But even bigger problem is that institutions designed to prevent this from happening are not doing their job.
Thousands security service and civil servants take their wages and look the other way.
Suggesting politicians are corrupt without any evidence will make that worse. If people think their politicians are corrupt they will further disengage with the political process, which will ensure there's even less pressure on politicians to take action on niche issues like this.
The EU Commission also gave a foreign tech company called Thorn (they pretend to be a charity), special access to government officials: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
I think both of those cases would be examples of lobbying and corruption.
It's little coincidence that national governments want Chat Control (laundering that through EU), and the EU parliament is the entity that shots it down (coincidentally the entity that is most beholden to the public).
It would be nice to learn which comissioners are lobbying for it.
$600K+ went to kickbacks, er… “lobbying”, and thorn was hit with some pretty nasty scandals involving sex crimes.
What I'm saying is that if there's no evidence of corruption, then simply assuming corruption will harm your cause because it will make it seem like political activism is futile in the face of supposedly hidden corruption.
If you look at that person's responses to others in this thread, that is exactly what they are doing. I do hope they have proper health and safety training for moving the goalposts so much.
I think it is far more likely that it is a lack of knowledge and incompetence. I am pretty sure that the majority of Parliament members, Council members and maybe even Commission members do not even know that there are viable alternatives outside Google (certified) Android and iOS. So they try to regulate their app stores, etc. instead.
I hope that with digital sovereignty becoming more important, there will be more interer in alternative mobile operating systems.
I agree with that. Reading HN comments, where people are supposed to be generally tech-savvy, I see a ton of "lack of knowledge and incompetence" (not in a negative way, just "uninformed"). Why should politicians know better than the average tech-savvy person?
But politicians get yelled at by everybody, saying everything and its contrary, while the tech-savvy people can comfortably take a condescending tone explain why "being so stupid is impossible so it has to be corruption".
In a functioning democracy, politicians represent the people. Meaning that some politicians will be on one end of the spectrum, and some will be on the other. If there are no politicians you disagree with, then probably you are not living in a functioning democracy.
> despite strong pushback
That is my point: look at the pushback! It's many people with very different opinions saying everything and its contrary, with a lot of technically incorrect takes.
Do you realise that when you say "they must be corrupt, because they don't share my opinion, and my opinion is absolutely the best", and you are not the only one saying that, then either everybody saying it should share your opinion or at least some of you are wrong, right?
Everybody wants to believe that they are right and everybody else is wrong, and therefore everybody else is either stupid or corrupt. I want to believe that sometimes, the world is actually nuanced, and people may have different opinions. I may have a strong opinion (and knowledge) about hardware attestation, but it doesn't mean that every politician does and hence has to be corrupt in order to not agree with me.
That's a distraction from the point that I actually made. One can try to paint politicians as saints all they want, and it still won't change the fact that the entire population is digitally surveilled 24/7 and what we do on our own computing devices are increasingly decided for us rather than by us. This flies in the face of liberal democratic values, and not okay. Some things simply aren't up for debate.
> Do you realise that when you say "they must be corrupt, because they don't share my opinion, and my opinion is absolutely the best", and you are not the only one saying that, then either everybody saying it should share your opinion or at least some of you are wrong, right?
In short, you're accusing of me of criticism. It's boilerplate fallacious logic that makes any criticism against anything sound illegitimate.
I agree that we are, I disagree that we are because all politicians are corrupt. Surveillance capitalism is the result of the private companies that built it, who could because they became so big, because of the lack of antitrust and stuff like the DCMA (and the equivalent that the US forced every other country to adopt).
Did all politicians collude in order to get there? I don't think so. The fact is that many people thought it was great to have powerful US companies taking over the world.
> It's boilerplate fallacious logic that makes any criticism against anything sound illegitimate.
I don't think so. You are saying "they must be corrupt, otherwise they would agree with me". I say that it sometimes happens, in all good faith, that other people don't agree with you. They may have different opinions, or they may be uninformed, incompetent, or simply wrong. There are many, many reasons to disagree that are not corruption.
You gave Snowden as an example: most politicians were not aware of what the NSA was doing. I think only the President (and maybe someone else) did, outside of the NSA.
People who say "the politicians want X" don't understand how politics works. Especially in the EU, where they are elected by the people of 27 very different countries.
According to the dictionary, corruption is "dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers)." If this isn't corruption, I don't know what is.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption
Also,
> I disagree that we are because all politicians are corrupt.
I repeat, I never said this. There are politicians like Ron Wyden or Bernie Sanders that oppose digital surveillance and control.
It's too easy to blame "the politicians" for everything. In democracies, politicians are elected. People just have to vote. You wanted facts? The US people chose not to elect Bernie Sanders, and also chose to re-elect Trump.
Is the US people corrupt? I don't think so. They voted for what they thought would be best. Maybe they were wrong, maybe they were uninformed, maybe they were incompetent. But I wouldn't say all the voters had to be corrupt, there is no other explanation.
> politicians continue to expand its scope with laws like we're discussing here
And my point is that when we discuss such laws here, it is pretty obvious that many "tech-savvy people" have no idea about how it works and complain about the politicians not understanding either. All they know is that they are against it, and yell at it with many incorrect arguments. I find it a bit rich: politicians who are in favour of it do exactly the same thing: they don't understand how it works but they know that they are in favour, based on their limited understanding.
So those many people who are against could not inform the politicians, because they don't know themselves. What happens then? Politicians, who don't understand, are yelled at by people who disagree and mostly don't understand either. If a "good" politician tries to listen to some of those complaints, most likely they will see that the complaint is wrong, and then it would make sense for them to ignore it, wouldn't it?
"Securely signed/verified devices for accessing your bank" or "increased surveillance and tracking of criminals" sound like splendid ideas and direct solutions to immediate problems. Now, how to actually implement them and how it will affect society in the long run might seem less important when you've got increasing crime rates, a slowing economy, displeased voters or whatever looming. In short, some dilemmas have very clear answers when you (willingly or through unawareness) only concern yourself with a subset of the effects of a decision, and this goes both for politicians and special interest groups. That being said, I'm very pro-privacy and it's the job of policymakers to know the details of what they're deciding on. Reality is however usually very complex and nuanced with several things being true because they all contribute a part to what's going on.
e: what am I doing, speaking like I actually know how things work? Nothing is absolute and nuance is important, but sometimes it is also very useful to simplify and generalise to get things done. If no one had any conviction, not much would ever happen. But moderation in all things.
Well, of course not! They're corrupted by the other companies who benefit from the DSA and DMA.
Too many people see something they don't like, imply a nefarious motivation without evidence, then expect everyone to agree that it is corruption.
If there is corruption, show the evidence. Otherwise, be honest and state that you don't agree with something. If you want to persuade people, back up your claims with verifiable evidence without falling back to nebulous claims of corruption.
Diplomatic status tax free too.
If it's Apple or Google let us know in the US because we have laws to go after them for acting corruptly in other countries.
Vaguely asserting corruption without specifics or even naming the perpetrators isn't "taboo", it's just poor form and silly. Letting such vague accusations float without evidence, motive, or even people to blame, leads to nothing good, and only vague distrust, which itself enables corruption. It leads to people believing there's no way to know the truth, therefore helplessness, and results in fascism like in Russia.
Lazy cynicism is itself a form of corruption of one's own mind.
I love this way of thinking. I might use this quote down the road