majority in Parliament—something that happened not once but twice, in 2014 and 2018.
> A blizzard of other electoral changes accompanied the redistricting. Each was incremental, and potentially even defensible in isolation. But in combination, the laws erected extraordinary barriers that would keep opposition parties from winning elections. For example, the old system had allowed for a runoff in any district where the victorious candidate got less than 50 percent of the vote. The new system abolished the runoff, allowing a party to win a district with a mere plurality. At the same time, Fidesz created a rule that required national parties to compete in at least 27 single-member districts—even as the party passed laws that made it trickier for small parties to unite on a joint list. The result was that the various opposition parties were basically forced to split the anti-Fidesz vote in many districts, allowing Orbán’s candidates to win with relatively small pluralities.
* https://archive.ph/6DiTT / https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/07/wh...
The trick in 'modern' authoritarian systems is (often) to not bother going after your opposition, but mostly trying to stay in power (see above) and helping your friends:
> The railway and stadium have been pilloried by the prime minister’s critics as vanity projects. But they have something else in common. Both were built, in part, by Felcsut’s mayor, and a childhood friend of Mr Orban, Lorinc Meszaros. Until a few years ago, Mr Meszaros was a gas fitter. Thanks to winning state contracts, he jumped to number five in this year’s list of the wealthiest Hungarians compiled by website Napi.hu. In a year, his fortune soared from Ft23bn (€73m) to Ft120bn.
* https://archive.ph/v8f6R / https://www.ft.com/content/ecf6fb4e-d900-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b...
> I guess you have a wrong opinion about Hungary and Orban because the media doesn’t like him because he is a pain in the ass for many plans of the European Union and gets bad reporting.
The Cato Institute called out Hungary in their most recent Human Freedom Report:
> Since 2007, the high point in human freedom, a minority of jurisdictions have increased their level of freedom, but many of them, such as Myanmar, began from a very low base, and many others experienced only minor improvements. The vast majority of jurisdictions saw declines. Among the countries and territories that deteriorated the most are Nicaragua, Syria, Hong Kong, Egypt, Turkey, and Hungary (see Table 3).
* https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-12/human-free...
Obviously that's bad idea and a bad practice as we know it from IT systems.
Maybe their intentions are good but even proposing something like that should be considered a ground for dismissal. EU, USA etc. are not startups, these are not newly forming countries that full stack politicians need the sharpest tools to make something great quickly. Those are established, sophisticated institutions that must move slowly and be risk averse and there's no space for sharp tools like these and the problems need to be solved through navigating the complex structure.
Maybe wouldn't be as fun as running Turkmenistan, maybe they will lag behind this emerging unicorn called China in some respect but that's how very large and complex structures have to operate. The new kids on the block will end up exactly the same if they are successful and mature beyond the hype.
I don't care in what they believe or how they explain they need in the total control over you. In fact, it's just a slavery, and I'm sure internally they know that and they like that. For some people it's the meaning of life to achieve that kind of power over other people. Unfortunately, a lot of such people achieve this goal nowadays.
Now, I (obviously) don't agree with this, just trying to explain how something like chat control could be proposed in good faith by someone.
I thought the banking system was designed to reverse transactions (unlike cryptocurrencies). Why do you need finding the scammer for that?
Often times the seller also doesn't know they are selling to a scammer, there's this technique where the scammers will give the account number of a seller to their victim, the victim will wire the money and the scammers at the same time will be pretending to be buyers and claim that they just wired the money and therefore the transaction is complete and they leave with the scammed money laundered in form of something valuable.
are there any right hands?
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Some EU countries are way ahead in this direction, and one could say they lead the way to the future. For example Greece has repeatedly used the Predator malware to spy on the communications of hundreds of people, including the leader of an opposition party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Greek_surveillance_scanda...). As a result, millions of tourists flocked into the country in the following years, and everybody says it is great.