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Comment by tmpccc | Hacker News Reader

I am in favor of ChatControl for politicians only:

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."

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Funny enough, that's actually a sound proposal and is "somewhat" implemented as high ranking officials are expected to always be with someone documenting their acts. It is usually considered scandalous when they ditch their translator or secretary and talk with other high ranking officials in complete secrecy.

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.

Let's be fair, in a real democracy, there would be no government secrets... I mean.. we're paying for all that, we need to know.

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.

There would be government secrets as long as there's more that 1 country. Also, unlike companies countries have subjects can be bad actors and there's no way to get rid of, so some stuff will have to a secret even if the world is run by a single government.

It's not too different in the corporate world. I'm an owner of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others and they refuse to divulge their secrets to me. I can't see their contracts, strategy documents or root passwords.

you have a choice of whether to own Apple or Google.

the government offers no such choice, it is a monopoly.

the government is not a corporation.

Of the people, by the people, for the people. In a properly functioning democracy the government should be the monopoly of the people.

That would be nice but it would put you at a significant disadvantage compared to authoritarian/totalitarian states which would certainly have very terrible consequences.

You can say the same about the decision making: in a democracy it's hard to agree on an action, whereas a dictator can just do anything.

Same problem in the UK. Boris Johnson claimed he lost his phone and then it got wiped. Rishi Sunak similarly.

The dog ate it! I lost it in a tragic boating accident!

That would be even worse. The government only really wants to observe the messages of their political opponents, nobody else. Then they the can blackmail them as they want. As the American do in their corrupt surveillance state.

So much cynicism that doesn't actually reflect the reality; maybe it reflects the reality in a pseudo democracy.

And it is almost guaranteed in the event this ever passes, that politicians would be one of the few, who would not be monitored.

And yet, they included a clause in the law that government should be excluded from this state surveillance.

It's almost as if they suspect everyone else is similarly, a criminal.

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