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Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

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Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#151

Post by pfortuny »

throwrqX wrote: post #133

Every time this comes up people talk about protecting privacy and anonymity and what not and while luckily for us most of the time the laws die out they still do pass on occasion. The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy. As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or ne…

That is why passion is not a good way to write laws.

Something being useful (lack of privacy) does not make it either good or necessary.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#153

Post by jokethrowaway »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #96
can16358p wrote: post #10

We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. Anyone who is really…

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen. Though, part of thi…

> > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.

> That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.

Are you familiar with a country called China?

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#154

Post by pbhjpbhj »

oauea wrote: post #55
ethbr0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state. In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done. Pretending there's…

The reason is, and always has been, to enable lazy police work. They won't have to do their jobs if facebook will just tell them who the criminals are.

Another way of phrasing this might be "people will not have to pay as much tax if technological tools are used to assess crimes rather than traditional high-touch policing (ie high man-hours)".

Generally people want all the [other] criminals catching, but do not want all resources of the state used solely for policing. Optimisations then are preferred even if there is collateral harm.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#155

Post by detaro »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #153
PurpleRamen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen. Though, part of thi…

> > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. > That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS. Are you familiar with a country called China?

"All leaders want their countries to be like China" is conspiracy BS, yes.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#157

Post by dmitriid »

monkeynotes wrote: post #121
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am making the point that the parliament votes, and _rejects_ proposals that overreach. My point is not Britain as an example, but that one of the Brexit rhetoric points was the rah rah 'unelected officials'. Arguably we both know that EC comissioners are appointed by democratic governments but we see multiple times how permeable EC commisioners are: 1. Surveillance proposals such as posted in this thread 2. Net Neu…

* 'unelected officials' The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that. And as pointed out before, the UK is ahead of the EU in terms of surveillance. You even have to opt in with your ISP to watch porn. The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country. The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anythin…

> The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country.

It's not a new thing either. 1984 was about Britain after all...

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#158

Post by alan-stark »

Sometimes I feel that the world is sleepwalking straight into the pages of 1984. Proposals to monitor chats, ban encryption, legitimize location tracking create perfect infrastructure for new dictators. If some day a new Hitler grabs power in a nuclear-capable country, he'll be able to track down and destroy dissenters before they have a chance to protest.

What are some simple and practical actions any EU citizen can take now to stop this from going forward?

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#159

Post by starkd »

monkeynotes wrote: post #121
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am making the point that the parliament votes, and _rejects_ proposals that overreach. My point is not Britain as an example, but that one of the Brexit rhetoric points was the rah rah 'unelected officials'. Arguably we both know that EC comissioners are appointed by democratic governments but we see multiple times how permeable EC commisioners are: 1. Surveillance proposals such as posted in this thread 2. Net Neu…

* 'unelected officials' The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that. And as pointed out before, the UK is ahead of the EU in terms of surveillance. You even have to opt in with your ISP to watch porn. The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country. The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anythin…

But at least those are the fault of the UK government itself. The people have greater likelihood of being able to fix it than if they have to defer to the EU commission for compliance. Brexit is expensive in the short term, but, in the long term, the nation is much better off for having preserved some of their sovereignty.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#160

Post by lcampbell »

xorry wrote: post #69

> every single line that you write in all kinds of messaging apps (including encrypted services), your e-mails — yes, all of this — can be filtered out ... how exactly will this work?

Probably just an extension to existing ETSI legal interception interfaces[1] that I believe are required to be implemented by all service providers of a certain size in the EU. Your personal email server and private IRC network are probably out of scope.

[1] e.g. for email: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102200_102299/10223202/... - the specs are really boring to read and there are lots and lots of them, if you want to deep dive. From what I can tell it's basically just the service provider implementing an API client that feeds everything they're required to a centralized endpoint.

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