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Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

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Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#41

Post by barrysteve »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #7

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…

They already 'know everything' (or enough) to control my life.

You think I can rob a bank tomorrow and not be known? Past a certain 'crime threshold' and the three letter agencies take a keen interest in everything/anything I do... I'm out of trouble right now, that's all.

Let them control everything... in the long long term it will be flipped against them. 1984 oppressed the political class.

And when the political class flees visible power... the same 'cybersecurity' folks will occupy the power vacuum, trapping themselves in their own tech bubble.

I've never seen someone so Secure.. as someone who constantly preens his security cameras, his up-to-date door locks, his impenetrable garage walls....

The whole state of tech right now is a racket, designed to make those pigs 'more equal than others' feel emotionally safe in their data centres.

The only way to get the pigs off our back is to manualize tech and make all the average joes on this planet, able to control tech from top to bottom, completely transparently and completely separate from the System.

When my son can trivially modify the instruction set on the CPU in his Smart Chainsaw, and reconfigure every single bit of code and enter every abstraction layer - as easily as we change capacitors on a dishwasher - then the guy in the security bunker analyzing every single molecule entering his 'secure enviornment' is laughably 'secure'...

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#42

Post by lock-the-spock »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #7

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…

Honestly a quite funny post. You offer strong emotion wrapped in a story lending supposed crédence but give no single fact of what this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing. You read one (extremely technical and niche) regulation and it's horrible, in what way? And the European commission does not adopt regulations, it's parliament and council that do (the commission only proposes them).

Honestly this kind of post serves no purpose or benefit. I certainly disagree (e.g. the commission is very useful in fighting against authoritarianism in Central Europey research funding, data protection, trade, ...) but there's not even facts to disagree with, just an emotional fact-free rent. If I was a troll that's how I would write.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#43

Post by notafalseflag »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #7

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission" . The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be th…

Some keywords for this: "Bin Laden. Bin Laden. Bin Laden"

And now the competition gets a copy of their competitors' communications.

Is there a one word phrase that exfiltrates and obscures sensitive communications when there is state censorship?

That's a critical vulnerability for secure operations.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#44

Post by ta8645 »

sofixa wrote: post #34
ta8645 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Why the heck is any new law needed at all for copyright? The only accusation is that LLMs did not respect current copyright laws, not that the current copyright law is insufficient. Specifically, there was a commonly used corpus of pirated copyright material (books3) that was used to train many LLMS. Its hosting was withdrawn when challe…

Because an algorithm isn't a human, so the usual "fair use" and inspiration arguments do not apply 1:1. The possibilities opened by e.g. film studios recording voice actors, trainign algorightms on them and then just reusing their voices, or deepfaking actors' faces, or Copilot giving verbatim copyrighted code are endless and quite different than what was currently possible. Does Microsoft violate copyright by traini…

> [examples of supposed problems]

None of those have anything to do with LLMs which was the issue stated in your original post.

> A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does?

Yes.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#45

Post by RandomLensman »

betaby wrote: post #30
RandomLensman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where or how are people oppressed in the EU?

[link I was referring to has been deleted by the original author]

Do you have a link to the court case? Defaming the state is its own offense so not quite clear what the terrorism link is.

Btw., that has nothing to do with the EU. Domestic German criminal law and nothing recent.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#46

Post by logicchains »

csomar wrote: post #12
tekla wrote: post #2

How are there not riots in the EU right now?

Dangerous polarization is happening in the EU right now. You'd think after WW II there will be safeguards against a repeat. But that's clearly not case.

It has safeguards, especially the German constitution. But fundamentally in a democracy if enough people want to elect a party like AFD or PFN there's nothing that can be done.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#47

Post by csomar »

barrysteve wrote: post #24
csomar wrote: post #11

The EU and the West are over-playing their hands with this in my opinion. They'll get burned by this at some point, at which point it'll be too late; and maybe then they'll recognize that the reason they have had such control was just the fact they were first. Not some universal physics law that such companies can only exist in the Western sphere. The recent Middle-East events had some troubling intervention (in Twit…

They want to overplay their hand. An oppressive internet that they can bully, works for them. An internet that withdraws into itself and the EU returns to pen and paper + dumb phones works for them. The US is all on this. As long as the US owns the internet and big tech, they are happy to let other countries do the dirty work of setting boundaries. The long term solution is to 'manualize' tech. Make all tech we touch…

They are under-estimating the level of development in tech in the "global south" which has a differing agenda. There is now enough talent and capital in the global south to kick-start tech companies and actually it's cheaper there. The problem is that they need time to catch up to the Western big tech. Why would anyone use a local chat/social app if Twitter and Instagram exists. Now, if they are being deplatformed, it'll be a different situation.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#48

Post by blipvert »

betaby wrote: post #30
RandomLensman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where or how are people oppressed in the EU?

[link I was referring to has been deleted by the original author]

Sounds like a Germany thing, not an EU thing.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#49

Post by barrysteve »

tekla wrote: post #2

How are there not riots in the EU right now?

A policeman in France killed a teenager in cold blood and they set their city blocks on fire. Polticians are arguing over the presence (vaguely racist) of immigrants. There's a war in Ukraine flooding out Poland.

They have more local and pressing concerns, than this.

Re: Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance

#50

Post by masswerk »

> To sway European public opinion, however, the European Commission went even further. X’s Transparency Report shows that the European Commission also used ‘microtargeting’ to ensure that the ads did not appear to people who care about privacy (…) and eurosceptics

Independently of the broader privacy and surveillance topic, this is highly concerning: if institutions, like the EC, start to run agendas through and by carefully created echo chambers and keep certain segments of the demographic out of the loop, all is lost, as there is no common and public realm of political discourse anymore.

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