sc11

It's often just security theatre meant to please the law & order voter base more than anything else. They might catch some minor criminals but as you said, if you really want to "move" data across a border, there are plenty of ways to do so without physically carrying a device.

For some goals it can actually be useful, though I'm not sure if this is done during regular border checks or just in the context of asylum requests or similar: Accessing location histories, picture metadata or social media profiles on your device can be a fairly easy way to check that you're not giving them false information about where you're coming from or where you've been. This can be done automatically, so the officer doesn't need to figure out themself what they're looking at.

> But basically a bunch of MEPs just didn't think it was that important to pay attention to the details, phoned it in, and screwed up badly.

Indeed. Epicenter.works published a table[1] to make it easier for people unfamiliar with the voting system to follow along. It uses the same template that the MEPs use, except with the "Vote" section filled in from the perspective of someone against Art. 11/13. This might make it easier to understand why this mistake could happen but it seems clear enough that, if you're actually paying attention, you could avoid mistakes on such an important issue.

[1] https://epicenter.works/sites/default/files/copyright_dsm_fi... (PDF)

It's not unlikely that at least some of them claim it was a mistake to avoid taking responsibility for their vote because they're aware of how unpopular it was. After being in parliament for at least ~5 years, it's hard to believe so many of them still haven't figured out how the voting works.

EDRi[1] attempts what you describe in your first point. It's an association of European NGOs to unite efforts on a European level, with an office in Brussels. They recently funded travel costs for citizens to go to Brussels to talk to MEPs about this directive, for example.

[1] https://edri.org/about/

> I'm not sure what a good way of distinguishing between the two would be.

GitHub Pages makes it easy to create a separate website for the first use case, which you can link to on the very top in the description. Then the README can contain info aimed at (new) developers of the project, build instructions and the likes, which you likely don't have to go to frequently (your 2nd case).

> It then needs to be passed by the parliament, where votes are proportional to population.

Votes in the parliament aren't directly proportional to population in order to prevent large countries from dominating votes. Germany has 1 MEP per ~855k citizens, France ~870k while smaller countries like Belgium or Ireland have 1 MEP per 400-500k citizens.

The same applies to VPN providers. You're just moving around who you trust.

The proposal for the ePrivacy regulation (not the same as the old ePrivacy directive) is supposed to do that but unfortunately there hasn't been much movement on it in the last year.

Can find a short overview of it here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/08/beyond-th...