Zero – Local Encrypted Vault App (No Cloud, No Signup, Free)
1 points by techdobz 55m ago 1 comments
BoxBuddy: A Graphical Interface for Distrobox (github.com)
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Are Cyber Defenders Winning? – Lawfare (lawfaremedia.org)
2 points by bariumbitmap 2h ago 0 comments
Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided
337 nickslaughter02 230 7/31/2025, 11:54:22 AM digitalcourage.social ↗
You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.
This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.
This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.
I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this
A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.
Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.
And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.
It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.
"In vain do we fly to the many"...
For those of us trying to collect all the weird tax situations: https://freetaxusa.com.
Such laws are adopted precisely so that society cannot influence politicians and their decisions.
That is, if society does not have the ability to do something about it now, then they will be even less able to do something about it later.
I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to us (and we obviously represent everyone).
It leads to extremely unconstructive messaging ideas, where you assume no one can ever change their minds and if they do they are to be forever considered "lesser" for not being "right" the first time.
They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.
I for one would like to see a bunch of French and Dutch farmers drive by and fling shit on them, at the very least.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.
It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything.
If you ask people "do you want A, B, C, or D" a majority may well say to do each. If you only have budget for one, getting them to come to consensus is impossible at the scale of direct democracy.
For some contrast Switzerland has a sort of defacto direct democracy in that citizens that obtain a relatively small number of votes can bring any issue they desire up for vote. And they have indeed brought issues like Basic Income with the suggested proposal of every single Swiss adult getting around $1700/month. That's something that would likely destroy any country that passed it, but it would likely pass by an overwhelming margin in the current state of the United States. But in Switzerland where people actually do have real power, and responsibility, to determine the future of their country, it was rejected by 77%.
Instead, back in the states we can look forward to our true political power of getting to choose between Dumbo and Dingbat for our completely unrepresentative representatives.
The system also makes reps uniquely vulnerable to targeted lobbying, corruption, regulatory capture, and threats. I find much to be faulty with opaque dealings with a few key individuals.
Direct democracy mitigates these issues. Influence must be exerted through broad, public persuasion. This forces special interests to operate in the open, creating a higher and more transparent barrier to subverting the public will.
Have you paid attention to any US or global election since 2016? The special interests stay hidden and their influence works wonders.
If direct democracy could have ever worked, that opportunity died the moment social media became popular.
I really like this position from an ethical point of view.
But in reality you will be conquered by a neighboring country with different principles in about 3 days.
No comments yet
So are you proposing people vote on them without reading them? Or that we write very short bills aimed at a non-lawyer audience, effectively leaving most decisions up to the interpretation by courts? Or something else?
Anyway, I'm all for putting the sons of politicians on the front line, but don't think that will stop wars. The British Empire was infamous for putting nobleborn men directly in harms way, they would proudly stand up right in the thick of combat making themselves tempting targets and were routinely cut down. In a society with a strong martial tradition this doesn't turn people into peaceniks, if anything it gets people even more excited for wars.
Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.
From wiki:
> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"
Campaign donations, per this website:
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
I doubt it. The cure is way worse than the disease and is a direct path to totalitarianism. The influence of capital will not go to the people, it will go to the government, and the government will use it to depend even less on the will of the people.
Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties?
The first would obviously be deeply problematic even if it was possible to police, the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it.
Of course not. Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying I guess (at least as far as I understand it). Lobbying as far as I understand (or rather, object) is when special interest groups (usually funded by large corporations) fund people to talk to legislators for them, including buying fancy dinners, "conferences" and stuff. Basically, the opposite of grassroots.
See here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/22/lobbyists-flout-eth...
Calling/emailing your chosen congresspeople of course is totally fine by me, it's actually very healthy to do so if you have a legitimate concern.
> the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it
How would it be ineffective? I suppose it depends on oversight, but it should be fairly easy to prevent it seems.
It basically is.
You may be thinking of who is considered a lobbyist or lobbying firm, which is (roughly, different laws on the matter have different specific definitions) someone (or some firm) who (or which) is paid to lobby on behalf of one or more other persons or entities.
> How would it be ineffective?
Because even if you are able to police it effectively, then the people that have money will instead lobby personally rather than hiring lobbyists, while hiring staff to do all the legislative drafting and organizational support work for their personal lobbying (but not actually doing the lobbying itself) as well as continuing to use the unlimited campaign financing channels opened by Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United to get people who they don't need to lobby once in office to convince them to vote in line with their interests elected.
... Under capitalism.
e.g. the law to make changing thing X require a supermajority could itself be repealed with a simple majority here, unless it was approved as an amendment to our constitution. Which _does_ happen more often than it does for the US here, but usually just for large nationally popular things.
PS. Maybe there's something there ...
It is harder to build than to destroy. If laws can be trivially repealed no one will be willing to commit to long term things. We're seeing that right now with the destruction of US soft power, economic power, and global leadership.
The US constitution, despite its biblical status in their culture, manages to be more of a distracting throw-word ("LOOK at how this bill helping provide healthcare OBSTRUCTS your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to NOT CARE ABOUT THE POOR!" (Ok, not a great example)) than a functional constitution that limits institutional overreach.
As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things collapse into a greasy turd.
That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to. I would argue that the root cause of the sad state of democracies is the fact that we were coaxed into a snafu by virtue of accepting the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy: the first does not warrant the other; in fact they are most times at odds.
I am also reminded of the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episodes on Adolf Eichmann's careerist pursuit enabling the Holocaust... leading me to wonder how many people are burning the world down as part of a KPI... Or, in other words, are our economic systems and forms of government vulnerable to the paperclip problem?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...
I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k.
The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even things that make it a democracy. The one (and only) criterion of democracy is "can you vote". And there are better ways to get all the other things than voting... voting/people do not scale. It is the undoing of democracy, people get what they deserve from it. Good and hard.
>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to.
It does not scale. You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger, true "the beatings will continue until morale improves" style. If I can figure out how to strike out on my own and be a million miles away from you when you rally for your most ambitious attempt yet, that's what I will do.
And yet it preserves everything you like about democracy.
This is why most practical real world systems tend to be a hybrid of several different designs.
Eg... the US constitution gives us Direct elections (congress) , indirect elections (president via electors, though that has been somewhat undermined), Sortition (juries), lifetime appointment (judges), appointment based on merit (civil service), and probably a few more that I've missed. One can even argue -if one would like to try- that separation of powers counts as anarchistic (certainly it is anti-archon).
At the federal level in the US we have the annoying problem that effectively everything is interstate commerce.
Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights.
https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on...
Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
Women and men have equal rights in the USSR.
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society.
Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.
Now, that isn't to say the USSR was blameless. We know it wasn't. However, we can take their successes and failures in what we propose and build next. Negative and positive rights both are needed. But the West is allergic to those.
Same for a "right to a house", where the State provided you with a filthy, overcrowded slum and call it a day.
I am sure Soviet Union is THE BEST example to demonstrate the concept.
It shows perfectly that you can have anything, anywhere and as much as you want - but it won't mean anything if you take away people's economic freedom.
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20...
Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.
"No more something!" "We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.
The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.
There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.
The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work.
Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor understanding of the candidates' position on various topics (strongly correlated with not having a stable policy position themselves). Candidates themselves have influence on people's view of subjects. People tend to take some of their views from the candidate they've decided to support, and project their own views onto the candidate in other cases making them seem more aligned/preferable.
The entire model is basically set up assuming that:
1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.
2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.
3. If an elected representative does not follow through on their positions and views, the people will hold them accountable by voting them out of office.
4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.
For the vast majority of issues in the vast majority of cases... one and two do not hold true to a level that's meaningful or significant.
That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.
Which means the fourth falls apart.
Given the elected officials aren't really beholden to the electorate, what else would guide their position? On an individual basis, there are a lot of opportunities for wealth and power. Unless it's anything particularly egregious, the only real impediment to them taking advantage is their own personal ethics and morals. The kinds of people that want to put their life on hold to run a campaign so they can maybe take a shit job with mediocre pay where a bunch of people will be pissed at them no matter what they do... are unfortunately often not in for the mediocre pay and anger.
And here we are. It's not whether there are enough people that support being continually monitored, it's about whether there's enough people and enough money _against_ it to stir up enough people to care to stop them. There's almost definitely not.
And just to make it entirely hopeless--even if you are a well-informed voter with considered and consistent views on policy... Many countries have very little in the way of options for who else to vote for. Is this important enough to enough people to make them a single issue voter? Would they vote for the hypothetical "We Support Murdering Kittens" party if they were against the spying? Probably not--they'll probably hold their nose and vote for the "We Love Kittens" party as the lesser evil.
However, democracy is not as feeble as this analysis would suggest. After all, we can see that major shifts in political support for policy positions are possible, and these do require public support (democracy) to occur.
For example, in the US the civil rights movements of the 1960's and 1970's. Or more recently the Brexit referendum in the UK or populist anti-immigrant positions that have arisen in recent years and acquired major political support. Whether you agree with these or not, they are politically impactful, and democratically supported.
Issues surrounding civil liberties have often attracted strong political and popular support. So the question here is how such support can be generated for privacy, which itself a right under numerous legal regimens including the US constitution and the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/
All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space
(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)
Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
Original:
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-...
Translated to English:
https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...
Peter Hummelgaard basically says yes to every new tool that the police asks for. He also is a staunch advocate of increasing punishment for every type of crime that happens to catch his attention, even in a time where our prison system is in shambles and has way too many inmates. A true authoritarian.
No. On the contrary, our crime rates are some of the lowest in the world.
According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified.
I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.
Also, this is still nothing like getting a warrant to a wire tap - any suspicion will reveal YEARS of private information about you to the investigators. Furthermore, knowing that this can be used to identify suspects, surely it will have an effect on peoples behaviors.
They propose to include health records! What if you like to read about bomb making out of curiosity, have a relative who is in jail for violence, and you start seeing a psychiatrist? How many boxes have to be ticked before a flag is raised, and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?
I also don't trust the police to not make mistakes or behave unethically enough to be comfortable with this. Denmark is not a very corrupt country, but we still see misuse of power. Just recently it was revealed how a police handler explicitly instructed an informant to lie in court and frame someone else, just so the handler could keep his source. Are these the kind of people who should have access to my search history and health data? No fucking thanks.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44747091
Kinda like in Spain tons of people learnt to either burn cards with microcontrollers in order to pirate TV top boxes or run Nagra and satellite decoders with keys dumped fron sketchy sites to be read with Kaffeine. And, often, it was more fun to decode the signal than to watch the actual TV schedule.
And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian laws that prevent me as a citizen from protecting myself: You don't speak for all of us.
Perhaps potential for misuse?
Because as I understand the world, the people who hold the most power are generally not the best people.
Other crime types exist that are crime only within a structure. The crime of sharing copyrighted files is a crime within a framework of intellectual rights but then training AI on the same files and and producing alternative files bypassing the IP is not a crime. Then you get into political crimes, i.e. it can be a crime to deny the Armenian genocide, denying the Jewish genicide and protesting against the extermination of the Palestinians at this very moment. It can be crime to hide from the US embassy that you are not completely in support of extermination of Gaza people. Your government might cut a deal to save Greenland from US invasion that makes certain things a crime that the current US administration doesn't like.
This all can change as politics evolves. Do you intend to support whatever the current position the current government has?
I steal $100 from the cash register. Cameras are pulled, and I'm arrested and charged criminally.
Company edits timecards and steals $100 from me. Its instead a civil matter, and maybe I might get paid back. Then again, probably not.
Person shoots and kills a home invader. Murder trial ensues, and they spend piles of money to defend themselves.
Cops shoot and kill person (likely black). They get away with it with 2 week suspended-with-pay because 'I thought I saw a weapon'.
Insider stock trading is illegal, unless you're congress. Then completely legal.
Highway patrols (read: state sanctioned gangs) confiscate cash for no reason. You have to sue the cash and prove good intent. You usually lose.
Illegal immigration: ICE goes to places including workplaces and arrests (in various legal issues) illegal immigrants for illegally holding a job. None of the managers or owners are ever charged with immigration fraud, identity theft, or similar laws.
There are 2 types of laws in our system: for those in power, and for those who don't have power.
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations.
If you decentralise, any damage will be localised and would affect fewer people.
I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.
Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."
Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."
Pass a preemptive policing law, 10% outraged, 80% claim "If it makes me safer, I like it. I'm not a criminal after all, I don't have anything to fear."
Pass a law that codifies your nation's most popular religion as something to be promoted and enforced. 10% outraged, 80% cheer it on, because it agrees with their views.
The 80% is illustrative here, but it seems like the people who agree with the above statements are a very solid and overwhelming majority. So why it did take us so much time to creep up to deliberate censorship and surveillance? As someone who was born in the 21st century, the freedom to access and do things on the internet had only ever been on the downhill, any small wins are overwritten by inevitable losses that make things more controlled, more 'safe'.
Simple:
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
by Eric Hughes
written 9 March 1993
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
We, the technological community, have failed the wider public by not creating decentralized alternatives that are as good as centralized ones.
Chat Control shouldn't even be an issue, we should just be able to laugh it away.
Is anyone concerned about Mastodon being banned? No right because it would be almost impossible to implement. Yet it is possible for WhatsApp/Telegram(yuck)/Signal. Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
Indeed. At the parent page of https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html (https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/), you can read:
"if you want to write code, go to OpenPrivacy.org":
> https://www.openprivacy.org/
This website perhaps gives you some inspirations.
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
Among all candidates, it seems the least likely here. It didn't even happen at the same speed the internet grew.
(The issues with monopolized editorial powers are still valid, it's just this one that I think is wrong.)
Boom-bust cycles, including environmental ones don't do anything to harm capitalism. Rather, they just make it stronger. AI systems have locked in existing power structures forever and guarantee that we will technologically advance fast enough to solve for or at least adapt to climate change.
I'd argue that the whole climate movement for the last 20 years stymed and significantly harmed the left as a result. The anti-nuclear and some anti-vax positions taken by parts of the green left in particular were anti-scientific and have cost that portion of the party the support of many scientist types.
Scare porn about what will happen if you don't de-develop society and reduce your CO2 footprint just makes folks want to eat even more burgers. Same reason why the majority of non cyclists hate cyclists.
It's the same thing when you show a ton of kids how a chicken nugget is made. They all go "eww" for a moment, then you ask them "who wants chicken nuggets?" and literally every hand goes up[1] . We want our slop. We don't care that it's slop, and these days, emotions of cruelty, subjugation, and schadenfreude are political dominant and in the zeitgeist.
[1] https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148
I’m with you that cruelty and domination is winning right now, and that a sizable fraction of people are fundamentally evil and an even more sizable fraction basically don’t care. I still eat meat and acknowledge that it’s immoral to do so.
Just think that whatever happens after climate catastrophe / the water wars will likely be worse but it feels natural that it will at least be a different type of worse. I don’t see the global internet as being extremely relevant then.
Idk, as an individual there’s nothing much I can do and arguing here won’t help anything so I guess agree to disagree.
It's teleco vendors, ISPs and govn't agencies are advocating this.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
People think that, but once you tell them they will lose their drivers license since they chatted to their spouse about bad eyesight they bark differently. Or shrug it off with "that will never happen to me" and you can start the "and then they came for the [next group], but I did nothing" line of talk.
Everyone has something to hide, they might just not know yet what it is but they will when the option to hide it has gone away. There is a reason my country stopped recording religion since 1946 in the citizen records, it was fine to do so decades before.
What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.
I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?
The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
Let's hope the opponents are from a small village of resistance and have some magic potion because it's going to be needed.
Leak: Many countries that said NO to #ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided—even though the 2025 plan is even more extreme!
The vote is THIS October.
Tell your government to #StopChatControl!
Act now: https://chatcontrol.eu
"Ask your government not to do that" means absolutely nothing.
There should be a list of what people should do step by step based on their country.
1. Redirects to someone's personal-name Web site.
2. The top heading on the page is their personal name and what seems to be personal logo.
3. Immediately below that logo the navbar entry for "ABOUT ME / CONTACT".
4. The last entry in the navbar is "GET INVOLVED", and the first entry of that menu is "Follow Me".
5. The first entry in the navbar is "WELCOME" and redirects to a page with a huge photo of him, followed by a heading that starts "Patrick Breyer – Digital freedom fighter and former Member of European Parliament for the German and the European Pirate Party" subheading "Europe’s voice of privacy and the free Internet".
6. Then the page below all this has some information.
I think this is one reason that positive revolutions can't happen anymore: the potential leaders/actors see no non-corrupt role models for how to operate. It's a very fuzzy line between self-promotion in service of the mission somehow, and self-promotion in service of power/influence for its own sake.
I'm using this as an example of a problem with modern activism. Everyone wants to do their videos of themselves posturing like influencers, and building their brand, and the issue looks like a vehicle.
Who else is fighting chat control and informing the population as well?
In fact I think all of these impending doom articles are particularly counter productive because they de-sensitize people before it even gets to the parliament which (1) has already expressed opposition to this and (2) is a bit more starving for approval and thus potentially more receptive to this kind of stuff
But that's beyond the point regarding the "keep trying" part because I really can't imagine a way to "fix" that which isn't going to negatively impact the quality of legislation in the long run
Also I'm fairly sure that if there was a limit on how many times it can be considered in committee it'd already have been approved by council, so be careful what you wish for
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher: you have to be lucky every time, we just have to be lucky once.
I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.
It seems to be a problem with the whole 'Western' world - we're all on way with increasing authoritarianism and our leaders wanting to create police states...
What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?
Enormous pressure can be brought to bear in politicians over something like this. The most prominent British politician to oppose the Online Safety Act in the UK is being labelled as "helping people like Jimmy Saville" by the government (Saville was a TV presenter and notorious child abuser) .
Usually a standoff based on whether the EU was delegated authority on the topic. If the delegation happened then EU law has precedence but depending on the topic national constitutional courts might ignore that which becomes a constitutional crisis
In this specific case it's much more likely that the ECJ shoots down the chat control part of the law before it gets to that anyway
If you now say this is not applicable as this is about storing connection data you don't understand the issue in full: This is a deeper incision than just storing connection logs. This violates a more fundamental right. We are talking about chats here. Not what IPs you connected to at what time (and that law was canned as violating the entire constitution, which i cited with the state's decision above). There is no middleground here.
I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is very very slow. This is an imbalance that makes it hard to fight such laws. They change a miniscule detail and it can pass a 3rd and 4th time.
Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.
Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.
I’m not sure if that’s the case in Germany though.
Given that the private malware providers aren't accountable for it, I guess that it will noticeably degrade the average battery life for phones in the EU.
Only charging your phones if you have 3+ AI subscriptions and comply with all anti encryption laws of course
It is client side scanning embedded in the apps themselves. Each app will have to deploy their own mechanism to intercept the messages. This is not (yet) an OS level scan so there is no AI bot watching your moves on your device yet. Furthermore the AI part will run on their own servers, not on the device.
Precisely, the way it has been described, is when you hit the send button, it will the send the message in clear text to the authorities and then send the encrypted message to the recipient, hence the stupid narrative from the proponents of Chat control that it does not break encryption because it was never encrypted in the first place.
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?
And politicians complain that democracy is losing it's appeal! What's the difference between what the EU wants to do and what is being done in autocracies like China and Russia?
Snooping on all messages and conversations, even the Stasi did not have this much power!
That works only if all your contacts are technically educated enough. It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.
More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail. It's becoming crystal clear that "we the people" have no power anymore, and the way we can take some of that power back is by not participating in their laws - self hosting, use services outside of the jurisdictions where backdoors are mandatory, educating and helping others do the same.
Make the internet a digital no man's land. Make alternative networks, stuff like Yggdrasil and meshtastic.
When preventing the laws from passing fails, we still need to make it as difficult as possible to enforce.
I agree. But for now, we still have a window of opportunity to stop the law on the political level.
The overwhelming majority will be swept into a Neo-Dark Ages where truth is locked away and Dogma rules supreme. For a time the lockdown will be universal and complete but after the system is in place for a time I believe people will find a solution and break off the shackles.
If even these states agree that surveilling their entire population 24/7 after 50 years of communist rule is good then where do you see a political solution emerge from?
You would think that Eastern European countries would have learned their lesson but no, it seems that we are just trading one surveillance state for another.
If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping.
Same if you encrypt your message and post it in Whatsapp.