EU Commission refuses to disclose authors behind its mass surveillance proposal
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
"The paper calls for “a harmonised EU regime on data retention” that is “technology neutral and future-proof,” covers all types of telecommunications service providers, includes measures ensuring both retention of and access to data, and is “in full compliance with privacy and data protection rules.”
"The EU’s previous data retention legislation was struck down by the Court of Justice in 2014, which found that the law allowed for “a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference” with the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. The court has confirmed this interpretation in several cases about national data retention measures."
"the paper calls for retention of data from “service providers of any kind that could provide access to electronic evidence."
"agreed upon the need for law enforcement to have access to data en clair"
Edit "possible" as in very computationally expensive to do it on a mass scale
The links you provided are paywalled.
http://web.archive.org/web/20241210080253/https://www.ftm.eu...
It is very carefully constructed exactly to prevent what you're talking about: leaking any kind of information about the data to someone who doesn't already know what the data is.
I mean, I do not have a link to a paper with a system like that, but I think a combination of FHE and enclave of sorts can be good for such purpose (leaving aside potential performance issues with FHE).
FHE, formally, is simply a scheme that has the following formal property:
Program(Encrypted(data, key))
= Encrypted(Program(data), key)
What you actually want is something like trusted computing. The government decides what analysis to run, it sends it to my hardware, my hardware runs that analysis on my decrypted data, and sends the result to the government, in such a way that the government can be certain that the algorithm was followed exactly. Of course, you need some assurances even here, such that the government doesn't just ask for the plaintext data itself - there have to be some limits to what they can run.
Alternatively, the service providers like Meta can do it. We trust them with the end to end encryption anyway.
No we don't.
Despite all this, fuck the EU for consistently trying to undermined data privacy and introducing Kim Jong Um style mass surveillance. None of that shit protects privacy, as they claim.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/1105a0ef...
11. "The creation of a platform (equivalent to SIRIUS51) to share tools, best practices, and knowledge on how to be granted access to data from product owners and producers. Building further on SIRIUS, this should be expanded to include hardware manufacturers in its mandate and to create and map law enforcement points of contact with digital hardware and software manufacturers."
22. "Developing a technology roadmap that brings together technology, cybersecurity, privacy, standardisation and security experts and ensures adequate coordination e.g. potentially through a permanent structure, in order to implement lawful access by design in all relevant technologies in line with the needs expressed by law enforcement, ensuring at the same time strong security and cybersecurity and providing for the full respect of legal obligations on lawful access. According to the HLG, law enforcement authorities should contribute to the definition of requirements, but it should not be their role to impose specific solutions on companies so that they can provide lawful access to data for criminal investigative purposes without compromising security."
26. "Establishing a research group to assess the technical feasibility of built-in lawful access obligations (including for accessing encrypted data) for digital devices, while maintaining and without compromising the security of devices and the privacy of information for all users as well as without weakening or undermining the security of communications."
I could quote the entire PDF but it's too long. In short, they want to expand surveillance on all fronts and mandate backdoors both in software and hardware. Read the PDF.
No doubt we'll keep on giving lessons about these to non-EU countries anyway.
Russia? China? Iran?
The US has a democratic system where the President is ultimately voted for by an unelected electoral college who can refuse to vote for the candidate their state voted for and has ended up with the candidate with most votes loosing.
Then said president can change the countries top court on obviously political lines and re-interpret existing laws and the constitution.
> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council
The European Commission has no need to play popularity contests, it's accountable to the heads of governments, not randoms on social media.
The EU actively engages in selecting and canceling heads of governments in EU countries. There has been 0 cases where the head of the commision was held accountable for something. Actually the current head has been found guilty by the EU court for hiding text messages. Who is going to hold her accountable and how ?
I m all for the EU but defending its despicable leadership with arguments that reverse reality is not doing any favors to anyone
Please link an example of the European Commission cancelling a government or election.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/former-censor...
You mean the fellow who illegally received undeclared external foreign funding? More concretely, from Russia, a declared state sponsor of terrorism?
A link to other website that also does not provide any evidence is not evidence even if it looks like a citation.
Can you explain why you linked to these two links?a
I don't particularly like the Electoral College - but the history and the cases when members voted against the people are interesting and in some (many?) cases, examples of checks and balances.
Checks and balances don't always align with your desires. That's a feature of democracy not a failure.
I wasn't trying to claim the US is non-democratic, I was pointing out to the author of the prior comment that the US system isn't perfect either.
Presumably if my votes counted a million times more than yours, you wouldn't say it's still a democracy, right? The extreme here is obviously a single ruler whose vote counts more than everyone else's combined. Where do you draw the line here?
That’s your definition, but then I’d like to understand what you call these form of government and how you differentiate from a country like russia, which is also holding elections.
The way you phrase it is very binary: either a country has popular vote or it’s the same as the least democratic countries.
No. I merely pointed out that we have two extremes and that a line needs to be drawn somewhere, and thus asked where the parent commenter draws the line. That's it. I never suggested anything about where I believe the line should be drawn.
Many states now have "faithless elector" laws that require the electors to vote according to the populace's expectations of how the elector will vote in the college.
Sure, if by "democratic" you mean "people are allowed to file ballots".
Regardless, it's hard for me to see the senate and electoral college as very "democratic" in the sense of your vote mattering equally.
Sure, but that's not the issue with current US administration, and it's dishonest to say that.
The issue is that checks and balances are literally, indisputably, being ignored. Ignoring court orders and doing illegal things is bad, actually. When Jackson defied Congress we at least had the decency to try to impeach his ass.
The current US administration is not only grossly incompetent and unqualified, as seen by the signal scandals, but they're also openly hostile to the democratic institutions of this country.
This is your democratic reference?
> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council.
What's with the cult of personality? Why do you need someone worth talking about? For example, everyone talks about Trump for all the wrong reasons, does that mean that's worth it?
It just sounds like you don't know much about the EU.
I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia. Those comparisons with Nazi Germany and other oppressive regimes are just insane. They devalue words, and you just won't find the right ones when shit really hits the fan.
Trump has been openly playing with the idea of a third term, and has spoken about ways of achieving this. What makes you so sure he will leave office in 2028?
> I am originally from Russia and I cannot read this seriously. Yes, there are problems in US democracy. But it still works and LIGHT YEARS ahead of what you can see in Russia.
I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with Russia, Nazi Germany or other oppresive regimes. I asked the question about what other countries and organizations are in a better position to lecture about democracy.
Acknowledging that the USA is currently in an institutional and democratic crisis doesn't mean they're Russia; it means they're on the wrong trajectory.
Because Trump is just a blabbermouth. Sorry, but people are just indoctrinated from both sides. You can check prediction markets and see the real odds of Trump not leaving the office. Yep, there is a chance, but IMO it's around 5% max.
> I don't understand where you're getting the idea of comparing with ...
Yes, I understand that US has democracy crisis. And so has the Europe! The problem is that there are no longer healthy examples in the world, except maybe smaller countries. Democracy as a thing is dying, but US are still holding the torch IMO.
Tell that to the deported people without due process for example, it's not blabbermouthing, these are concrete actions that affect people's lives.
I think there are plenty of healthy examples by all standards, other than the US, none of them are perfect, of course.
LOL what? Gambling odds have no relevance to this. Bookmakers are not working on any privileged information.
Well given the ratio between what he says he would do and what he actually does I would not be much worried if I lived in US.
But, more to the point, much of what Trump has said and done has been downplayed until it actually happens. We can't just play pretend and cosplay Hellen Keller here. The insurrection, project 2025, these things are real and did actually happen. Despite being downplayed repeatedly. I mean, every Trump supporter on Earth has been calling Project 2025 anti-republican propaganda (but it's written by and for republican leadership?), and now that many part of it are being implemented verbatim - surprise! - it's what everyone wanted all along.
We cannot continue to downplay and underestimate this administration. They will do illegal things, they will threaten democracy, they will ignore court orders. If we cannot comes to terms with that reality, then we have no choice but to allow them to do these things.
But I am not from Russia, though part of my family is. I guess I am then only a half expert ;)
Same in the EU. In this very comment section there are people abdicating to the courts, saying they'll block this proposal. The EUs checks and balance also work slowly and not always in your favor.
Annual Deaths (Recent Years): - Mediterranean Sea 2,000–3,000+ (60% drownings) - Pushbacks/Frontex Several hundred (2,000 deaths linked to Frontex actions) - Land Borders/Camps Dozens to hundreds (Winter peaks, underreported)
There are by far too few NGOs or journalists looking into the despicable practices of the EU - but we Europeans definitely should not sit oh the high horse and preach about human rights to anyone.
It is a disgrace what we as a European people let our elected officials get away with.
One should try living in more than one country. After some time, one might realize, that the adjective "better" has no place in one's sentence.
But I'll take the bait, let's say someone who lived in Syria during the Assad rule and then changed to the US, will that person come to that realization?
For that reason it would be more embarrassing than anticipated if the authors were disclosed . . .
i've just yesterday uploaded my final essay for a uni course on ethics where i'm debating on chat control and i have to say that being unsatisfied with some commission moves is not enough. there would be a shitton to talk about, but i'll just leave here that:
-while chat control was being discussed, europol was already salivating at the thought of expanding the regulation scope to other crime areas (as they said, "all traffic is useful" or something like that)[1]
-the european commission bases his thesis on the efficacy on the data provided by thorn, but we don't have any actual information about the trustworthyness of this claims. the european commission refused to comply with a FOIA request and the ombudsman suggested to comply, but still the eu commission refused to protect commercial interest of thorn. eu ombudsman ruled the case as maladministration on behalf of the eu commission but it has no power to do anything else[2]. another foia request filed in a member state revealed some other documents that still do not give any insight to thorn software, so we can't trust it yet
-a few europol members moved to thorn, with one violating rules about conflict of interest [3]
[1] https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
In autumn, the new Danish presidency will try to push through the original extreme version of #ChatControl 2.0"
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1145965873906841...
> Swedish commissioner (Ylva Johansson) pushing it
She has retired since. She faced major criticisms after refusing to meet any of the privacy focused NGOs and had regular meetings with Thorn, the US company selling surveillance software.
> The EU Commission is hiding the participants of the #EUGoingDark group meetings. I have requested lists of participants several times, but so far have only received completely redacted documents. (My Toot on Mastodon.) All that is known is that police forces and secret services are represented. Despite the highly sensitive topics in terms of data protection and fundamental rights, the EU Data Protection Supervisor only has the status of an observer. NGOs are not allowed to take part in the group’s meetings. While fundamental rights are muted, the #EUGoingDark group is planning to influence the EU Parliament with targeted surveillance PR.
Oh, at least he discloses upfront that "going dark" is an unofficial slogan from the opposition. Not sure if that's necessary, "High Level Group on Access to Data for Effective Law Enforcement" sounds sinister enough already.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/high-level-group-...
Why would we doubt these claims? North Korea, China, (Soviet) Russia, all of them were and are very effective at using surveillance against their population. Feel free to expand the examples, the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
We also doubt this claims because thorn might have published further data but guess what, we can't because there's no info about it
It is also reasonable to assume they use some kind of machine learning, (now we're entering speculation territory since we have few data about it) but the Ai act would require high risk ai systems - and I think a csam detection algorithm would be that - to comply with some requirements in regard to transparency for the product to be used
I know it's not the best, but still
"But the commission cannot do much – CBA [Central Anticorruption Bureau] management and the Constitutional Tribunal, packed with PiS [judges], are obstructing its proceedings. In such an environment, any work based on facts and merit is pretty much impossible.”"
https://balkaninsight.com/2025/02/25/pegasus-in-poland-a-fli...
Stopping abuse is not to have that backdoor.
I suspect von der Leyen. She has pushed similar crap in Germany, and the temerity of not telling who proposed it is completely in character for her. She has told straight lies about her intentions before.
As in if you propose a law in a general area and gets shot down you cannot simply rewrite it slightly and once again pitch through attrition.
Something like 4 strikes and you can never bring it back to vote or for every proposal you lose a vote you cannot repackage the same core for the next 10 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model
extreme capital concentration breeds this, and we had it happen everywhere.
It's far more difficult to do these kinds of things when people have the direct vote.
I suspect there’s a universal desire for governments to want to spy on the people they govern.
government is just a higher level cop, protecting property.
Go to your local Verizon store and try to find a product free from government surveillance. Anything that is more electronically complex than a phone charger will probably be spying on you. Portable hotspot? Backdoored. Modern tablet or phone? Backdoored too. WWAN laptop you installed Linux on? They collect your browsing data at the tower.
If Americans had en-masse daddy issues that encouraged surveillance then sufficient awareness could ostensibly "fix" the issue of privacy. But we can't fix it; the preeminent issue is that every business you spend your money on is unwilling to resist government coercion.
EU Digital Identity Wallet: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/E...
EU Age Verification: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
Is this wrong.
On the far-right, we have authoritarian politicians openly mingling with fascists and neonazis. Le Pen in France, Reform in UK, whatever parties in Germany and Italy... Not to speak of the counties where they are _already_ in power like Hungary.
On the far-left we have... well actually, who is left enough that they'd be as "far" as the fascists and neonazis are on the right of the spectrum? I'm not aware of any party or politician with any sort of influence that'd be that far left. Is anyone proposing full-on marxism? USSR-style or chinese-style central planning (not that anyone on the left considers these a model to repeat)? The "communist" and "socialist" parties are wayyyy more centrist. The political horseshoe actually looks more like a hook.
But if that's what you think then surely many left-wing parties in Europe must be far left, too. For instance when the leader of the main left-wing party (and 3rd largest party in Parliament) in France says that he wants to get rid of capitalism.
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/newly-elected-reform-uk-counci...
I am from the UK, and follow UK politics closely. Seems I missed these "far right" policy announcements and neonazi affiliations?
I read one mention of a local councillor who'd shared an inappropriate post and was immediately suspended from the party. Is that how you're concluding that Reform UK is a nazi-adjacent party?
The same parties voted in 2011 to introduce mass data storage, where all international internet traffic can be stored and kept for 6 months by the state.
I see no reason to believe that either party would protect the right to private communication or internet use.
Which means all internet traffic that crosses the border at any point. So it practically includes all domestic traffic, too.
I speculate that this is a result of centrist/neoliberal establishment wanting to solidify control.
The extreme right is typically using failures like this as a political attack vector.
At the end of the day, EU Parliament representation is dilute and indirect. Unlike the democratic systems of most nations, elected EU parliamentarians cannot originate any new law. Only appointed (unelected) individuals within the EU Commission/Council can do so, behind closed doors if it suits them.
MEPs are on a lucrative gravy train and they generally don't want to rock the boat. If the Commission doesn't get a "yes" from Parliament, it simply makes superficial amendments and retries Parliament until the "yes" is received.
With the Copyright Directive, after a "no" vote in Parliament in 2018, the Commission literally put the same contentious articles (11 and 13) back in again for the second vote - this time under different article numbers (15 and 17), so all the public activism and criticism linked to the original article numbers would be orphaned. MEPs voted "yes" the second time, like the good, obedient MEPs they are.
At its core, the core issue seems to be the lack of accountability between the MEP, and people that voted them in. Few people vote in the EU elections, and even fewer follow up on what happens there.
Chicken and egg problem but if you want your MEP not to be just "a good obedient MEP they are", the electorate needs to ask more of them.
Prior to Brexit, the UK had less than 10% of a stake in the European Parliament, so our 73 representatives had little effect on the overall system.
I didn't know a single person who could name their MEP.
Direct democracy at the national level is simply more engaging and relatable. It matters that the electorate, and their representatives are accountable for the outcomes of their decisions.
Try calling up, E-mailing or anything else with Dutch politians. No one will talk to you, answer your E-mails, allow you to call them. They make themselves unreachable.
Think about it for a second, they would be creating a massive machinery intended to spy on all their citizens for dubious reasons, not thinking that if one day a madman/madwoman gets in power, they would have provided them with a tool that would enable this person to track and hunt down all potential political opponents.
By building this, they are effectively facilitating future political purges.
Hitler and Stalin would never have dreamed to have such surveillance capabilities.
And when too many blind followers arise it can really get out of hand.
Exponential disappointment can be one ofthe most ominous things . . .
What is then called a state where a secret police makes the laws?
"EU's von der Leyen can't find texts with Pfizer chief on vaccine deal" - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-...
No and if they are not mentioned, you can request the participants via an information request. The Commission has failed at both. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44168505
"45 organizations and cybersecurity experts sign open letter expressing concerns with UK’s Online Safety Bill" https://www.globalencryption.org/2022/04/45-organizations-an...
"UK Government Denies U-Turn on Plan to Scan Encrypted Messages" https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/07/uk-government-plan-scan...
"UK’s secret Apple iCloud backdoor order is a global emergency, say critics" https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/10/uks-secret-apple-icloud-ba...
Perhaps it was a good idea, seeing as the UK was often a major supporter of plans like these, and that they are now no longer a threat to EU citizens, but Brexit certainly won't protect you if you're a UK citizen.
Try that with the Commission/Council steamroller. You get what they want, forever.
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Hopefully a younger party of politicians from outside the political establishment will have new ideas on civil liberties, and will succumb less to pro-surveillance lobbyists.
Here's a detailed analysis of where Reform UK stands from a libertarian perspective:
https://libertarianism.uk/2022/12/01/some-thoughts-on-the-re...
FTA:
> The commitment to protect civil liberties and freedom of speech is welcome, but I think it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Opposition to central bank digital currencies, and a commitment to preserve cash, are also welcome; though the proof of those particular puddings is still to come.
There's no daylight between North Korea's "dystopian reality" [sic] of capturing random screenshots of user devices, and the EU's mandatory data retention concept.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/108156-north-korean-smartphone... ("In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance")
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cewd82p09l0o ("Inside a phone smuggled out of North Korea")
Context: Under the EU's Chat Control proposal, your private messages (Signal, WhatsApp etc) will be scanned by an on-device AI agent. The current debate is around scanning images and videos but the original proposals called for analyzing all text too (I wish I was joking).
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1145965873906841...
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/sig...
I don't like that Opposed / Abstaining are both green. Abstaining means they don't care.
But perhaps there's no way to make that "democratic".
Excerpts of Provisions XII and XIII of the Constituton, easily googlable:
> It shall be forbidden to reorganise, under any form whatsoever, the dissolved Fascist party
> The members and descendants of the House of Savoy shall not be voters and may not hold public office or elected offices
I read that Germany banned a right wing party that recently won quite a large share of votes. I'm not sure about the extent of the ban and if it's a ban at all.
This stuff is straight up out of 1984.
And it is encouraged to do so. Privacy is agency.
"In a despicable attack on the freedom of speech, a German right-wing journalist has been sentenced to seven months’ probation for mocking left-wing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser."
"The editor-in-chief of the news website Deutschland-Kurier was punished for sharing a satirical meme on his X account. The meme, which was posted by Bendels last February, shows Nancy Faeser holding up a sign, with the words: “I hate freedom of expression.”"
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/proving-the-p...
Just like in the scene in "Dumb and dumber" : " i would say ... like one in a million"
Of course elected representatives don't necessarily have the same opinions as news reporters. But you would expect consistency within the same publication
Hypocrisy at it’s finest.
They absolutely shouldn't just be proposals. They should be scandals that make anyone involved have zero chance in future elections and unemployable anywhere near the political sector.
This is nihilistic BS and false equivalence.
EU commission's retraction can be challenged in the courts if it's not allowed.
The courts aren't some kind of magic guarantors of justice and order, and something isn't okay just because the courts approve it. If this somehow is tolerated by the courts, the fact that we have them is irrelevant.
It's the policy itself that determines whether we are like North Korea.
Not allowed by EU law obviously. Role of courts (in general) is interpreting law and thus deciding how said laws apply case by case. Law in EU flows down from EU treaties that where negotiated and signed by member countries. The big ones (treaties) needed also be "ratified" by country wide referenda.
So it's just another thing allowed by a person. Law isn't something magical with capability to make something not okay okay. Law is just someone allowing or forbidding something, with this having been incorporated into a sort of system.
A sensible world would have lots of referendums with the general public approving or disapproving of parliamentary decisions, à la Switzerland, but that is not the world we live in.
The reality is most people don't want to think about governance all day every day, so we hire people to do it. Key thing is that we hire them.
I do not feel heartened by this sentence, even though I should be. We're choosing from a pre-curated menu rather than truly "hiring" representatives. The real power lies with party gatekeepers, donors, and institutional barriers that determine who even makes it onto the ballot, not with voters making the final selection. It's more like being asked to pick your favorite from two restaurants that a food critic already chose for you, rather than having genuine choice over where to eat.
Sure, power isn't evenly distributed and there are some obvious improvements we should pursue, but this does not a North Korea make
It's a bit like saying 'so make your own Facebook', but that's pretty useless if it's a response to someone who feel that some big social media company is influencing public discourse and harming proponents of certain ideas.
You can't make your own Facebook, or organize a political party other than in response to slow phenomena, and here we're talking about something has until recently been seen as literally illegal-- against the founding principles of the EU, so this is a huge, sudden change which people have no chance of resisting in a representative system.
No they don't get elected to the highest offices in the land (nor should they), but you can absolutely work your way there from a clipboard.
You are basically chosen by parties and other entrenched organizations. New parties are very unusual.
However, none of that really matters. Democracy, laws, etc. don't make this kind of anti-privacy policy more legitimate. If you create a STASI, it doesn't matter if you do so democratically, and that really is what we are talking about.
With software on your phones controlled by others going through your stuff you have a beyond-STASI-surveillance level.
The problem is not that the EU doesn't have checks and balances, the problem is that politicians are willing to offend common decency in the first place and drive the erosion of civil rights.
That's always the case in well working liberal democracy. Or, Can you provide example when this is not a case.
That's why we have liberal democracy.
¹ https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-comm...
The current regime demands too much bureaucracy and too many employees to be rolled out broadly, hence this push to do what they're already doing but on a much larger scale and just store the data until they want it. From the perspective of politicians it's already something that's being done, e.g. in the US surveillance programs and everyday policing and software from large US corporations and so on. They think the resistance from their subjects is infantile and stupid.
Take it from a gay American dinosaur: you cannot trust the courts to do the right thing. The court system of any country is the system of last resort to dealing with issues after they have caused harm or suffering, and by design they’ve been overloaded with grievances to make it harder to stop any institutional harms.
The right time to stop this sort of action is before it becomes law. Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career, nevermind letting it make it to an actual proposal or committee.
Stop putting faith in a court system operated by the same entities making the rules. You’re effectively waiting until the last possible moment to stop something after it’s done harm, which is highly irresponsible at the very least and does nothing to prevent harms from happening in the first place.
Well said.
It's a weak and stagnant variant of democracy, where people say (to paraphrase): it doesn't matter what the people think, or say, or believe; or how their elected representatives vote; because you can just count on the courts (or some other force external-to-democracy) to clean up and fix everything. That's not democracy. That's shirking the hard parts of civic participatory democracy—offloading the burden onto a small group of elites who aren't meant to be morally load-bearing.
You've *failed* at liberal democracy if you've reached the point where your popularly-elected representatives are floating the suggestion of North Korean-style panopticons. (Or anything else as antithetical to core human rights).
Liberal democracy, if it should exist, is a zeitgeist of strongly-held shared values—not (only) a set of legal technicalities codified in a document somewhere.
This is just plain "surveillance is bad when bad people do it, not when good people do".
If you want nuance, say that surveillance harms a person's privacy, and mass surveillance harms _everyone's_ privacy. You can then think up scenarios where you deem privacy invasion acceptable - for example, if you have reasonable suspicion a crime is being commited by a specific person, but not to put fear into the hearts of citizens and to spy on and thwart any organised resistance to your grip on power. You might then conclude that you should not perform mass surveillance as it's in keeping with the totalitarian approach.
is not contradictory unless you assume everyone shares your premise that surveillance is intrinsically bad which, obviously, they do not.
Also, I did not say surveillance was intrinsicly bad. I said it harms peoples' privacy, which it does, even if you think that harm is justified or beneficial, even if you think privacy itself is harmful and people should have less of it.
"Surveillance-by-bad-people is bad. Surveillance-by-good-people is good."
We accept this for almost everything in society, FWIW. "Enslavement-by-bad-people is bad. Enslavement-by-good-people (i.e. of bad people) is good."
The moral valence of almost everything is conditional upon who is doing the action and why they're doing it.
You need better a better argument than that it's contradictory.
There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.
The ethic of reciprocity asks you to accept that "X harms Y" is the same as "Y harms X", while the totalitarian propaganda satirised in 1984 asks you to think of "them" and "us" and justifies immorality by claimimg it will benefit "us" and/or harm "them". The same theme ran through Animal Farm as well ("some animals are more equal than others").
It's still say it's doublethink to want to apply surveillance to some group of people but not others.
Have you heard of prisons? We use a different word for it so as to not introduce the (obviously false) semantic "contradiction".
Perhaps if you want to say that forced labor is bad even after conviction, then let's say "kidnapping is bad when done by bad people, kidnapping is good when done by good people [to bad people]". Ta-da, you've invented prison.
Otherwise, we're talking about the inherit good-or-bad nature of surveillance as a whole and, thus, using the character of those applying it is irrelevant and contradictory.
The fact that many contradictory ideas are widely held or, at least, broadcast from the tallest proverbial hills, doesn't change the fact that they are contradictory. One thing all living generations seem to agree on is that politicians talk out of both sides of their mouth.
You mean like... having laws written down by elected leaders and then having judges who are accountable to the electorate to evaluate specific instances...?
>having laws written down by elected leaders
The EU commission is not elected by public vote.
>judges who are accountable to the electorate
Judges are not elected by public vote.
edit: neither are the think tanks, NGOs, and array of well-paid experts who tend to both guide legislation and/or justify it to the public. This discussion can go in circles indefinitely as long as you continue to ignore reality and defer back to abstract principles and the _stated_ values & goals of the regime.
I guess double-think is nothing more than an extreme form of cognitive dissonance being accepted by the masses, the interesting part is how this achieve in the book. Again, language & propaganda come first, then information control, followed by swift and brutal violence for dissidents.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, it doesn't make sens to talk about “bureaucracy” here, the Commission isn't a “bureaucracy” (which means unelected civil servants), and more like a government (the commission is proposed by head of European states and approved by parliament).
That doesn't change anything to the problem though, Western democracies have been doing creepier and creepier stuff year after years when it comes to mass surveillance.
Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…
Like in pretty much every democratic government on the planet.
> Having an actually elected body (the EU Parliament) and then not letting them initiate legislation is just a joke on top of that…
It is because the head of states kept that power for themselves (as the European Council).
If this nightmare of a bill passes it will be:
- 1. because the state leaders pushed for it as members of the European Council.
- 2. Because ministers of the Interior of all member states approved it in the Interior meeting of the Council of the ministers of the EU (also called simply “Council”, it's a distinct body from the “European Council” which regroups the heads of states).
- 3. Because the European Parliament approved it.
In all cases it won't be the fault of “bureaucrates” but of elected politicians (like how the Patriot Act or DMCA were bipartisan pushes detrimental to everyone's freedom).
What? Both houses of the Federal Government of my country (I’m not in the EU), as well as the state/province level and the local level are elected, and I know that is the case for many others…
I'm talking about the government, which is a group of nominated ministers (nominated either by a prime minister or a president, and only the later is elected directly).
Take the US for instance: no citizen ever elected Rubio, Bessent, Hegseth, Bondi and co. as members of the Trump cabinet. The US citizens voted Trump, then he appointed them and Senate approved each of them after an individual hearing. That's exactly how it works for the European Commissioners too, except the nomination doesn't come from one president but the European Council, which is made of the 27th heads of states of the EU.
(And if you checked the European Commissioners, most of them have been elected before and a handful were members of the Parliament right before their nomination. They are definitely politicians and not bureaucrats)
This is at best a difference of degrees. Neither the commissioners nor the civil servants have their names on a democratic ballot or are otherwise considered in any real way during the election process but both are indirectly chosen by the elected government. The question is how many degrees of separation do you need before the democratic elections no longer have an effect on the rulers chosen at the end - and the answer is probably not that many.
Neither is any minister in most democratic country. You don't get to vote for the Secretary of the Treasury or any member of the government directly in most systems. Presidential systems have an exception in the person of the president, who is personally elected, but everybody else is appointed and merely approved by the parliament.
In the European parliament, the EPP won the parliamentary elections last June, and they approved the nomination of the Von der Leyen Commission, like how the Starmer Cabinet got approved by the House after the Labour won the elections.
The real difference is that nobody really cares about the European parliamentary elections: in pretty much every country it works like some kind of intermediate election for national parties to assess their strength, and they don't really campaign as members of EPP or S&D and mostly as members of their own national body without any consideration for European politics. And that's quite a serious problem.
The EU has many institutional issues (most of them deriving from the fact that individual state leaders refuse to give more power to the EU), but the Commission members not being individually elected isn't one of them.
The ist and isms have been overused in both the media and social discourse to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore.
Sadly this is their actual stance, and this is why everyone who opposes EU's overreaching policies are labeled as 'right-wing extremists'. In Germany they go as far as to try to ban these parties. It's an absurd repeat of history.
Such a law would in effect silence the voices who opposed the law, making way for even more totalitarian laws.
The situation in EU is incredibly sad and I'm not sure if it's possible to fight this.
The media is complicit in pushing domestic and foreign policy, is selective in what it covers and how it covers it and intentionally uses very different language to describe the exact same thing (eg [2][3]).
I generally agree that what the DPRK does and what Europe (or the US) does isn't really that different. Dig a little deper and look at the role the West played in creating the DPRK and the intentional starving (ie economic sanctions) we enacted, just like in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Venezuela.
European (and US) history of the last century is the neoliberals siding with fascists to quash anything communist or communist adjacent (eg labor unions). Germany might've lost the war but Nazism won. Whatever you do, don't look too deeply into the background of Adolf Heusinger [4] who was made the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2]: https://x.com/trtworld/status/1785959608168731091?lang=en
[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-how-media-langua...
They (the authors) pay well. Much better than some Huawei lobbysts or defence lobbysts. /s