A failure rate of only 50% is absurdly good for a system like this. If we have to:
> Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist, and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears somewhere.
then apparently either there are so many perpetrators that regular conversations with partners etc. are about as common as crime, or such regular conversations don't have such a high risk of being reported after all.
I don't think chat surveillance is a good idea. But please use transparent and open communication. Don't manipulate us just like the enemy does.
According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false positives already stood at 90,950.
Presumably the actual number of criminals caught by this would remain constant, so the FP rate would increase. Unless of course, the definition of criminal expands to keep the FP rate low...
I recall a half decade back, there was discussion of the quit rate of employees, maybe Facebook?, due to literal mental trauma from having to look at and validate pedophile flagged images.
Understand there is pedophilia, then there's horribly violent, next level abusive pedophilia.
I used to work in a department where, adjacently, the RCMP were doing the same. They couldn't handle it, and were constantly resigning. The violence associated with some of the videos and images is what really got them.
The worst part is, the more empathetic you are, the more it hurts to work in this area.
It seems to me that without this sad and damaging problem fixed, monitoring chats won't help much.
How many good people, will we laden with trama, literally waking up screaming at night? It's why the RCMP officers were resigning.
I can't imagine being a jury member at such a case.
Its a real and sad problem, but not one that I think can be fixed with technology. To much is on the line to allow for a false positive from a hallucinating robot to destroy a person(s) life.
This remains one of the best things I've found on HN.
How many of the other 50% were guilty and how many innocent after an investigation?
It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this.
[0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...
Are we reading the same thing?
This linked statement clearly authorizes invasion of privacy by public authorities, in the name of any of the very vaguely listed reasons – as long as there’s some law to allow it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". *Only targeted interception* of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
If a principle of the EU legal order is at stake, such as the right to privacy, then that constitutional imperative can very well override a new law.
The commission and parliament are well aware of this risk. They often choose to have laws advised on by the courts, in advance. To avoid a legal mess.
This is normal in a functional democracy. To avoid abuse of power / overreach by any institution.
I'm not happy with everything the EU does, but to call it useless is to be ignorant of the rest of the world.
ECHR court however can't repeal the law, only fine the governmemt for actual violation of convention rights.
I don't remember whether the EU top court can repeal EU laws, but general answer is no. It's politics -- if the government is full shitheads that somebody voted for and then haven't protested hard enough to boot out -- then they can ignore constitution, jail judges, behead journalists in a forest and send army to shoot at protesters of the wrong kind.
It seems axiomatic that legal systems contain provisions that prevent their violation. However, democracy requires that laws are voted on by elected representatives or plebiscites, which can of course mean repealing prior laws.
However the EU institutions are not sovereign, which might be the loophole here?
Edit: I'm aware that the EU is only afforded "competences" given to it by treaties, so perhaps human rights don't fall into any of these...?
However, I also wonder if legislation such as Chat Control, etc, might fall outside its competences.
In the end, the question is whether there is a legal mechanism by which the introduction of laws such as those in question here can be prohibited?
>Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
Doesn't matter really. No right in any treaty is absolute. Not even the right to life itself -- the police can and does shoot people and it's legal for them to do under specific conditions. And of course the chat control law says that whatever it is supposed to be doing should be done in the most privacy respecting way possible.
In theory the court (any court really) can weight whether the measures are proportionate and whether negative obligations (not invade privacy) are in a balance with positive obligations (you know -- protective children is also important) and whether the balance is appropriate of a democratic society.
The problem everybody is trying to not see - there is no right to E2E encryption under any law right now. There is no right to have a communication channel that government can't possibly listen to. It's not a thing. The same way there is no right to have your house unsearchable by police and your freedom unbound by a court that can jail you. There are strict limits when any of those things happen, but they do fact happen all the time for good reasons and for bad ones too.
Add: if I would attack it from a legal standpoint, I would not focus on privacy so much, but rather say that creating mass-scaning capability is a threat to the democracy itself.
However, mass surveillance cannot reasonably be held in balance with detection of crimes, as most people are not criminals
What I'm saying, is -- just because the balance isn't where you want it to be, and the policy is bad, that alone doesn't mean the law is unconstitutional, against the EU treaties or ECHR or should be impossible to pass through the legislative.
It's just bad because it's bad.
It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.
The ECHR itself is independent of the EU, it is national governments that have signed up to this treaty.
So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???
.... It would be interesting to hear knowledgeable legal opinion in this!
Correct. EU is not a party of the convention, member states are, so EU law can be ruled on by ECJ and national law and actions of national governments by ECHR.
Then at the end of the day it's the national government that would look at your chats and "I'm just following EU law" would not be an especially great excuse for the ECHR court.
>Article 8 de la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales:
>Droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale
>1. Toute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée et familiale, de son domicile et de sa correspondance.
>2. Il ne peut y avoir ingérence d'une autorité publique dans l'exercice de ce droit que pour autant que cette ingérence est prévue par la loi et qu'elle constitue une mesure qui, dans une société démocratique, est nécessaire à la sécurité nationale, à la sûreté publique, au bien-être économique du pays, à la défense de l'ordre et à la prévention des infractions pénales, à la protection de la santé ou de la morale, ou à la protection des droits et libertés d'autrui.
—
> Article 12
> Nul ne sera l'objet d'immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d'atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes.
And that's it, no other additions.
That's the key word.
There is no penalty for doing so.
If something is outlawed but there is no negative consequence for doing it, then it’s not really outlawed in practical terms.
it escapes me hwo so many can be so naive.
The EU isn't really a state, though. The members are states, but not the EU.
EU law and its constitution have primacy.
But mostly, EU law just sets a baseline, and almost all execution of it is devolved to the member states.
Edit: the EU does not have a constitution but a constitution shaped update of the Treaties. Now, lots of politicians are happy to blame the EU for unpopular stuff, but the council is the national politicians and they basically run the EU.
You make use of the silent assumption that politicians are not criminals. :-(
Especially the EU, with limited democratic oversight, does not have to be too concerned about things like this.
You want the police to solve crimes, right?
If you are against this it is because you have something to hide.
Also it is more than possible that those politicians do not agree with that Convention.
you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel.
stop treating the ECHR like some talisman that keeps the wolves at bay, as if authoritarian drift politely obeys paperwork. stop playing with this whole “actually, the loophole is X,” “no, the loophole is Y,” like you're debugging a bad API instead of staring at the obvious: when a state wants to expand surveillance, it does, and the justifications are retrofitted later, be it "public safety", or "keeping your children safe."
If this posited wannabe-surveillance state wanted to institute ubiquitous surveillance, it would just unilaterally do so a la PRISM. To our knowledge, they have not done this and are instead trying to rationalize the creep of surveillance somehow, which indicates that public opinion around these initiatives still matters. Public opinion is something we can all influence. Maybe discussing the legalese is a waste of time, but discussing the rhetoric and how to combat it definitely isn't
What I think the endgame is here is to be able to do surveillance out in the open, so you can have more human resources doing it, and so you can use that surveillance legally more often. If you have a clandestine surveillance operation, you can only employ people you trust not to squeal and you have to engage in parallel construction (or resort to extralegal execution of force).
A lot easier if you can just point to a piece of paper and say "but you said we could"
ECHR is on same ontological level as the notion of state. If no one concrete is willing to enforce it, it has zero agency.
Politicians can ignore constitutions like citizen can ignore laws. Politicians can send military forces on manifesters, and people can make politicians meet the guillotine.
This is defeatist, fatalist nonsense.
It was defeated once. It can be again. What might change that is lazy nihilism masquerading as wisdom.
It’s arguing why something that just happened is impossible. It’s justifying not doing anything because doing anything is pointless. Nihilism justifying laziness.
No, this is just being pragmatic and realizing that against a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push, legal arguments fall short. Until you address the root causes of something like Chat Control being tried again and again until it passes, any victory is just a brief respite.
You need political will to ensure freedom is respected and wanted by all. After decades of media and reactionary propaganda about crime scaremongering, it's hardly surprising that politicians are able to draft such laws with a straight face.
(6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the rules laid down in this Regulation and a level playing field within the internal market, those rules should apply to all providers, irrespective of their place of establishment or residence, that offer services in the Union, as evidenced by a substantial connection to the Union.
(f) ‘relevant information society services’ means all of the following services: (i) a hosting service; (ii) an interpersonal communications service; (iii) a software applications store; (iv) an internet access service; (v) online search engines.
And via https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... pp 8:
(2) ‘internet access service’ means a publicly available electronic communications service that provides access to the internet, and thereby connectivity to virtually all end points of the internet, irrespective of the network technology and terminal equipment used
===
Calling it Chat Control is itself an understatement, one that evokes "well I'm not putting anything sensitive on WhatsApp" sentiments - and that's incredibly dangerous.
This bill may very well be read to impose mandatory global backdoors on VPNs, public cloud providers, and even your home router or your laptop network card!
(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. But it doesn't take a lawyer to see how broadly scoped this is.)
It's quite wild to see child sexual abuse continue to be cited as a justification for far-reaching, privacy-invading proposals, allegedly to empower government actors to combat child sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, we have copious and ever-increasing evidence of actual child sexual abuse being perpetrated by people with the most power in these very institutions, and they generally face few (if any) consequences.
Laws targeting service providers usually always apply to all providers providing services in the respective jurisdiction. It would be unusual if it was any different.
How this not a declaration of war?
Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.
If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.
But the near daily proposals getting tossed out in their desperate attempt to turn their countries into daycare centers is just annoying to people trying to build things for other adults.
This would involve them taking about a 30% hit to revenue (or more, depending on the company), so yeah, entirely implausible.
But, it's also worth noting that the US constantly does stuff like this. Like, the entire financial services panopticon of tracking is driven almost entirely by the US, and has been around since the 70s. Should the EU then wall off the US?
Personally, (as an EU citizen), that would really hurt if they did, but getting completely off the dollar based financial system would remove a lot of the US's control (and as a bonus/detriment reveal to the US how much of their vaunted market is propped up by EU money).
Most governments are bad, and these kinds of laws are international, so I'm not sure walling off the EU would make your life much better.
And let's be honest, you should expect the tech industry to end up as regulated as the financial industry over time, the only difference will be how long it takes to get there.
Someone should tell Congress.
For example, Hacker News has no obligation to preserve your "First Amendment Rights" on this website. They are free to mute you, ban you, or even just surreptitiously change what you say without you knowing.
If a website which otherwise wouldn’t censor you begins to censor you because of threats from foreign nations, that’s a foreign nation pressuring an American company into suppressing rights of American citizens.
That’s a foreign nation imposing on your rights. In the past that used to require an invasion, so it was a bit more obvious what was happening, but the result is still the same.
Yes it’s through a website, which is owned by a company, which technically speaking owes you nothing.
In the digital age though, where are you going to use your speech, if not on a website?
What you (and others) are doing is trying to reduce the significance of a major transgression over a minor technicality. Way to miss the forest for trees.
The EU can stuff it on this one. And I supported (still support!) the GDPR.
Outside of law, I have never once heard "that's just semantics" in a context that made sense, or said by an intelligent person. Not once. Maybe it turns out semantics are never "just semantics", and instead it's something that always matters.
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems kind of naive and short sighted.
Semantics are very important when it comes to legal matters.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The U.S. federal or state governments, courtesy of that amendment, have very limited authority to control your speech. That's where the legal authority ends.
So you see no problem with using jurisdiction washing like Five Eyes to remove our rights?
If we don't tolerate a government we elect abridging our freedom of speech, why would we accept a foreign government doing that?
When foreign governments try to force conpanies to abridge free speech by Americans on American soil, that is an attack on something that we deem important enough to have enshrined in our constitution.
It looks like the possibilities are endless once you throw semantics out of the window, so I could see why you're so fond of doing so.
The principle says that information is non-confidential by default, rather than the other way around.
We can request almost any information held by government agencies, including copies of communication like email and documents.
One thing that has surprised European acquaintances is the fact that this includes government-held info about individuals, e.g. address and tax returns.
We can. It’s just easier to throw a wrench in a legislative process than to start it. (By design.)
New rules lead to profitable business opportunities (and future lobbies), incumbents get to entrench their positions using the new rules, and people get stockholm syndrome and just end up accepting the new normal.
Modern representative democracy is Parkinson's law at work. Government is the purest form of bureaucracy and monopoly. Thus, it finds ways to grow itself every year regardless of what happens.
They handwavingly dismiss all privacy-related criticism with “well our experts say something else!” and insist there are no privacy issues - but at the same time require exemption for their own caste.
Populism largely runs Denmark.
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/4963/Denmark:-Exemptin...
The law was installed in 2016, (colloquially called “Smykkeloven”/The Jewelry Law) after Syrian refugees walked up through Europe and Denmark, and a myth arose about super rich refugees with bags full of gold.. in 2022 this law had been used in 17 instances.
I cannot roll my eyes enough at the policians here.
From https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2lknr2d3go.amp
“UK seeks Danish inspiration to shake up immigration system”
“Shabana Mahmood will model some of her new measures on the Danish system - seen as one of the toughest in Europe.”
Europol, Julie Cordua (CEO of Thorn), Cathal Delaney, former Europol who now is on Thorn's board, Alan Parker, billionaire and founder of the Oak Foundation that's been bankrolling the fake charities lobbying for chat control, Chris Cohn, another billionaire and hedge fund manager who has been funding anti-encryption lobbying in both the US and the EU, Sarah Gardner, former Thorn employee and part of the network of fake charities lobbying to ban encryption. SHe also focuses on lobbying in the US as well, and Maciej Szpunnar, Polish Advocate General and the European court of justice, wants to use chat control for prosecuting copyright infringement.
And don't forget Peter Hummelgaard: "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communite on encrypted messaging services."
So you have a few billionaires running lobbying organizations disguised as fake "for the children" charities that operate in both the EU and the US, Europol, and a group of powerful people that are fundamentally opposed to privacy.
> Thorn works with a group of technology partners who serve the organization as members of the Technology Task Force. The goal of the program includes developing technological barriers and initiatives to ensure the safety of children online and deter sexual predators on the Internet.
> Various corporate members of the task force include Facebook, Google, Irdeto, Microsoft, Mozilla, Palantir, Salesforce Foundation, Symantec, and Twitter.
Apparently Thorn scratched that list from their current website, but the Wiki page has an archive link.
As with all these types of legislation, always follow the money.
Not to be confused with EU parliament which is elected by popular vote and EU comission, which is the executive branch of EU and us voted in by Parliament
On the 13th, Breyer wrote:
> Yesterday, EU gov'ts rejected changes to mandatory backdoor #ChatControl & anonymity-destroying age checks.
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/1155418089245415...
So yes, if you don’t like chat control, talk to your MEPs and stop voting in populist ministers and council members/presidents.
Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently, or at all? We will never know...
Even if it did work it would be completely ineffective at reducing the number of victims. Even if it somehow did by proxy then criminals would simply get smarter and find new ways to completely evade this system.
I have a large amount of disrespect for people who should know all this yet push these types of solutions anyways.
In a nation state, it’s easier to pull off authoritarian shifts, because citizens will not usually revolt over such things alone. But the EU relies on sustained support and a positive image. There are already at the very least 10s of thousands EU skeptics created from the last wave alone, and probably much much more to come.
Zooming out, I think this is the time when the EU is needed the most, given the geopolitical developments. Both Russia and China are drooling about a scattered Europe consisting of isolated small states. That makes it more infuriating. Someone, ideally the press, needs to dig into the people behind this and expose them.
The strength of the EU is based on the EU institutions not having too much power. It's why the EU does not attempt to expel, hopefully temporarily, reprobate nations such as Hungary.
If this passes, however, the pencil in my hand would definitely hover above the YES checkbox for a while and, actually, maybe even tick it. This alone would be enough of a straw to break the camel's back.
We should also try to minimize the number of useful idiots who are genuinely concerned about children's safety. There are two excuses being used to push these surveillance laws: CSAM scanning and content moderation for children. These are bad excuses and we need to call them out as such in every conversation.
CSAM scanning ignores the actual problem, which is the process by which CSAM is created. The root problem is the trafficking of children in physical space, not the tools used to transmit and store child porn, which are general purpose tools used to transmit and store anything. Our efforts and resources, as a matter of priority, should be spent on preventing children from being trafficked in the first place.
The under-16 social media ban ignores the actual problem of parental responsibility. We could implement configurable IP filters on the device itself at the OS level, with the setting being protected by a password parents can set, and this could be done completely offline. It would be way easier to implement and will work better than any of these remote solutions. And as a matter of principle: it is the responsibility of parents to decide how to raise their own children.
The frequency, aggression and coordination around chat control, both in the Uk and Eu tells me there is a single entity.
It’s not just by chance
There’s an arms race element to this that I don’t see people discussing.
Do EU citizens have any privacy from US tech? Is there anything to protect?
Do we want the USA to have exclusive right to spy on the world?
Is it better to have 1 Big Brother or 10?
This time, we should feel 100% completely reassured (from the proposal):
Regulation whilst still allowing for end-to-end encryption, nothing in this
Regulation should be interpreted as prohibiting, weakening or circumventing,
requiring to disable, or making end-to-end encryption impossible.“Digital House Arrest”: Teens under 16 face a blanket ban from WhatsApp, Instagram, online games, and countless other apps with chat functions, allegedly to protect them from grooming.
For which I agree.
“Digital isolation instead of education, protection by exclusion instead of empowerment – this is paternalistic, out of touch with reality, and pedagogical nonsense.”
I would not know English or anything about computers, and my childhood would have been quite sad were there such a retarded ban[1]. I do not care about WhatsApp and Instagram, but online games and apps with chat functions? Come on now. "Allegedly" is the keyword.
At any rate, see Roblox and Discord. Do something with those platforms first. :)
[1] I was around 12 years old when I met an older guy IRL who I have met in an online game initially. Can you imagine the safety? :D He showed me his laptop on which he had a Linux distro installed, and the rest is history.
The Zombie proposal just keeps rising from the dead. The technical/mathematical objections don’t change.
I still haven’t seen a counter-argument stating why a mass-scanning architecture should be expected to work, given the base rates and error rates involved.
There will be massive backlash towards EU. Texting is just so embedded to the daily life, if the EU causes inconveniences or trouble with texting, this might create massive anger. It could start off Brexit-like campaigns in some countries.
I'm not saying that it is impossible this is going to be implemented. But I think it's just some bureaucrats dreaming.
Why not?
Which is really funny, because the EU commission recommends to their employees to use Signal for texting.
Might as well let it go pure evil so when the time comes, the people will be less hesitant to get rid of the whole EU bureaucracy and the armies of corporate lobbyists altogether
- members of opposition of the wrong kind (as defined by incumbent);
- journalists investigating the government;
(if the incumbent is brazen enough, those above can be and already are selectively targeted with paid exploits)
- political opponents of the wrong kind (aka the extrimists, which kinda overlaps with #1);
- actual enemy combatants (aka the terrorists), spys and traitors;
- organized crime of the day with unwarranted delusions of grandeur (R. Taghi, his antics and aspirations to kill the Dutch PM);
- immigrants and immigrants to be of the wrong kind and people who smuggle them;
The shit has hit the fan about a decade ago already and not calming down at all, but intelligence gathering capability of secret services of all EU countries are being continiously degraded, because everything is E2E by default and money flows are obscured too.
Nobody likes to see shit being on fire and having all the dashboards down.
Another happening happens, the services are asked why they didn't prevent it or report it being likely -- what do they answer? "We can't read the damn messages, so we can't know if there is a cell that plans to do it again".
This is their best chance for them to enact mass surveillance, before the hoi polloi crack and finally get out of their couches.
American right-libertarianism is a joke that originally started as an anarchist branch and has degenerated into getting in bed with the state to further its selfish ideals. Criticism of the state has nothing to do with those posers, as their goal is solely to become the state (i.e. the oppressor), rather than truly pursue the ideal of a free society.
It can't be illegal to role-play a grooming situation between consenting adults in a private conversation. If millions of people do that, they must be buried in reports.
And once in place repealing it will be tremendously difficult.
How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
They do sometimes manage to just ignore parts that they don't like sometimes, at least temporarily, as the recent and continuing mess in the DPR-US illustrates.
You need a means for citizens to hold the powers that be accountable. Unfortunately, the EU is largely designed without such a mechanism, as its initial scope and ambition was much smaller than the superstate it is growing into it wasn't deemed necessary.
Every branch except for the European Parliament risks consequences only if they fuck up so badly that the majority of EU citizens in their home countries (or in some cases, the majority of member states) deem their actions so reprehensible that they consider punishing the EU more important than electing their own national government, since it's effectively the same vote.
This is technically still a means of accountability, but it's not really a threat in practice.
He was being straightforward, direct, matter of fact, technical, and an asshole.
You gotta lube up the plebes, or they get butthurt, and that is what is causing the issue.
TLDR: Billionaires hold political power.
I'm not sure it can be solved without everybody writing down their vote, but this would be one way that would make pushing through unpopular policies, whether because of changing opinions, mismatches where politicians misrepresent their plans or corruption, much more difficult.
Of course initially we would have to learn, that changing our minds too often will lead to things not getting done at all. And it is doubtful, that a lot of people are even capable of becoming informed and reflecting beings, not to be swayed by a hip populist radical, and thus causing shit to happen. Also the sheer number of issues and policies would be so many, that most people couldn't make up their mind on everything. But that's OK, since people can raise awareness and simply vote later, when they became aware. Another issue would be what the choices are that people have on the platform. How to give all relevant opinions as choices? How to know what is relevant? Or can voters apply for adding a new opinion? But then who grants the right to add a choice? How to prevent spam?
So there certainly are huge issues with the idea. But maybe, over time, we would develop into politically reasonable societies and politicians would have to fear the opinion of the people, because one scandal uncovered, and they could end up kicked out tomorrow. Maybe it could also better designed, so that there is some minimum time between being able to change ones stance about something. Or some maximum of policies one can have an opinion about per day.
Even initially to have such a platform without real political consequences of voting, would be super interesting, because you could lookup what the current opinions of the people are.
I think that would empower ill-conceived (and/or ill-willed) populist & short term movements, with everyone in constant fear of being "un-vote bombed" by armies of easily led, and likely make the lobbying problem worse.
To use the recent US shutdown as an example. Passing a budget is like one of the basic requirements of governing. If the current government cannot accomplish that, it should immediately dissolve and elections be held. Every single position in power at the time, gone, the whole thing gets re-elected because they have proven that the current group cannot adequately govern.
The ability to recall needs to work similarly. Vote should be able to be initiated by the people at anytime, and a successful vote means the government dissolves and new elections are held.
We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails. It failed the first time, it should not be able to be immediately reintroduced whether in the same or a different form. There should be some sort of cooling off period where that piece of legislation (or its goals) cannot be reintroduced for x number of years.
The cooling off period also has problems, because sometimes a piece of legislation is a good idea, but has a major flaw that causes people to vote against it. What happens when people want a law passed, but not in the form it's presented in?
It's important to note that this is a basic principle, almost the basic principle, of English-style parliamentary democracy. You have a monarch who makes decisions (through their chosen government, ever since the English cut off a few heads), and the rest of the Parliament (a bunch of nobles, clergy, and eventually representatives of commoners) is there to withdraw financing from that government when they disapprove.
> We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails.
We usually do, it is called a "session." The problem is the inability to pass negative legislation (which also has a pretty long history) i.e. we will not do a thing. Deliberative assemblies explicitly frown on negative legislation, and instead say that purpose is served simply by not doing the thing.
The problem is that individual rights are provided by negative legislation against the government: think the US Bill of Rights. Instead, we have systems where exclusively positive legislation is passed by majorities, and repealing that legislation takes supermajorities. The only pragmatic way to create new rights becomes to challenge legislation in courts, and get a decision by opinionated, appointed judges that X piece of legislation is superseded by Y piece of legislation for unconvincing reason Z, and this new "right" is about as stable as the current lineup of the sitting justices.
What we need is to pretend like "democracy" is a meaningful word rather than an empty chant, or more often simply a euphemism for the US, Anglosphere, Western and Central Europe, and whoever they currently approve of. Democracy is rule by the ruled, and the exact processes by which the decisions are made define the degree of democracy. Somehow, elites have decided that process is the least important part of democracy, and the most important part is that elites get their preferred outcomes. Anything else is "populism."*
Decisionmaking processes in "democracies" need to be examined, justified, and codified. The EU needs either to cede a lot more leverage to its individual members (and make that stupid currency a European bancor, rather than a German weapon) OR become more directly responsive to European individuals. If you're not serving the individual states, and you're not serving the individual citizens, you're exclusively serving elites.
* A term made into meaningless invective by elites who hated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States), a party who believed in things that were good.
What's plan B? Lower the threshold to a million dollars?
Is this true? Lots of countries with high living standards have high taxes. It doesn't need to solve every problem but it does help solve the problem of one unelected person holding too much power and influence.
> What's plan B? Lower the threshold to a million dollars?
1B = 1000M. I think thats high enough. Don't see why you need to make it 1000x smaller to try and make a point.
It does? Really?
What are they teaching kids in school these days? According to the books I studied, nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone.
Yep.
> nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone
You don't believe in democracy and equal rights? Anyway billionaires love their 10 digits not 8.
I agree that wealth inequality is horrible and taxes on the wealthy should be much higher. But if someone owns 10% of a trillion dollar company, that's $100B in shares. They can sell off 900M$ worth of shares and "not be a billionaire" in terms of income and money (and thus taxation). So what do you do?
- Seize control of their shares and thus their control over private industry
- Or, accept that billionaires exist
This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
Most people hate the idea of billionaires, but people generally also hate a centrally planned government where the government owns a controlling stake in all businesses preventing any insider from having any real control.
We should be discussing strategies to tackle this. Not just go "oh lets just accept it".
Just how many people have 100B+? Do you see them trying to interfere in governance and elections? Maybe we can have annual wealth taxes. Just like property taxes. There are many ways to tackle this. That's what we should be discussing. Not just giving up. Absurd wealth inequality will cause societal collapse.
> This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
So, the government steals a percent of private businesses every year? What does the government do with this? Are you suggesting that the government forces business owners to liquidate their own shares to give to the government? So on a long enough time line, no one is allowed to own a business.
> No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
The business is already paying taxes (i.e. property taxes). You're proposing a new tax on top of the existing taxation scheme, an ownership tax that likely requires the owner to reduce their ownership. Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.
Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.
Again, I agree that billionaires are bad. I don't think taxation or incentive structures will fix it. I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.
All tax is theft by that argument. Whether they liquidate or not is up to them. They just need to pay x tax. They aren't selling their stake to the government. They are free to pay the tax from their general annual income or by selling their stocks in the market like they do today every year.
> Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.
How are folks paying property taxes today? They are paying x% of the properties annual value yearly.
> Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.
If stock is being sold to pay tax its being sold to someone else in the market not the govt. The govt is not owning the business.
> I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.
I agree. But I don't share the sentiment that nothing can be done. None of what I said is radical. Its reality in many european countries. And wealth equality is far less. eg. an annual 1% wealth tax. 1% of 1B is 10M. That's peanuts to them. Heck their stocks appreciate far greater than that yearly.
Ah yes Europe, where businesses are largely uncompetitive globally and the countries are more than ever completely at the mercy of global superpowers. I'll also point out that the most competitive and richest european countries also have the largest wealth inequality, and the european countries pulling down the average are the poorest ones and most irrelevant globally. Their stock market is also considered mediocre and many European prefer to invest in US markets instead.
Just pointing out that "more taxes" isn't some panacea and there's a real cost to competitiveness going this route. If the US went this way, the BRICS nations especially China would eclipse the western world within a generation on the back of more absuive practices, and become the global superpowers easily pushing the west around.
I suppose that's nicer for this generation of citizens, although potentially catastrophic for the generation afterwards. And I don't necessarily envy the geopolitical reality of Europe right now, even if I do envy many of their healthcare systems.
> I'll also point out that the most competitive and richest european countries also have the largest wealth inequality, and the european countries pulling down the average are the poorest ones and most irrelevant globally.
This isn't even true. The US has the same inequality as Russia. Every top EU country is far far lower. Maybe we are communist after all.
Your entire argument is that 900 people out of 350,000,000 people in the US having to pay more tax is going to drive the US into the ground.
Talk about a low-faith strawman! Let me eviscerate this garbage argument.
The 900 billionaires in America control around $7.8 trillion USD in assets (US yearly GDP is over $30 trillion, for reference)
Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending.
Pack it up boys, we completely solved wealth inequality and will be a glorious european nation with our $78 billion dollars! If we applied that to nationalized healthcare (estimated cost $3 trillion per year) we just paid for 2% of the healthcare system!
Or maybe we just redistribute that $78 billion. That's $588 dollars per US household per year. Problem = solved.
Great argument.
Excellent point. I'm glad you see how much of a pittance 1% annually is. Though I've made the same point before(remember I said 1% of 1B is just 10M, thats a joke for billionaires). Increase the % as you wish. 1% does nothing for inequality given stock gains are far higher yearly.
My whole point is that its a problem that needs to be solved. How we can solve it is a great thing to discuss. Your entire argument so far is that it can't be solved. Which I don't agree with.
And for some reason you just ignore some points. eg. property taxes: "in 2023, approximately $363 billion in property taxes was collected on single-family homes across the United States. Property taxes generally account for about 10-11% of total U.S. tax revenue.". You said "Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.". Turns out thats not true.
Tax the billionaires. You seem to think the current trend is bad as well. You just happen to think my suggestions to fix it is bad. That's fine. But I think its a better constructive use of your time trying to think of better ideas than give up.
1% is your number. Feel free to tell me the magical wealth tax % that fixes all income inequality and maintains strong ability to own private businesses. This is your argument and it's lazy to tell me to do your work for you.
>My whole point is that its a problem that needs to be solved. How we can solve it is a great thing to discuss. Your entire argument so far is that it can't be solved. Which I don't agree with.
Yes, I think that your wealth tax cannot solve the problem unless it tips away from capitalism towards socialism, e.g. destroy billionaires ability to have control over private industry and broaden the base of ownership or make it public. Maybe you have a magical % wealth tax that fixes everything, I'll wait for your thesis.
>And for some reason you just ignore some points. eg. property taxes: "in 2023, approximately $363 billion in property taxes was collected on single-family homes across the United States. Property taxes generally account for about 10-11% of total U.S. tax revenue.". You said "Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.". Turns out thats not true.
This is not a place to have expansive multi-point debates. I'm not ignoring anything, I'm having targeted discussions on major points. Again, property taxes are NOT universal in the US and are largely balanced by income taxes. States with high property taxes generally have low/no income taxes and vice versa. And yes, property taxes have had a strong effect in lowering home ownership. In China, over 70% of millenials own a home (no property taxes). In America, less than half of millenials own homes (high property taxes).
Another point I neglected to reply to because these replies get way too long: European regulation is bad on businesses because corrupt billionaires aren't in place to stop it. Can't you see that regulation and private power go hand in hand? A government strong enough to force billionaires to not get richer and instead spread the wealth is a government strong enough to regulate the heck out of businesses. Given power, it will be used.
>Tax the billionaires. You seem to think the current trend is bad as well. You just happen to think my suggestions to fix it is bad. That's fine. But I think its a better constructive use of your time trying to think of better ideas than give up.
We do tax billionaires and the wealthy! The top 1% of Americans pay 25% of all revenue. The bottom 50% pay roughly 3% of all revenue.
Please forward your taxation thesis that 1) solves wealth inequality 2) preserves the ability to own large businesses. And no, forcing a business owner to sell their shares to retail investors and hedge funds does not preserve business ownership, it guarantees that citizens will eventually be forced out of their own businesses that they start.
My thesis is simple: Skin the cat. Blow up their ownership. Prevent them from owning large businesses. Use the power of government to jail them and disappear them until they bow before a government of the people. Or accept the system for what it is. But half measures? Fiddling with minor taxation numbers? Get real, that's controlled opposition that prolongs their reign.
The sad reality is that the world has a nonzero percentage of power-hungry narcissists. We need governments that are more democratic and robust. We all know that the current government processes are broken and corrupted.
as in: not possible
the EU parliament can't legislate to remove it, at least not without permission from the two organs (commission, council) that keep pushing this
EU parliament is the only legislature in the world that needs permission to legislate
It makes sense, because EU law is mostly technical stuff that commission has to draft and all the national governments have to agree to.
With the commission being elected by the parliament itself and vote of no confidence being a thing, it's not like the parliament doesn't have power -- the power is intentionally nerfed to not overreach where national governments don't want it to.
you only need 50%+1 to appoint the commission, but 66% to vote them out
so practically impossible
The reason that EU Parliament can't pass bills is because constituent governments don't want to lose power to parliament.
Swiss style democracy with public referendums?
People are not able to be experts in everything they are asked to vote on, thats why we delegate it, just like people delegate their healthcare, plumbing, flying to a holiday destination, growing food, etc.
People en-mass are just as easy to manipulate as elected members, if not easier.
Generally speaking, people are stupid. Really REALLY f-cking stupid. Giving the average Joe this kind of unmoderated power in a modern world that almost entirely eludes his understanding is no different from handing him a loaded gun; eventually, someone will get hurt real bad. As someone living in Switzerland, the main reason things are as stable as they are is because:
* Changing anything significant requires a referendum, which is a huge pain in the ass. So politicians just kinda avoid important changes that require referenda, finding other ways to enrich themselves and leaving society stagnating. This means that actually important changes come about very slowly or not at all. Read up on how long it took for women's suffrage to become universal – and the outright threats of internal military action the federal government resorted to...
* Whether the Swiss like it or not, Switzerland is mostly a loud, spoilt economic annex of the EU. It will remain stable for as long as the EU is, and well off for as long as the EU wants to be seen as a peaceful and magnanimous partner in international relations. After all, "bullying" tiny and surrounded Switzerland into agreeing to anything – which the Swiss will cry about at any opportunity you give them – is a bad look.
So yeah, Swiss direct democracy is not all it's made out to be, and really not all that great up close. Admirers remind me a lot of Weaboos, strangely shortsighted in their admiration of a system they know little about.
42 homicides year 2021, so an extremely safe country too.
Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist. They are literally in top 10.
I can tell you our politicians where usually picked up from high school, never been to college, and had worse grades than the general public.
So direct democracy might be like capitalism… the worst system besides all the others.
A lot of society wants this. A lot of parents are asking for this.
When it's so cheap to enact mass propaganda, selective omission and manufactured intent, it becomes impossible to just say, "well, the people want it." Their decision making process is compromised by the same people pushing these policies through.
Democracy is indeed broken, and we have to take that seriously if we're going to fix it.
Trying to build support for mass surveillance by misrepresenting it as targeted tool with checks and balances is exactly the kind of bad faith discourse I'm talking about.
Other than hoping for a large meteorite or the second coming to end this misery, or stirring up the bloodbath a la Nepal - then, by recognizing the power of large numbers of people doing little things, like sabotaging the system at the personal level. But that implies unity, and unity and mutual support have been deliberately annihilated in this society for too long. Thus, this outcome is even less probable than the first two.
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
Relating our experience in the US, we planned for exactly this, it went okay for a while, until it didn't. The answer to parent is "do this but a little better" :-)
I’m sure there are other examples of such legal abuse of different political biases - I’m just using this as an example because there is such a long history of it. Eventually, legislators will pass whatever they want anyways. And then your recourse to regain rights is to go through an expensive years-long legal battle that ultimately requires the Supreme Court to take the case. This type of “attack” is a serious flaw in many modern democracies.
I think the fix is to have personal consequences for legislators, judges, etc that make bad decisions that violate the constitutional rights or fundamental rights of citizens. The idea that people are immune from consequence just because they’re serving in an official capacity is insane. This shouldn’t be the case for anyone serving in political office or other public roles - as in, you shouldn’t get immunity whether you are a lawmaker or policeman or teacher or whatever else.
I remember a few years ago, being shocked to see that over 50% of applicants for a software engineering role applied directly from their smartphones. So it's not even just normies who see their phone as "the computer".
By choosing "people-vs-individual-politician" fight over "people-vs-government-system". Like, literally, make politicians personally responsible for this bs.
Then it's no end to end, or at least end to end while traveling but easily collectible at rest, I mean it already is, who would stop meta from collecting messages in clear on the whatsapp ui? We should opt for a peer to peer solution or implement one
Germany first voted against chat control 2.0, then they clarified why they were against it, became "undecided". And now "Denmark" came out with a (lighter) version "some others" are more willing to vote for. [0]
What a joke. In front of our eyes.
Then they wonder why people hate their guts and are becoming increasingly violent, euro-skeptical, etc.
[0]: https://euperspectives.eu/2025/09/germany-backtracks-chat/
I think "oops" or "d'oh" are the phrases we're looking for here.
Plus, when you see politicians react the way they did, it's like a code smell.
Someone said it's an asymmetric conflict, so we need to pull it to our (human-size) level and fight on our chessboard.
The difficulty which PGP had of key exchange could be handled somewhat like Signal does now, via a personal physical sync of the phones.
At which point, the authorities will still be able to make use of "traffic analysis" as they always have. So they'll be able to tell which parties are communicating, but not what is being said.
Well - colour me not so surprised. The lobbyists are back at it.
I think we need to permanently crush them now. They attack us here. This is a war.
The only real solution is to counterattack. Get legislation through the EU parliament that guarantees a right to privacy and anonymity.
Dunno if there's any chance of that happening.
A snippet I posted before:
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance. Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.
The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.
It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.
The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.
This legislation, while reprehensible, is not terrorism. Defining terrorism is particularly difficult (the UN has been trying since the 60s and is trying again this year), but if all intimidation for political gains is terrorism then so is every other political ad from the last 30 years. Banksy would probably argue that regular advertising also qualifies - after all, that's what the "F" in "FOMO" stands for and beauty products are definitely pushing an ideology.
You don't have to like the official definition of terrorism, but that doesn't mean that you alone get to decide what it should be.
Germany’s criminal code already recognises coercion of a population for political ends as a serious offence. If a private organisation tried to impose a system that eliminated private communication, criminalised encryption defaults, and created a permanent climate of fear around ordinary speech, they wouldn’t get a policy debate. They’d get an arrest warrant.
The only thing making this “controversial” is institutional hesitation. Everyone knows issuing warrants against EU-level actors would cause political embarrassment, so we pretend the behaviour is something milder, something safer to acknowledge. That gap between what the law says and what the state is willing to enforce is exactly where tragedies start.
This isn’t about inflating the meaning of terrorism. It’s about refusing to downgrade coercion just because it comes from people in respectable offices. Words shouldn’t shrink to protect those in power. They should describe what is happening.
edit: and whilst we are at the semantics - the word “terrorism” comes from the French Reign of Terror, where the state used fear as an instrument of governance. The original meaning was quite literally state-driven intimidation of an entire population to enforce ideological conformity.
I wonder if one could train an LLM to automatically protest all the new chat-control? This is getting ridiculous.
The other excuse being used to push these laws is CSAM scanning. But CSAM scanning ignores the actual problem, which is the trafficking of children in physical space, not the tools used to transmit and store child porn, which are general purpose tools used to transmit and store anything. A society's efforts and resources, as a matter of priority, should be spent on preventing children from being trafficked in the first place.
These attempts for more surveillance and control are being pushed under the guise of these very bad excuses, and we need to call them out in every conversation to reduce the number of gullible dorks that might vote for it.
People need to actually understand that governments are very close to having the tools needed for authoritarian governance all around the world. It might not happen immediately, but once the tools are built, that future becomes almost inevitable.
We can't just hope to rely on technological measures because we can't out-tech the law at scale all of the time. But we can and should fight back on both fronts. On the technological front, the first step is securing VPN access to ensure anonymity on the Internet. The best effort at the moment IMO is SoftEther, which is VPN over Ethernet wrapped in HTTPS.[0] It's open-source. It has a server discovery site called VPNGate.[1] You can host a server to let somebody else use, then use a server someone else is hosting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN
[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/
We're really only missing a few things before there's decentralized VPN over HTTPS that anyone in the world can host and use, and it would be resistant to all DPI firewalls. First, a user-friendly mobile client. Second, a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a sparse and decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent (or we may be able to make use of the BT protocol as is), and we'd have to build such auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client itself. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its existence for other clients to discover.
If we can make and keep the Internet a free place, these discussions can keep happening without fear of censorship and prosecution, and people can coordinate to fight authoritarianism and create better technologies to guard against it in the future. This is very much doable if we tried. So let's ensure the free flow of information is not a temporary blip in the long arc of humanity's history.
Instead we take a moral high ground over Russia banning and blocking what are basically non-compliant messaging platforms and pushing Russian citizens to Max, which is controlled by the government. All the while these legislations in Europe will lead to the same end result.
How am I supposed to to argue against chat control in Russia when we are doing it too, just with a different twist.
I never wanted privacy anyway: I wanted no discrimination, inclusion, healthy democracy, etc, etc.
Privacy has always been a tool for me.
At this point, selective privacy like we are experiencing today (we cannot know what’s in the epstein files, but google can send a drone and look into my backyard) serves none of the things I am interested in!
“Saying you don’t need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." — Edward Snowden
It’s a very privileged position to believe you have nothing to hide and not be worried about the consequences. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky. Many people live in fear for their freedom and lives for elementary things they can’t change and shouldn’t have to hide, such as one’s sexual orientation. We should think of them as well.
Over the last 5000 years it's been very rare for plebs to have any privacy. For a brief period from ww2 through to the early 21st century power shifted to the plebs, but since the 1980s that power has shifted back to the feudal barons, and our rights will eventually regress.
But the SP500 will be at record highs so everyone will be told they should be happy.
For 5000 years there were no surveillance cameras or ways to surveil communications! (other than the little that was said by mail)
I appreciate xmpp as well but I have actually seen uses of matrix in open source community etc. a lot more so what are your thoughts on it?
Note for anyone interested in matrix, to not use the main matrix.org but other instances as well to actually have more decentralization/distribution