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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

#271

Post by throwaway50662 »

masswerk wrote: post #241
firtoz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap that's pretty much evil scheming right there. Digital gerrymandering?

Let's put it this ways: if policymakers are allowed to think that certain elements should not be represented in the political process and/or should be just overwhelmed by a broad wave welcoming the agenda, we're deep into the root causes of what haunted Europe in the 1930s. If only for this reason, we must stop targeted advertising and messaging, before it is too late. Because, for a minimal social and political alig…

Targeted advertising isn't the problem.

Governmental organisations buying advertisement is the real culprit. They would find a way to do it even without targeted advertising, so let's cut it out completely.

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

#272

Post by njharman »

dsign wrote: post #78
irusensei wrote: post #23

Its just me that thinks there is something really wrong with the way politicians try to pass such controversial laws? Politicians bring up something controversial. Most of the time influenced by some lobby with very little interest in public benefit. To combat this lots of people need to do activism. Those people need to devote your time and energy to prevent such thing. So far it sounds good but after the dust settl…

I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to c…

Instead of money spent to influence politicians, money will be spent to influence the masses. The net effect will be same, money "wins".

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

#273

Post by try_the_bass »

freeopinion wrote: post #112

I would be interested in learning the thoughts of those who have thought deeply about the role of anonymity in democracy. I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revea…

> I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy.

I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to cooperate. It could be positive pressures like getting positive feedback from peers, or negative feedback in the form of shame from peers.

Authenticity is important here, to ensure that one's peers can provide accurate feedback (both positive and negative). Anonymity breaks this model, allowing people to pretend to have one viewpoint in order to reap the positive rewards, while simultaneously allowing them to dodge the negative feedback for antisocial behaviors.

You needn't look further than the behavior of pseudonymous commenters on the Internet to see this play out. So many "normal" people are capable of being complete assholes online because they're able to hide those actions from those who can impose social consequences.

I mean, if I found out a close friend was the kind of person who demonstrates the kind of casual cruelty that online trolls exude, I might stop being their friend.

That's not too say that the benefits of privacy are all bad. Vulnerable people certainly benefit greatly from privacy, especially in adversarial environments... But perhaps the answer in less adversarial environments (i.e. direct/indirect democracies) more often isn't "more privacy", but "less judgement"?

The other framing for this question involves trust. Anonymity undermines trust, but trust is _required_ for coordinated action. From this perspective isn't pretty obvious that democracies and privacy pursue opposing goals.

Put differently, when it comes to voting, I don't think it's a good idea to incentivize lying--or worse still, actively promote it as a positive. If making votes public causes negative externalities, perhaps there are solutions other than "let people lie about how they vote"?

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

#274

Post by matthewdgreen »

hef19898 wrote: post #210
matthewdgreen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can confirm, you don't. I'm sorry if I insulted or embarrassed you. That wasn't my intent. My view is that the design of governing bodies is another area of engineering, and you can learn a lot about design goals by looking at the resulting systems. But I realize this can also become very personal.

Defining structures of government is not engineering, trying to apply the principles to both doesn't work.

I don’t agree with that statement at all. I think it encompasses a very myopic definition of engineering, and implies that humans can’t build or evaluate government structures on the basis of specific design goals.

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

#275

Post by try_the_bass »

concordDance wrote: post #252
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every citizen is free to express his opinion. you are, but if you commit a crime in doing it you go to trial. which is fair. edit: libel is a crime punishable by the law, everywhere in the west. Doesn't mean you are forbidden to say what you want. democracy without a justice system as a counter power is not democracy as we intend them in modern era.

> Doesn't mean you are forbidden to say what you want. This confuses me. Saying someone is "free to do X" normally means that X is allowed by law. Or else what could it possibly mean?

I don't see "free to do X" being exclusively "it's allowed by law". One is always free to do whatever one wants. Criminal law exists to punish those who abuse that freedom in ways their society has deemed to be harmful.

That is to say "free to do X (under the law)" is a subset of "free to do X".

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

#276

Post by Roark66 »

Nothing new for the EU commission. They are the least democratic of the EU bodies. The name the have (the commission, from the soviet union commissars) is very appropriate and the do live up to it. Just look how they attack every country that has the audacity to elect forces opposed to their paymasters (that mostly include German interest groups, and Russia by proxy). Trying to redefine words like "rule of law" to hit for example Poland(ruled by a party opposed to EPP, the ruling party in the EU) while 100% ignoring horrible corruption in Bulgaria that is aligned with them. No reaction whatsoever to huge corruption in the Court of Justice of the EU (the Court of Justice is the opposite of the rule of law at the moment, but it's a long story). All while trying to force more power to itself against treaties, get rid of veto rights, and push through things like this law. Sad really, because the EU itself was a great idea, but everything can be corrupted.

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

#277

Post by torcete »

There is actually no democracy in the European Union, nor in any of its state members. There is no power separation, the executive branch and the legislative branch is all one that is trying to control everything.

You can see it with all these laws that bypass the judiciary system when censoring content on the internet. It's not a judge who decides to ban or not Russia Today or Twitter.

This is basically Michels' iron law of oligarchy unfolding under our eyes. They create the laws, they execute them and they punish if you don't follow.

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

#278

Post by try_the_bass »

alerighi wrote: post #214

What they are even trying to achieve? A criminal can always use an e2e messaging system. Even if they ban the systems (such as Signal) that don’t employ these measures, it’s just a matter of using a VPN. The excuse of reducing crime is just… an excuse

Making it harder to do crimes shouldn't be discouraged because some criminals will find new ways to do crimes.

You're defending the ability to commit crimes because the law isn't perfect. The law _cannot_ be perfect, so no law will ever satisfy your requirement.

Following this line of reasoning to it's conclusion: because all laws are imperfect, and criminals can always find ways around them, your position is that no laws should be enacted.

After all, you can't have crime if nothing is criminalized, right?

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

#279

Post by admissionsguy »

sesm wrote: post #267
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big desirable thing about the EU is it's strong social net and relatively modern urban infrastructure. If you like the city or don't have a safety net from some other auxiliary source such as family or church it's superior. Otherwise the US wins out in factors such as an overall more vibrant economy, more personal freedoms, not having a major landwar on its borders, etc. Also all this just applies to the actual g…

Have you ever been to Serbia? I’ve been living there for the past year and to me it looks like a great place in terms of value for the money.

If it's anything like Poland, it may enable a great material standard of life, but the parochial culture and overall nastiness (and they support Russia, so they must be nasty) will grind you down over time.

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

#280

Post by dsign »

jezzamon wrote: post #255
dsign wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system. A part of me wants to believe this madness would end. Another part fears that we would try, at least for a few months, total surveillance and bisections as a form of capital punishment. But on the bright side, we would be able to c…

Take a look at the recent Australian referendum (disclaimer: like most young people I voted yes, but the outcome was no): Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023...

Thanks for this really interesting piece of information, I didn't know about this referendum in Australia. Another commenter said that a true democracy would disenfranchise minorities, and I take the result of this poll as a data-point in favor of that argument.
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