There should be sorts of an exponential backoff mandated for the contents of bills.
Now, every lobby group keeps pushing their sketchy agenda, knowing well that they will eventually pass it. Worst case, it will be passed bit by bit.
Vespasian · 1h ago
That's also problematic.
Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
somenameforme · 1h ago
The whole point of governance in a democracy is consent of the governed. When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large, then they've entered into the realm of authoritarianism with an occasional election - which is exactly what we accuse the 'bad guys' of doing.
mattlutze · 2m ago
That's the benefit and frustration of the democratic or representative democratic process.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
gruez · 43m ago
>When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large[...]
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
mariusor · 1h ago
I disagree on this one.
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
labcomputer · 5m ago
Double jeopardy in the US means being prosecuted for the exact same crime more than once. It does not, however, prevent being prosecuted for similar or related crimes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
digitalPhonix · 1h ago
In many countries, it took multiple attempts to get gay marriage legalised. Having a double jeopardy type block for repeated attempts at passing laws would prevent social changes being captured in law.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
somenameforme · 1h ago
You're fighting a strawman there I think. He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
mattlutze · 44s ago
That would be a boon to the conservative movements, for sure. And also ensure that almost nothing gets done unless it is extremely populist.
The clause in the US constitution specifically has no time limits and it looks like it's the same for all the countries listed on wiki.
gruez · 41m ago
>He said nothing about it then never being possible to propose a law. A reasonable cool-down period to ensure politicians can't simply exploit the fatigue of the public would be reasonable - perhaps 10 or 12 years.
So if gay marriage or weed legalization was defeated in 2015 you shouldn't be able to have a go at it until 2025? Or if YIMBY zoning reforms or AI regulation were defeated in 2025 you shouldn't be able try again until 2035?
pessimizer · 30m ago
Yes, even for things you support.
mschild · 1h ago
He did make a reference to the double jeopardy law in the US though which, if I'm not mistaken, explicitly prohibits exactly that type of behaviour.
LtWorf · 1h ago
It would be nice, but they change it a little bit so it's technically a different law.
pessimizer · 33m ago
And there is in most parliamentary law, but usually restricted to sessions. Additionally, there's usually a proscription against passing negative laws (i.e. "we will not do X"), meaning that when something passes it becomes law and needs a supermajority to repeal, but when it fails, all it needs is a majority to be passed (in the next session.)
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
The EU doesn't even have that level of democracy.
kstrauser · 1h ago
I wish there were a “No, And Stop Asking” law where you couldn’t propose a law again within X years after it fails to pass.
I know a million reasons why that’s probably impossible, starting with “what makes it the same law?”, but I can still wish we had one.
thaawyy33432434 · 19m ago
Also an expiry date for every bill. All things should have a timeout.
We should fund another lobby that pull in the other direction.
elevatortrim · 22m ago
Trying to prevent stupidity by regulations and rules is proving to be problematic: Because we have very successfully prevented stupid from destroying themselves, and let them thrive on the successes of others built (e.g. anti-vaxers are relatively safe thanks to everyone else vaccinating their children, or you can thrive on benefits in the UK which is great when you genuinely tried your best but fail, but terrible when it is motivating you to stop trying).
This fundemantally conflicts with a lesson startup scene learned very early: Fail fast, fail often. Our societies do not fail fast when they make mistakes, thanks to the incredible safety and stability intelligent and sensible people created.
This is preventing people from learning from their idiocies, which in turn allows them to reach to critical mass and forcing their idiocy on the whole society in the form of bullshit or hurtful laws and orders.
We should change this and let idiots fail fast before they become a danger to everyone.
mariusor · 1h ago
I doubt that this can be actually done as intended because the wording of a bill can be changed enough to pretend it's not the same as the previous versions. I can't really think of a way to make this work, but indeed it would be a great addition to law passing.
worldsayshi · 1h ago
Wouldn't that potentially be exploited by the opposition where they could push a similar bill but with unpopular additions?
nickslaughter02 · 1h ago
It exists but the proposal must be voted on. These people will not put the proposal to vote if they know it will not pass. That's why they ask countries' positions up front.
zenmac · 1h ago
Good idea. yeah at this point, law making every were just seems like brute force attack at this point. We need some kind of security assure to keep out these 'law making crackers'
achenet · 1h ago
As other comments on this post have mentioned, exponential backoff would still have some issues.
However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.
I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
mytailorisrich · 55m ago
But that's exactly how the EU works. If you give the "wrong" answer they'll keep going until you give the "right" answer.
France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU constitution... nevermind, the same was in the later Lisbon treaty.
Ireland rejected the Nice and Lisbon treaties... nevermind they still passed when asked again after cosmetic changes and "information campaigns".
Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
darkwater · 40m ago
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
On the other end there is the "don't interfere with anything" and you get totalitarianism as a side effect, eventually.
If a democratically elected government passes a law that makes killing some category of people lawful, should they be allowed to do it?
mytailorisrich · 25m ago
That escalated quickly from my comment to "but Nazis"...
epolanski · 27m ago
> Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
I am polish, please *do not spread falsehood*.
EU funds suspension came because of Polish non-compliance with several EU laws.
Most notably the previous government had created a "new" government-controlled chamber of judgement that gave de facto the executive branch control over the judicial one.
Judges in Poland could be suspended and punished if politicians didn't like their rulings. Not only that, politicians could be suspended, fined and even jailed over any public comment.
This was a blatant violation of Polish constitution as well as the treaties Poland itself signed when joining the EU.
mytailorisrich · 11m ago
Well an euroskeptic government is out and a new as pro-EU as is possible to be (Donald Tusk was President of the EU Council) is in, so all is well... You may recognise a pattern that is at play in other countries both in the EU and outside.
NotPractical · 1h ago
It is the courts' job to block unconstitutional or otherwise illegal laws.
I believe someone said in a previous thread that a court in an EU member state had already found this mass surveillance on citizens who are not criminal suspects to be illegal under either their constitution or the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but I can't find it anymore. I am wondering why that is not sufficient to permanently block this.
Belopolye · 36m ago
I believe it was Germany's constitutional court, which given the experience of East Germany is understandable.
Bender · 2h ago
Chat Control repelled 4th time in the EU
Nice! They will keep trying until they wear people down. Keep up the great battle!
eloisant · 2h ago
We have to win every time, they only have to win once
rsynnott · 1h ago
Well, realistically, if this were to pass, it would likely run into trouble with the courts. There's a bit of a history of this; in particular the Data Protection Directive got struck down by the ECJ for violating fundamental rights.
some_random · 1h ago
Never trust the courts to protect your rights, even if you think that a law obviously infringes on obviously well enshrined rights that still is no guarantee of victory.
orwin · 28m ago
That's probably the plan anyway. The plan is to defang the courts, and especially the ECHR, since the beginning. The AfD explicitely said it was their plan, the National front in France didn't, but would be very happy if it didn't had any power, and a lot of media close to the neolib/conservative/nationalist are more than happy to shit on the ECHR (Pericles project is only from one of those).
Each time the courts disqualify a parliamentary law or executive decision, it has to spend political power. If the decisions or laws it stop are all from the same side, that side can start chipping the courts power away. The reason for the legislative part to exist is to avoid a dictatorship of the majority (basically X is arrested for something, Y is not even though he did the same thing, because Y is from the majority group). Having the ECHR censoring the law would have been sold by a lot of media as "the ECHR is supporting pedophiles" and "those non-elected judges wants to keep abusing children", and hopefully after a dozen years of similar attemps, the court would be either defanged or totally partisan.
SiempreViernes · 2h ago
No? If they win it mostly flips who pushes the proposal to change the law and who opposes it.
s1mplicissimus · 1h ago
I think the implication was that there's something like a tipping point after which the surveillance leads to people not daring to oppose it in an organized way anymore. Which, at least to me, is a way more realistic danger than, for example, AGI.
Sharlin · 1h ago
It's usually much easier to pass a law than to get rid of it once passed.
oytis · 1h ago
What kind of government will on its own initiative want to give citizens more privacy not to say actively push for it against other governments? EU parliament cannot propose laws, so it would be nearly impossible to grassroor such an initiative
spwa4 · 1h ago
Except ... where do you get the idea that the police forces will respect the law? If you want to get an indication of that just read the judgements here:
Note, especially, how many judgements are about the state already getting convicted a first time and then immediately violating the judgement, and in some cases the size of the convictions tells you something:
(over 6000 very serious individual violations by law enforcement)
Or take https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-greece-9 where the Greek state illegally abducted 2 children and moved the to the US. Obviously this court provides no recourse, and the Greek state is entirely free to just totally ignore the judgement.
So where do you get this idea that law enforcement or the state will respect the law when they don't get what they want?
thw_9a83c · 1h ago
I would really like to know from a perspective of an informed Danish citizen, why the Denmark chose to focus on the Chat Control legislation as one of their priorities during its EU presidency. It somehow doesn't fit with my view of the Scandinavians as a technically competent people. The proposed solution is absurd and can easily be overcome by the real offenders.
- Scanning of your emails and storage etc. is illegal in EU. The EU parliament voted for an exception which allows it (https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/167712). It has been extended twice and is set to expire in April 2026. EU parliament threatened to not extend it again. This proposal should become a law which permanently replaces it and is revised every 3 years. A nice opportunity to include scanning of your encrypted communication too.
speckster · 56m ago
Can't speak for the danish, but at least in Sweden i think its more of a "moral police" issue. Our politicians just scream about catching pedophiles and then close their eyes to any privacy issues. Lots of "well if you have nothing to hide then what is the problem?". The people pushing the issue are not really that technically competent either.
nickslaughter02 · 1h ago
All this means there's a blocking minority (supposedly) which can go away immediately if Germany flips. The debate is happening today. Nothing is repelled.
The title needs to be corrected. It's borderline maliciously incorrect.
meanwhile more and more public schools roll out cameras and surveiled environments for the students
when those students enter the workforce, they expect the surveilance. they grew up under chat control so they're used to it. get with the times to live and die another day
NeutralForest · 2h ago
Great! Crazy that it can be brought back every time though, it makes me very uncomfortable.
rsynnott · 1h ago
I mean, how else could to work? Beyond a new EU treaty (Lisbon treaty replacement) banning discussion of it, I'm not sure that there's any way to prevent it coming back.
m000 · 1h ago
Voting should be on specific clauses, and if anything is rejected there should be a cooling period before it can be brought up for voting again.
The cooling period does not preclude discussion of course. That's why we pay the MEPs: They are actually expected to show up in the EP and discuss. Not only show up on voting day and follow what their party dictated.
varispeed · 10m ago
Chat Controls will inevitably lead to concentration camps and mass killings once the power learns what people actually talk about. They become paranoid and afraid. They will try to nip dissent and perceived threat in the bud. We are on the slippery slope and people should stop seeing EU as roses and fluffy bunnies. They are corrupt autocrats and if you think they are not, you are rejecting evidence of your eyes and ears.
kamil55555 · 1h ago
I know normal ordinary people that were defending this...
PanoptesYC · 1h ago
What is the UI from in the twitter screenshot? I'd like to read the positions of the Supporting/Undecided countries.
(And I need to understand why the hell my country, Italy, supports the motion)
wizzwizz4 · 1h ago
Contact them, and ask!
jacknews · 2h ago
Just ridiculous how authorities are perservering with this.
The ruling should come with a timeout period; they're not allowed to try anything similar again for 20 years or whatever, and even then only if circumstances have changed.
vladms · 1h ago
I prefer a simpler system if possible, adding further rules ("don't try anything similar for X years") seems to me that will make matters worse (who decides if it is similar enough? can you challenge that? at what stage you have to decide? etc.)
Also, are you sure most population is against ? I did not see a poll on that. I know enough people that like "authoritarian" governments and laws, so I think we (the ones that don't agree) should make an effort to convince people that too much "authority" is not the most efficient/smart way. Some of those people are in fact just afraid even if they would not admit it...
jacknews · 1h ago
Yes you are right, the people and the authorities should be better informed.
The problem is that these kinds of laws tend to be one-way streets. Once systems are in place, they are hard to remove, so there should be some protection against unenlightened authorities just trying again and again and 'getting lucky'.
Now, every lobby group keeps pushing their sketchy agenda, knowing well that they will eventually pass it. Worst case, it will be passed bit by bit.
Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy
The clause in the US constitution specifically has no time limits and it looks like it's the same for all the countries listed on wiki.
So if gay marriage or weed legalization was defeated in 2015 you shouldn't be able to have a go at it until 2025? Or if YIMBY zoning reforms or AI regulation were defeated in 2025 you shouldn't be able try again until 2035?
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
The EU doesn't even have that level of democracy.
I know a million reasons why that’s probably impossible, starting with “what makes it the same law?”, but I can still wish we had one.
We should fund another lobby that pull in the other direction.
This fundemantally conflicts with a lesson startup scene learned very early: Fail fast, fail often. Our societies do not fail fast when they make mistakes, thanks to the incredible safety and stability intelligent and sensible people created.
This is preventing people from learning from their idiocies, which in turn allows them to reach to critical mass and forcing their idiocy on the whole society in the form of bullshit or hurtful laws and orders.
We should change this and let idiots fail fast before they become a danger to everyone.
However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.
I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU constitution... nevermind, the same was in the later Lisbon treaty.
Ireland rejected the Nice and Lisbon treaties... nevermind they still passed when asked again after cosmetic changes and "information campaigns".
Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
On the other end there is the "don't interfere with anything" and you get totalitarianism as a side effect, eventually. If a democratically elected government passes a law that makes killing some category of people lawful, should they be allowed to do it?
I am polish, please *do not spread falsehood*.
EU funds suspension came because of Polish non-compliance with several EU laws.
Most notably the previous government had created a "new" government-controlled chamber of judgement that gave de facto the executive branch control over the judicial one.
Judges in Poland could be suspended and punished if politicians didn't like their rulings. Not only that, politicians could be suspended, fined and even jailed over any public comment.
This was a blatant violation of Polish constitution as well as the treaties Poland itself signed when joining the EU.
I believe someone said in a previous thread that a court in an EU member state had already found this mass surveillance on citizens who are not criminal suspects to be illegal under either their constitution or the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but I can't find it anymore. I am wondering why that is not sufficient to permanently block this.
Nice! They will keep trying until they wear people down. Keep up the great battle!
Each time the courts disqualify a parliamentary law or executive decision, it has to spend political power. If the decisions or laws it stop are all from the same side, that side can start chipping the courts power away. The reason for the legislative part to exist is to avoid a dictatorship of the majority (basically X is arrested for something, Y is not even though he did the same thing, because Y is from the majority group). Having the ECHR censoring the law would have been sold by a lot of media as "the ECHR is supporting pedophiles" and "those non-elected judges wants to keep abusing children", and hopefully after a dozen years of similar attemps, the court would be either defanged or totally partisan.
https://www.echr.coe.int/
Note, especially, how many judgements are about the state already getting convicted a first time and then immediately violating the judgement, and in some cases the size of the convictions tells you something:
https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-t%C3%BCrkiye-...
(over 6000 very serious individual violations by law enforcement)
Or take https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-greece-9 where the Greek state illegally abducted 2 children and moved the to the US. Obviously this court provides no recourse, and the Greek state is entirely free to just totally ignore the judgement.
So where do you get this idea that law enforcement or the state will respect the law when they don't get what they want?
- Lobbying. Thorn and other "NGOs" are shaking in excitement about new revenue streams by providing the surveillance software. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
- Scanning of your emails and storage etc. is illegal in EU. The EU parliament voted for an exception which allows it (https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/167712). It has been extended twice and is set to expire in April 2026. EU parliament threatened to not extend it again. This proposal should become a law which permanently replaces it and is revised every 3 years. A nice opportunity to include scanning of your encrypted communication too.
The title needs to be corrected. It's borderline maliciously incorrect.
when those students enter the workforce, they expect the surveilance. they grew up under chat control so they're used to it. get with the times to live and die another day
The cooling period does not preclude discussion of course. That's why we pay the MEPs: They are actually expected to show up in the EP and discuss. Not only show up on voting day and follow what their party dictated.
(And I need to understand why the hell my country, Italy, supports the motion)
The ruling should come with a timeout period; they're not allowed to try anything similar again for 20 years or whatever, and even then only if circumstances have changed.
Also, are you sure most population is against ? I did not see a poll on that. I know enough people that like "authoritarian" governments and laws, so I think we (the ones that don't agree) should make an effort to convince people that too much "authority" is not the most efficient/smart way. Some of those people are in fact just afraid even if they would not admit it...
The problem is that these kinds of laws tend to be one-way streets. Once systems are in place, they are hard to remove, so there should be some protection against unenlightened authorities just trying again and again and 'getting lucky'.