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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

#501

Post by kragen »

b112 wrote: post #456
kragen wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if i type https://gmail.com/ into my browser, it usually doesn't matter if you have successfully gotten comodo or actalis to issue you a fake certificate for gmail.com, because my browser doesn't try to connect to your malicious server; it tries to connect to google's actual gmail server, and so you don't receive my packets, and your fake certificate does you no good but, as i said, if you can feed me fake dns result…

because my browser doesn't try to connect to your malicious server Unless a router is compromised along the route, which is a known thing, and part of why we use ssl everywhere now.

the paragraph immediately following the one you quoted from explains that, and did so nine hours before your comment

the grandparent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34629050 also describes some more common ways that this can happen without routers being compromised

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#502

Post by alexbiet »

walterbell wrote: post #323
alexbiet wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Excluding migration to new land, what is a good historical precedent? Sounds a bit like "Rewrite It In Rust!" Reboot is good for those who have extracted and sequestered value out of the old system. Less good for those whose assets were extracted and still have legal claims within the old system.

The systems we instate adapt based on human evolution. We began living in small groups, then tribes, alliances, principates, republics, nation states, mega states. It is hard to believe we've reached the pentacle of governance systems. All participants are impacted to a certain degree, be it positively or negatively, by change. Digesting the current state of the world leads me to be believe a system change may be around the corner.

First principles, everything is in a continuous state of decay. Every living or non-living being, every system, institution or organisation by-product of a living being. What goes up must come down. Institutions start out with noble goals for society. As they grow and amass power, their values tend shift inwards, creating a fertile ground for hubris, nepotism driven incompetence, corruption and disconnect. Most often then not, given a long enough time span, they crumble over their own incompetence and lack of accountability to the environment around them.

Using the programming analogy, it's not as much of a rewrite as it is a major version upgrade (i.e. from 1.x to 2.x) we need.

Keeping your assets is important. Creating opportunities to gather new assets is also important. We are in need of a vision that brings prosperity and purpose for all of us.

Observing the gluttonous initiatives of outdated institutions to swindle our rights, freedoms and assets is hardly ever inspiring. Things change with time.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#503

Post by sebastianz »

irusensei wrote: post #395
Seattle3503 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think we have romanticized civil disobedience a little too much. Not because having authoritarian laws is good, but because it seems like some people would rather be heroic resistance fighters than engage dry policy work and advocacy. It would be better to never live under bad laws at all.

> people would rather be heroic resistance fighters than engage dry policy work and advocacy Isn't it tiring? I mean you can raise hell and get some picture but you know one or 4 years from now they will try the same bullshit with a different name until it works. You are wasting your time and energy on activism while there are crooks literally getting paid (by your money) to degrade your life. I think that time and e…

> I think that time and energy should be best spent building things which are immune to power abuse.

I'm not sure such a thing exists. What technologies built by humans do you know of that are immune to power abuse?

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#504

Post by intrasight »

dns_snek wrote: post #442
intrasight wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

borrowing from gun reasoning, if encryption is made a crime, then only criminals will use encryption.

That goes way beyond the scope of legislation in question. Suggesting that something akin to the great firewall of china could be deployed in the EU is unrealistic - having said that, it sure feels surreal when expression and support of these authoritarian ideas by EU representatives doesn't lead to immediate political suicide.

First, I was being sarcastic. But in terms of "political suicide", remember that politicians a) have info we don't, b) have fear mongering elements screaming in their ears, and c) have surveillance lobbyists taking them out to dinner.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#505

Post by posterboy »

benevol wrote: post #332
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…

By that logic, we'd need to make knives illegal, because people get stabbed to death every day somewhere.

Which logic?

It's always a matter of availability, balance, justification, right. The justification is there, so your argument is a strawman.

It would be more relevant in a direct comparison to gun control, which. Blades are fairly easy to furnish on the spot, easier than guns, so this comparison fails, too.

Balance requires a need for knives, which is difficult to put aside and certainly not the point of this argument. The ball park figure alone is not making a rational argument.

The internet is not the breaking point either way, though it could be used to implement access control.

So, I am effectively unsure if your whatabout'ish strawman is in favour of intrusive regulation.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#506

Post by b112 »

kragen wrote: post #501
b112 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because my browser doesn't try to connect to your malicious server Unless a router is compromised along the route, which is a known thing, and part of why we use ssl everywhere now.

the paragraph immediately following the one you quoted from explains that, and did so nine hours before your comment the grandparent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34629050 also describes some more common ways that this can happen without routers being compromised

Noted.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#507

Post by fidgewidge »

O__________O wrote: post #353
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to slow down and look at this with level heads. 1. What is a reliable measure of this "vast percentage"? 2. Are you perhaps lumping any departure from your preferred political model as "authoritarian"? 3. Are you perhaps overattributing the level of "democracy" to your preferred political regime? 4. Have you considered the motivations behind the distaste with ostensibly "democratic" regimes? Simply de…

From the first sentence of the related post — “The European Commission is currently in the process of enacting a law called Chat control. If the law goes into effect, it will mean that all EU citizens' communications will be monitored and listened to.” Level headed person would see that the next step is logically that all communications regardless if they’re in private, in person, etc should be monitored. If that’s n…

"I mean that topic like this would not even see the light of day if there wasn’t source of significant support; hint, there is."

Where are you from? This is an initiative of the EU Commission. The EU is not a democracy, the Commission doesn't care what voters think and is quite open about that. It can take that attitude because there are no voters: the Commission is an appointed civil service and the people there get their jobs via opaque processes. So the Commission trying to do something tells us exactly nothing about society, democracy, the will of the majority, how supported the policy is, or anything else beyond what a tiny club of Eurocrats thinks and wants.

As for the percentage of people who want to live in a totalitarian system, it's probably about 25%-30%. A lot but not a majority. That's roughly the proportion of people who in polls in the UK during the Brexit campaigns said they're true EU supporters, and not merely supporting it due to fear of the consequences of disobedience. Why do they like it and support it so much, well, exactly because it's not a democratic system and they'd like to live under such a system (they had no answer back to criticism of the EU as undemocratic).

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#508

Post by fidgewidge »

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 had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that."

It has had zero unelected PMs. Every single PM was elected by:

1. Members of their constituency. You have to be an MP to be a PM.

2. Members of their party (at least to some extent).

If you mean the UK doesn't use a presidential system then yes but so what, everyone knows that. It's normal, lots of countries use a parliamentary system.

"The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anything else, it was marketed as "we don't want the EU telling us what to do", but that just played heavily into nationalism."

Wanting decision makers to be accountable isn't nationalism, that's just normal support of democracy. Besides, this criticism is off base because the EU is a nationalist project. The EU has its own flag, its own currency, its own borders, even its own national anthem. It is in love with the idea of being a nation. Replacing the nations of Europe with a new nation called Europe is the goal of the project. It is and always has been a nationalist project, which uses "nationalism" as an insult to mean love of the existing nations rather than of itself.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#509

Post by fidgewidge »

kypro wrote: post #467
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #20

As a pro-EU citizen I feel more and more inclined to agree on some of the Brexit rhetoric. Commissioners have shown multiple times that they are too permeable to lobbying, too willing to water down tough environmental regulation, and too keen on 'security' surveillance. So far the EU parliament members have balanced the act with some sanity. But the power and lack of transparency of the EC both with regards to lobbyi…

The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me. I really just don't get it at all. Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap? I'm all for European trade, but I felt I had to vote Brexit because o…

> The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me

Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#510

Post by fidgewidge »

midoridensha wrote: post #486
kypro wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me. I really just don't get it at all. Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap? I'm all for European trade, but I felt I had to vote Brexit because o…

>Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap? Basically, no. What you're asking for is what the EU has tried to do somewhat: become a confederation. It doesn't work. The USA tried it back in the 1700s and it was a disaster. The country couldn't defend itself, have any kind of central banking and currency, or any consistent policy. It was replaced in 12 years with the more ce…

The USA was hardly a disaster. Mutual defense is possible without unifying everything under a single government (see NATO), the US didn't even have central banking at all until the 20th century so not sure how you concluded the lack of that was a disaster within a few years of the USA being born, and "consistent policy" is something it still doesn't have in many key areas - without the USA being a disaster.

> The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity

It was created as a trading bloc, literally the European Economic Area. That project later got hijacked by federalists who wanted to do what you say, but they never had agreement on that from the actual citizens. That's one reason the UK left.

> Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.

Arguably the US's internal problems come from too much centralization, hence why Americans famously loathe Congress but like their own Congressman/woman.

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