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Comment by vrganj | Hacker News Reader

Also, another key fact to bring up here once again:

The institution that forced this through is the EU Council, the body that represents national governments and is composed of heads of government.

The reason they have to force it through and couldn't do 2.0 is because the EU Parliament stopped them.

In other words, it's the nation states that want this and the EU institutions that are blocking it, not the other way around as often framed online.

If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states.

You can see this play out in real-time in the UK, which has gone real dystopian ever since Brexit.

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"If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states."

In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.

The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.

Exactly. As demonstrated by several countries pronouncing themselves against it every time this comes up.

If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.

They are face-saving. Again, if the country didn't want this, their Council representative would have voted against it.

Sure, you are right, but that does not mean that the EU as such is totally innocent in this.

Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.

The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.

Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.

I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.

The EU as an institution has zero enforcement power - I think that is its check or balance. It is more like the UN, than like the USA.

If the majority of national governments didn't want this, the Council wouldn't push for it. That's literally who the Council is composed of.

I think a good step for transparency would be forcing Council votes to be open so the ire could be redirected at the appropriate national governments instead of letting them EU-wash their unpopular ideas.

That would definitely help a bit.

That's a completely backward way of seeing it. "Nations" want nothing. The EU council is obviously an EU institution, the institution least accountable to the people of the EU. They want it and force it through as best they can. The parliament, the EU institution most accountable to the people of the EU (not that it's saying much) tried to stop it.

Of course Nations want this.

Who is in the Council? You are saying "nuh-uh", but not addressing any of the substance of my comment.

The Council represents state governments, not nations. A nation consists of all the people in it, not just those who appointed themselves to speak on its behalf.

... appoint themselves? You are aware how governments are chosen in all member states? Are you calling into question the democratic processes of national governments?

Either way, your issue is with national governments and not the EU, which curbs their excesses.

Yes, that's correct. I am calling into question the democratic processes of any so-called "representative democracy".

I see. Thank you for sharing your views with us. I think they speak for themselves.

Far from it. This is a classic example that national governments use EU to launder unpopular policy at home. "We have to, it's a EU requirement". It's hard to think it's not by design, that indeed EU is made to "curb the excesses" of popular accountability. UK played that game for decades, and it went as it had to go.

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