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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

#221

Post by alexbiet »

walterbell wrote: post #140
alexbiet wrote: post #63

Let them have it. Complete and absolute control over all citizens. Nothing more, nothing less. Then what? They will finally realise absolute power is an empty pursuit that brings nothing but misery for both the masses and the so called elites. False leaders have no place leading anyone as they lead through fear and insecurity. Their lack of trust cemented in incompetence, arrogance and hubris leads to a neurotic chas…

Why would mortal humans waste time/money on mass experiments with predictably useless outcomes?

Entirely the point I am making, albeit indirectly. The majority of rules and regulations nowadays are aimed at more and more control over the people at little to no benefit to them. People get angry and protest such measures. Rinse and repeat, for at least the last decade or two. It’s repetitive and pointless. When does it become clear the once great system which brought us growth and prosperity is no longer fit for purpose? At what point people realise we need to shed the old system and its top crème de la crème in favour of a new one?

We need new leaders capable of creating a vision for our future to inspire 8+ BLN people and to put in place the means to get us there.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#222

Post by lyind »

purututu wrote: post #97
mach1ne wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.

> It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer. This exact terminology is openly used by many politicians now, demanding for a NWO. Depending which bubble you live in, you have not seen any or only too little such speeches.

Anybody writing about a "New World Order" is clearly joking.

There is no order in this world, except the laws of physics, "Me!" and some love.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#223

Post by CamperBob2 »

brookst wrote: post #125
ethbr0 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better said than me. There are different approaches to changing someone's mind if they're misunderstanding something, versus if they're straight-up lying to you. The fact that there exist highly public straight-up lying politicians doesn't mean the mass of politicians are liars. Most are trying to do a decent thing, with the understanding they have. Casting one's democratic agents as "other" corrodes democracy, decre…

Yes, and it’s frustrating to see people whose policy positions I generally agree with (less surveillance, please) resort to this kind of rhetoric. People who disagree are not only wrong, and not only intentional wrongdoers, but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know? These people have obviously never tried to get four people to agree on what movie to see.

Secret motives aren't really the right argument, I agree. Citing the seemingly-inevitable negative outcomes may be a better approach.

When someone argues for ubiquitous mass surveillance, ask them to explain exactly how the Stasi worked, how they came to power and what can be done to keep it from ever happening again. Point out that these questions have to be addressed before arming the state with surveillance tools that previous abusive regimes couldn't have dreamed of.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#224

Post by im3w1l »

ethbr0 wrote: post #41
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 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…

How do you explain the countless tyrants in ancient and modern history? Hell, even in contemporary times. The truth is that there are absolutely very dangerous people around. And also a lot of good people too. We can't know for certain who is who, so the best approach is to be as polite as if they were good people but as cautious as if they were evil.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#225

Post by pessimizer »

ethbr0 wrote: post #41
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 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…

> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.

It's marketed to upper-middle class elites as reasonable, and of course it's upper-middle class elites that are paid to put together this marketing. But it's really orders from an owner class that has entirely different interests from the other 99.9% of the population.

If an individual member of of the upper-middle class has a problem with {the imposition of the week}, they are harshly corrected, shunned, then eventually ejected from the upper-middle class. Your credentials will be taken away, your friends will avoid you to keep from being suspected themselves (and will rationalize this behavior to overcome cognitive dissonance, becoming energetic state chauvinists), your credit will be destroyed.

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.

This is just a slander. There are people who own large parts of the economy, and people live for decades, and people pass their ownership to their children. They are also friends with their peers. The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#226

Post by staunton »

tomxor wrote: post #71
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. I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out: 1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets ass…

> everyone actually adopts them

I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#227

Post by tomxor »

staunton wrote: post #226
tomxor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out: 1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets ass…

> everyone actually adopts them I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.

I know. It's a thought experiment to show that even in unrealistically optimistic conditions, technology is still not sufficient to solve the problem. I intentionally ignored the societal component of adoption for this reason, showing that it makes no difference.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#228

Post by YoshiRulz »

tomxor wrote: post #71
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. I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out: 1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets ass…

IMO, your hypothetical falls apart at the second point:

> Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures.

A government could legislate that it may not rain anywhere in the country on Tuesdays, but executing that isn't practicable. Likewise, backdooring one family of CPUs may be possible, but you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.

And I want to say that there exists provably un-backdoor-able "zero-knowledge" computing, something like Ethereum's smart contract ISA, but I may be misremembering.

In the end, our governments are democratic, we elect politicians to represent our will. They shouldn't be pushing for things like backdoors at all when no citizens are in favour. So yes,

> [...] we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak.

I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#229

Post by [deleted] »

vorpalhex wrote: post #147
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…

"Would the law you propose have stopped you being abused?" No. Police are not psychics. They do not stop theoretical crime. They can only respond after crime has happened.

[deleted]

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#230

Post by candiodari »

UncleEntity wrote: post #166
ImHereToVote wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Government organizations never do things in secret. The very idea is patently absurd. I mean, how would that even happen in practice, someone does something without blasting it on Twitter, as I said, absurd.

Maybe the things that get blasted on twitter are formally secret things that government agencies do that someone blew the whistle on? Which means there could be an untold number of things which they do which are currently secret. I heard once that things, sometimes shady things, exist outside of the twitterverse.

There are boatloads of laws in any democracy that would never survive a referendum. This law is one example.

Let's face facts here: 90% of the aim is to make policing cheaper and more pervasive. To make it possible for algorithms to police people, because then those algorithms can replace attention by police officers. Even most police officers themselves wouldn't agree to that.

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