They make it really difficult to fight any of this.
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
afarah1 · 4h ago
Same for any legislation piece.
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"...
cortesoft · 2h ago
This is the case for so many things… it is why every attempt to make filling out your taxes in the United States fails completely.
aleph_minus_one · 4h ago
A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...
afarah1 · 4h ago
Which is costly to do...
FirmwareBurner · 59m ago
How do you get to them to force them into submission? Did Americans get the child rapists off the Epstein list yet? And the unelected EU leader Ursula VDL has had private security since she was a child.
They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.
darkmighty · 1h ago
On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.
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"
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.
dragonwriter · 56m ago
> Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help.
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.
darkmighty · 19m ago
> Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
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.
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.
AlecSchueler · 30m ago
> It's just the power structure of any representative legislature...
... Under capitalism.
Der_Einzige · 3h ago
Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.
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.
mrnotcrazy · 19m ago
If you think the republic is one of the worst books in human history I would ask what makes a good book? When there are plenty of implementation issues for direct democracy it feels strange to blame Plato... Particularly when the world has benefited from the republic in so many ways.
Arainach · 1h ago
It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources.
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.
maldonad0 · 1h ago
The average person (and more if younger) is illiterate these days and unfit to hold any position of significant power. Source: I work with them.
lupusreal · 29m ago
I say only the patriarchal heads of households should get votes. Isn't that pretty much how Athens did it? No votes for slaves, women, anybody with mixed non-Athenian ancestry, no poors allowed to hold a political office...
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.
sidewndr46 · 4h ago
One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.
ryandrake · 3h ago
The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.
Bluestein · 2h ago
It's analogous to information security.-
PS. Maybe there's something there ...
sneak · 2h ago
Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress proposed a bicameral legislature, where one half needs a 66% majority to pass a law. The other half’s only job is to repeal laws, which they can do with a 50% majority.
Analemma_ · 1h ago
This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.
ryandrake · 1h ago
There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on everyone" should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 minority should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.
Arainach · 1h ago
This doesn't work in practice. Look at how Senate Republicans have weaponized the filibuster in the last 20 years. A 40% veto is conceptually similar to your repeal process and it results in gridlock and nothing getting done.
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.
nucleardog · 1h ago
It's an interesting thought, but as presented that sounds fairly dysfunctional. If it takes 2/3 to pass and 1/3 to repeal, you may as well just say it takes 2/3+1 to pass, as otherwise anything passed can be, and likely will be, just immediately repealed.
lupusreal · 26m ago
At the end of that book, the protagonist explains that all the high minded Luna libertarian values broke down and were more or less abandoned in the years following their revolution, and they returned to more normal political processes.
soulofmischief · 4h ago
A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.
deaddodo · 3h ago
Look at SOPA/PIPA. They simultaneously pushed the same bill through both chambers to try and guarantee it would pass. Grassroots efforts led to it being overwhelmingly blocked in both cases. And then they just slowly slipped most of it's provisions through other legislation over the years.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 3h ago
The same game theory that could make a modern constitution so robust could also be used by the bad guys to thoroughly corrupt the drafting of any modern constitution you could get enacted.
rolandog · 22m ago
I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points.
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?
>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy
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.
deaddodo · 3h ago
Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.
Kim_Bruning · 4h ago
That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)
sidewndr46 · 3h ago
Not really. There have been multiple times that California passed ballot initiatives that violated their own constitution.
At the federal level in the US we have the annoying problem that effectively everything is interstate commerce.
miohtama · 2h ago
The only way to stop it is to have positive rights written in law, like right to online privacy and privacy of communications.
mystraline · 1h ago
Yes, like the Soviet Union.
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.
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.
Saline9515 · 1h ago
While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. Yes they had a "right for leisure", unless the State decided that you were a slave and sent you in Siberia to knock hard rocks for the rest of your life. Or your "rest days" were in fact forced, unpaid labor (subbotnik), no different than their previous feudal serf system.
Same for a "right to a house", where the State provided you with a filthy, overcrowded slum and call it a day.
cobbzilla · 2h ago
Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!
lupusreal · 17m ago
Article 35: Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.
HPsquared · 4h ago
The proposing side can be centralised and organised; the opposition diffuse and disorganised. Hence the continual growth of all forms of legislation.
pcrh · 2h ago
On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.
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.
nucleardog · 20m ago
> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.
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.
wyuenho · 3h ago
The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.
crinkly · 39m ago
This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.
Ylpertnodi · 3h ago
And just because they respond, it doesn't actually mean anything will result from it.
"No more something!"
"We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
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)
FabHK · 2h ago
It's equally difficult to support it, no?
MPSFounder · 3h ago
This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.
sevensor · 2h ago
> an educated populace
Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.
I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and any other data collected via surveillance. This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
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.
mrtksn · 2h ago
What is the motivation behind this? Do you have some issue that in Denmark its deemed solvable only through that? Can you provide some context maybe? Is it like cultural thing?
delusional · 2h ago
> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
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.
fn-mote · 22m ago
See recent article [1] about a municipality (?) violating its own law and state law to share surveillance data (license plates) with almost 300 agencies.
How do you prevent a misuse or switching to "let's just start looking into this without warrant until this popular issue(i.e. immigrants, USA, Russia, religios tensions, ethnic tensions) is solved" when the next political crisis hits?
rockskon · 1h ago
There is no reason to believe it wouldn't eventually be used to generate leads as opposed to needing a warrant to sift through.
crinkly · 38m ago
Once you have collected the data it won’t be uncollected, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, when the right one walks out of the door.
anthk · 3h ago
Public Unix server will get a Reissanance. Tons of folks will learn to live under small Nix account to chat privately under remote Tox accounts or over I2PD. This will only boost up populace's knowledge.
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.
loa_in_ · 3h ago
These things won't magically boost populace's knowledge. People are born every day and they don't know anything. Each year the burden of things you need to know to be an adult increases. The populationbon general will not get hands on with something optional.
zo1 · 2h ago
I think that's a great idea. I for one want to enable our governments to track down criminals and punish them for it. If they're not doing everything they can do so in this technological and digital age, then they are breaking their part of that pesky "social contract" I am being upheld to.
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.
mrtksn · 2h ago
What do you plan to do when definitions of crime start getting fuzzy? Crime is not just petty crimes where it's a clear cut to tell if someone did something bad in definitive terms.
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?
mystraline · 1h ago
Crime has ALWAYS been political in nature.
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.
chuckadams · 5h ago
I wonder how much support it would have if it was called "Speech Control" instead. Probably still a depressing percentage...
exasperaited · 5h ago
It has been given the name "Chat Control" by its detractors, no?
jeltz · 4h ago
Yeah, it's real name is CSAR.
consp · 1h ago
The fact it's named after a know autocrat (squint your eyes to view the name) should give you enough to think about.
Let's hope the opponents are from a small village of resistance and have some magic potion because it's going to be needed.
thrance · 3h ago
How much support does it have anyway? Outside of Parliament, I mean.
Havoc · 5h ago
Entire world seems to be making a pivot to surveillance state :(
anaisbetts · 4h ago
The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
tavavex · 33m ago
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
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'.
aleph_minus_one · 4h ago
>
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
I don't think there are actionable items in that manifesto, and was written during the RSA munitions debate.
kpcyrd · 2h ago
The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems". The cypherpunk scene is still alive and evolving, but it's fairly niche, and a tough environment for people driven by external validation while 'things are well'. But there are still people around making sure the necessary pieces are in place in case they become necessary.
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
>
The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems".
The privacy-preserving systems have been built and are finally making it into the mainstream, only to be uprooted by politics. Not that we no longer need to build more of such systems, but the root of the issue lies elsewhere.
atoav · 2h ago
I'd argue the actionable things are already happening: Hackers and cryptographers creating technical solutions that defy governmental control, people trying to sway public opinion (or trying to get people to realize that being surveilled isn't just about their secret it is about a fundamental balance of powers between companies/governments and individuals).
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
marcosdumay · 1h ago
Was it really the internet that killed third places?
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.)
bondeau · 1h ago
Say more?
spencerflem · 3h ago
My solice is that it’s all temporary, as climate catastrophe will bring down whatever system they’re building before too long
tavavex · 24m ago
The scale you're talking about is total societal collapse, shutting down "the system" as it exists today requires nothing short of a worldwide apocalyptic event. It's not something I'd be hopeful about, especially since by the time it gets this bad, most people will already be dead. Or we might not even be old enough to see that happen, if we're lucky.
Der_Einzige · 2h ago
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?
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.
Anti vax is nutty, anti nuclear makes some sense if the goal is worldwide disarmament. I agree AI is an incredible boon for surveillance and censorship but I’m highly skeptical that it will solve climate change and currently seems to be making it worse by measurably increasing power usage. XAI is using diesel for theirs and the air quality in town is measurably worse now.
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.
maldonad0 · 1h ago
And there is no non-violent solution
RegnisGnaw · 4h ago
China has shown the world the way and most countries likes it.
yupyupyups · 4h ago
No, people don't like this.
jeltz · 4h ago
Most ordinary people don't but they still vote for authoritarian politicians who like it.
Saline9515 · 3m ago
Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
sneak · 2h ago
A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
consp · 1h ago
> A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on 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.
mcdonje · 4h ago
lmao, like every other major power has been a bastion of free speech until China came up. McCarthyism, what? Politkovskaya, who?
tavavex · 29m ago
Censorship and killing people who were too "out of line" were staples of human civilization ever since we started figuring out governance. What's unique about China is that it was a pioneer in capturing this new technology and using it to their state's advantage. Never before in human history could you monitor all the things people said to one another, all the money that got exchanged, all data that's uploaded and downloaded, and have automation that ensures that everyone's information is looked at. The internet had become a tool of centralized control, China just was successful at realizing it first.
LexiMax · 4h ago
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
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.
rockskon · 1h ago
Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.
betaby · 2h ago
> pulled millions out of poverty
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
nickslaughter02 · 6h ago
Full post:
Leak: Many countries that said NO to #ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided—even though the 2025 plan is even more extreme!
That website is pretty bad. Don't say "act now" with a link when the link has no concrete actions listed.
"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.
neilv · 5h ago
This link is full of the usual self-promoting priorities of politicians, and the modern "influencers" who mimic them.
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.
bondarchuk · 5h ago
In a representative democracy there is nothing nefarious about a representative presenting himself as a person who would stand for certain policies.
neilv · 4h ago
This is purporting to be an issue thing (see the link). But it can't help be a personal brand thing.
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.
normalaccess · 3h ago
With the way the world is I wouldn't be suppressed if it's been infiltrated and is controlled opposition designed to fail.
oytis · 3h ago
Are they going to vote on that every year until it passes?
arlort · 2h ago
No, the reason there's an article like this every 6 months is very specifically that it never gets to a vote
normalaccess · 3h ago
Yes, there is no stopping it with the current structure and tools. They will push until the people give in. Best to prepare for it's existence and figure out how to use the good old sneaker-net.
pimlottc · 4h ago
Argh, red and green colors are not great for accessibility, I had to look hard to find the countries that were opposed/neutral (Poland, Austria and Netherlands, afaict)
radicalbyte · 4h ago
NL should be because, at least so far, they've been listening to the experts (many who are ex-colleagues & friends of mine). We have elections later in the year and that can change (although they're looking positive so far).
elric · 1h ago
More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.
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.
mvieira38 · 3h ago
Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Easier than asking everyone you know to use GPG
crumpled · 2h ago
It's not a solution if it passes with "Client-side scanning". Basically a AI bot watching your screen all day.
You're gonna need a whole secure deviant device.
mvieira38 · 1h ago
If that passes it's over for the european internet, IMO. I would just shut off all personal online devices completely and go banking and work only on a cheap Xiaomi
rdm_blackhole · 1h ago
That is not what the law is about.
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.
RamblingCTO · 4h ago
I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time.
Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
graemep · 4h ago
Is it clearly against the constitution?
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) .
arlort · 2h ago
> What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
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
whimsicalism · 3h ago
the UK essentially does not have a constitution nor any significant judicial authority over lawmaking
dmesg · 4h ago
It is against it and the law was revoked twice already by liberal politician SLS:
2nd March 2010 - 1 BvR 256/08
I don't like this rhetorical style were easy to prove facts are denounced with questions to evoke uncertainty.
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.
mvieira38 · 3h ago
As I understand it, the pressure for a surveillance state comes from the EU, right? While Germany and countries in their cultural sphere like Austria are fundamentally opposed to that. If that's the case, it won't ever change unless the EU changes
RamblingCTO · 2h ago
I'm afraid Germany ('s government) is not opposed at the moment and there is enough internal pressure as well. We had our fair share of moments getting surveilance like that and fighting it. I bet my ass off, that Ursula von der Leyen, the c... who tried to make it German law had her hands in that as well.
mvieira38 · 1h ago
If any other country should know better, you'd think it would be Germany. Ursula in particular married into a family which was both persecuted as Anabaptists and participated in persecution by being Holocaust enforcers, so how on Earth is she not aware of the slippery slope here?
derelicta · 4h ago
A constitution is just a piece of paper. The ruling class can discard it as they wish.
bee_rider · 3h ago
The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).
Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
betaby · 4h ago
> It's against the German constitution
No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.
RamblingCTO · 3h ago
I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?
betaby · 2h ago
'Constitution' arguments are used by ones in power only to server their agenda. Constitution argument won't save us from the surveillance. Most of the time western countries play 'national security' and 'think of the children' to circumvent the constitution and have ~100% success rate.
RamblingCTO · 2h ago
I don't feel like that's true in Germany. The constitutional court would like a word I guess. They have a pretty big history regarding surveilance and such.
So did they go to court? I think that would be crucial to rectify that. If not, they let the rogue agents have a free hand.
IncreasePosts · 4h ago
Just saying "It's unconstitutional" doesn't really cut it. It's a question for the courts to decide (based on the constitution).
bee_rider · 4h ago
A constitution is the basic big-picture law of the country. The court’s interpretation should be easy to guess. Otherwise, the people won’t feel like it is their document.
Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.
IncreasePosts · 4h ago
At least in America, a classic go to for Republican and democrats alike for opposing legislation is "that's unconstitutional!"
bee_rider · 3h ago
Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the same page).
I’m not sure if that’s the case in Germany though.
RamblingCTO · 2h ago
as the constitution doesn't have that high of a place in our identity it's more something for constitutional lawyers and higher courts. I think there's more tension between our constitutional law and that of the EU's law. for most people that's background noise I guess.
RamblingCTO · 3h ago
They did already, multiple times now. Hence my original comment.
EGreg · 1h ago
The war on end to end encryption is far bigger and more global than you think, and you’re the boiling frogs. Here is the evolving map:
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?
baal80spam · 5h ago
Who would have thought?!
scythe · 5h ago
Is this an active "undecided" or a "we restarted the count so everyone is undecided again" situation? France flipped, but Macron is more geopolitically mercurial than the average world leader.
thrance · 3h ago
He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).
cocoto · 2h ago
The far right in France doesn’t want ChatControl. In fact I think only the soft left, middle and soft right want ChatControl (and it is not even a consensus for among these groups).
rdm_blackhole · 1h ago
The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.
derelicta · 4h ago
Can't wait for my phone to report me for spreading anti govt propaganda or calling for a general strike.
rdm_blackhole · 4h ago
Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
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!
vaylian · 4h ago
> Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages.
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.
thewebguyd · 3h ago
> 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.
vaylian · 56m ago
> More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail.
I agree. But for now, we still have a window of opportunity to stop the law on the political level.
normalaccess · 3h ago
Nothing can stop the ratchet like progress clamping down on information control. These policies have been war gammed by think tanks decades in advance. The enemy is vast and deep with the control of nearly every nation-state on earth.
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.
rdm_blackhole · 1h ago
There is no political solution in sight when even the countries that have been subjugated to the the horrors of communism and the secret police have decided that this is good thing.
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.
supermatt · 4h ago
It doesn't matter what you use. It is your device that will be doing the snooping - i.e. client-side scanning
rdm_blackhole · 4h ago
The CSS in the proposal is implemented on an app level, like Whatsapp or Signal does the detection before sending the encrypted message, not at the OS level.
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.
ulrikrasmussen · 3h ago
I'm worried that as soon as this is implemented, someone will make a patched version of the signal client which doesn't do the scanning, and soon after all the affected apps will be forced by law to use remote attestation like Play Integrity.
rdm_blackhole · 1h ago
Signal said that they will the EU market if push comes to shove, so there won't be a Signal client to patch because there won't be a Signal app.
Hizonner · 5h ago
Aw, Jeez, not this shit again.
readthenotes1 · 5h ago
ChatControl!--because Orwell was a rabble-rousing fool
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"...
They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.
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.
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.
... Under capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"No more something!" "We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Let's hope the opponents are from a small village of resistance and have some magic potion because it's going to be needed.
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
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
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 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.
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
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.
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 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.
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.
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.