Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

It’s the thousands of little paper cuts that build up over time but that can go on for an entire lifetime without ever reaching a breaking point.

As an example, capital controls.

I grew up in the 80s, which was largely cash-based. You got paid in cash, spent in cash, and gift/transact to others in cash. Oversight was severely limited, close to non-existent.

The concept is that you're innocent until proven guilty. It's your money, do with it what you want and it's nobody's business what you do with it. And should you engage in any illegal matters, then it's up to the government to build this case with due diligence: have a probable cause, collect evidence, maybe arrange a warrant, etc.

The important part is the very high barrier to building such a case. It's a huge amount of work just to do this for one case. Because of this, authoritarianism is kept in check. You could say it doesn't "scale".

Now we fast forward to our digital "cash" society. It's questionable if you actually own the money at all, but that's a technicality that is beyond the point.

You have no transaction privacy. Not only is it all on record, the threshold for a flagged transaction gets lower and lower. Buy a car and the bank knows and the IRS knows (in the Netherlands). There's a proposal to do laundering analysis on any transaction > 100 euro. You can't deposit or withdraw sizable money without caps or raising all kinds of flags.

The privacy is eliminated. There is no probable cause or warrant, you're treated as guilty by default and evidence is to be collected that you're innocent. A full reversal of assumptions, rights and freedom.

Which is only the beginning, because my true point is that this scales. A government now has the ability to do whatever the hell they want with your money. They can analyze millions of us and control it with the push of a button.

Wrong photo in iCloud? Money frozen. Political opponent? Assets seized. Spent too much of your money on high energy products? Programmatic tax applied.

You can make that list as long as you want, but let's take even the absolute simplest case of having that wrong photo. Imagine the analog scenario where a government regularly bursts through the door of your home to look at your photo albums. That would be the most absurd thing ever, not to mention ridiculously inefficient. Yet this is digitally happening as we speak, and nobody knows or cares.

This kind of digital insight and power over your life is a power that should not exist. Most people in this world live in authoritarian countries. Quite a few democratic one are edging towards it. Do the math.

For clarity though, I don’t mean literal predictability, I mean relative predictability from the individual’s perspective, which for some actual means life being predictability unpredictable; to some degree, I am, in part because I value the chance to improvise, but anyone that knows me would say that’s predictable.

As for population migration, statistics I had heard before, was roughly half of world’s population doesn’t move more than days walk from where they grew up and remaining in a given area is rarely tied to personal or regional opportunities or threats. Clearly my understanding might be wrong or things like climate change might force people to move; for example, roughly billion of the eight billion people on Earth will likely be displaced by climate change.

In the US, we talk a lot of partisan issues that pit parts of the country against one another; and of bipartisan issues that unite them. I'd like to introduce the concept of an antipartisan issue: one that unites the country against its own politicians. In this particular case, surveillance is antipartisan, because:

- People do not want to be surveilled

- Politicians believe the people need to be surveilled in order to stay in office

The last one might seem confusing. But keep in mind that things like high crime rates tend to get politicians thrown out of their job. Big, high-profile busts of scumbag criminals tend to make politicians look more competent and thus increase chances of reelection. And if politicians as a class believe that surveillance is necessary to prosecute crime, then they will disobey democratic instruction not to.