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Comment by tomkarho | Hacker News Reader

The only way I see to prevent the constant pushing is that every single time some council or committee presents something like this every single of one of their private communication gets leaked for everyone to peruse at their leisure from whatsapp to bank statements.

They want to erode people's privacy? Let them walk their talk first and see how that goes.

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Tempting though that is, I think that's the wrong way to resolve it: The people proposing it (law people) are a different culture than us (computer people), and likely have a funamental misunderstanding about the necessary consequences of what they're asking for.

Two cultures: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/05/25-12.04.31.html

Why would they exclude themselves from the rule if they werent worry about it? Its not like theres no pedophiles in those positions. I wonder who are they going to offer the job of watching the photos of families with kids for this.

> Why would they exclude themselves from the rule if they werent worry about it?

They don't even understand that they haven't. Sure, they've written the words to exclude themselves (e.g. UK's Investigatory Powers Act), but that's just not how computers work.

The people who write these laws, live in a world where a human can personally review if evidence was gathered unlawfully, and just throw out unlawful evidence.

A hacked computer can imitate a police officer a million times a second, the hacker controlling that computer can be untraceable, and they can do it for blackmail on 98% of literally everyone with any skeleton in the closet at the same time for less than any of these people earn in a week.

The people proposing these laws just haven't internalised that yet.

Let's stop infantilizing our adversary. Law enforcement knows exactly what they're doing. If they didn't know that this law would compromise security, they wouldn't have gotten carve-outs for their own communications.

You think it's "infantilising" to call them a different culture?

If any of us software developers tried writing a law, all of the lawmakers and enforcers would laugh at how naive our efforts were — that's not us being infants, that's just a cultural difference (making us naïve about what does and doesn't matter), and the same applies in reverse.

> If they didn't know that this law would compromise security, they wouldn't have gotten carve-outs for their own communications.

It compromises their security even with carveouts for their own communications, because computers aren't smart enough to figure out which communications are theirs, nor whether the "I'm a police officer serving a warrant, pinky swear" notice came from a real officer or just from a hacker serving a million fake demands a second.

> how to prevent them from being pushed over and over until a specific context allows it to be approved.

We need more diverse mobile OSes that can be used as daily drivers. Right now, it's almost a mono-culture with the Apple-Google duopoly. Without this duopoly, centralization and totalitarian temptations would be less likely.

There's GrapheneOS, which is excellent and can be used without Google, but it relies on Google hardware and might be susceptible to viability issues if/when Google closes down AOSP. Nevertheless, they are working on their own device that will come with GrapheneOS pre-installed, which is exciting.

There's also SailfishOS, which has a regular GNU/Linux userland and almost usable at this stage with native applications. As a stopgap, it can also run Android applications with an emulation layer, and plenty of banking ones work just fine.

Already so much embarrassing information about the people in power is leaked or uncovered by investigative journalists and organizations, who exist to uncover these things, that the despicable character of those people is something people can look up rather easily. I am not convinced, that we even collectively still possess one brain cell to let consequences follow, such as voting radically differently, starting a democratic process to vote or indirectly vote their arses out of office. Instead it seems like we have tons of non-democratic mindset people in our society, who don't inform themselves, don't care about other generations, are too uninformed to understand the consequences of their vote, and simply every time vote the same shit into office.

Take Germany for example. For decades now we have let SPD, CDU, Greens, FDP ruin our country. AFD won't be better by the way. Again and again we vote against our own interest out of stupidity, complacency, or whatever it is. Oh, they want to raise pensions? What a coincidence just before the elections! Aaaand all the pensioners votes are secured for a party that will further ruin the country and line their own pockets. We do the same frickin shit every single time. And now it is so bad, that if we don't do it, then we will get right extreme AFD, that has even less a clue of what should be done, is paid by Pootin, and would fuck up things even faster.

The basic premises, that you are voted out of office, if you do badly does no longer hold here. It's all money and population brainwashing, to vote against our own interest. What our ancestors have built up from the ruins of WW2, we throw out of the window in ever election that we elect the same shitty parties again: CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens, FDP, AFD, Linke, BSW... None of these deserve our trust and vote. It apparently is asking too much of the citizens of a wannabe democratic country to check alternative parties in a Wahlomat before an election, to decide what fits best ones ideas.

I like this idea frankly. Where are the hacktivists when we need them?

You can become an "hacktivist" by taking 15 minutes of your time to write an email to your MEP.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

I think "hacktivist" here means hacking into the politician's inboxes and leaking the contents, like "politicians want to do this to you; let's see how they like it when it's done to them" sort of thing.

No, you silly man, the politicians are protected from this law, this is just for the plebs.

>The only way I see to prevent the constant pushing is that every single time some council or committee presents something like this

Yes but.. it can't just be vague exhortations and generalities. I didn't know the pertinent bodies previously, but after GPT'ing on it, it looks like they include:

One is "DG Home," an EU department on security that drafts legislation.

Another is Europol, a security coordination body that can't legislate but frequently advocates for this kind of legislation.

And then there's LEWP, The law enforcement working party, a "working group" comprised of security officials from member EU states, also involved in EU policy making in some capacity.

I think the blocking states should be resisting these at these respective bodies too.

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