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Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

digitalcourage.social

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Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#61
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for any legislation piece. A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M. Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time. And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for. It's just the power structure of any representative legislature. "In vain do we fly to the many"...

A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...

Which is costly to do...

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#62
post #30

They make it really difficult to fight any of this. You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind. This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying. This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if t…

One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.

That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#63
post #12

[flagged]

Really, we're not allowed to agree with some of the EU's ideas but disagree with others? You demand that we take every policy proposal from the EU as part of a single coherent political philosophy?

If you give the EU a lot of power, which some people in HN are in favour of, they will use it for good and bad. I’d rather they have no power and live without the good things. Those who celebrate the good things are too ignorant to realise that the power they use to do good things will eventually be used to do bad things.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#64

I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time. Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?

A constitution is just a piece of paper. The ruling class can discard it as they wish.

The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).

Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#65
post #37

[flagged]

I am not familiar with the charging port debate, but enforcing apps to be open to other developers and prevent addiction and be accessible by people with disabilities are all good things. However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good. EU can make good laws, and sometimes EU can make bad laws..,

I think the broader point here is that regulation is a double-edged sword. There's an argument to be made that a body which has the power to impose a particular charging port on your phone also has the power to impose what it would view as 'common sense' chat control and CSAM scanning.

Europe went from many years of regulating cell phones to mostly ensure they don't cause interference or spontaneously combust, to fairly rapidly achieving a normalized position of regulating ports, app stores, and software. (I suppose another way of looking at it is that the EU didn't seem to much mind when Nokia dictated most everyone's charging ports.)

I'm not taking a position on one side or the other on the above, there are compelling arguments for and against both, and millennia of political philosophy has attempted to grapple with the issue of how much power the people should permit the state to have, what those checks and balances should be, and how they should be enforced. Some will reliably naively assert we should only permit well-informed, well-intentioned, good-hearted people to enter into positions of power, but we've seen that play out too many times for it to be considered a viable assumption.

So a discussion worth having is whether existing constraints apply, and if not, what hard constraints can be placed on regulators to limit them from acts like this? We've normalized their ability to regulate the device industry to this degree, and they're overstepping. Does Title II Article 7 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights in the European Union prevent this? Or is a new solution needed?

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#67
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not familiar with the charging port debate, but enforcing apps to be open to other developers and prevent addiction and be accessible by people with disabilities are all good things. However enforcing surveillance and CSAM scanning is not good. EU can make good laws, and sometimes EU can make bad laws..,

I think the broader point here is that regulation is a double-edged sword. There's an argument to be made that a body which has the power to impose a particular charging port on your phone also has the power to impose what it would view as 'common sense' chat control and CSAM scanning. Europe went from many years of regulating cell phones to mostly ensure they don't cause interference or spontaneously combust, to fai…

Universal charger = good

STASI/GESTAPO 2.0 = bad

To the rest... install Tox, QTox/UTox for PC (any OS) and Atox under Android. Never post personal data, ever.

Learn to set up i2pd on Trisquel/Ubuntu distros and set it as a daemon. Set up Links with 127.0.0.1:4444 as the proxy for everything and MARK the checkbox that says "tunnel everything to proxy" or similar. Disable cookies in the settings and DO NOT login to any web. Don't use "links -g", but "links in the terminal".

After you finish setting it up, save the settings.

Do the same with IRC clients, prefer simple ones such as IRC. Be aware to delete ANY metada and don't put your username as the login one under Unix/Linux, ever.

Get some Mutt config for it for the tunnel at /etc/i2pd/i2pd-tunnel.conf. Again, if it's a bit technical, use Claws Mail and disable any enabled metadata for your account.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#68
post #51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am not arguing anything, I was just asking.

Right sorry the topic is very exhausting and I extrapolated my frustration, assuming you are interested, it came back in 2015 and was canned again in 2019: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung_in_Deu... I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is ve…

As I understand it, the pressure for a surveillance state comes from the EU, right? While Germany and countries in their cultural sphere like Austria are fundamentally opposed to that. If that's the case, it won't ever change unless the EU changes

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A constitution is the basic big-picture law of the country. The court’s interpretation should be easy to guess. Otherwise, the people won’t feel like it is their document. Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.

At least in America, a classic go to for Republican and democrats alike for opposing legislation is "that's unconstitutional!"

Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the same page).

I’m not sure if that’s the case in Germany though.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#70

Leaked record of a meeting on 11/07/2025: Original: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-... Translated to English: https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...

I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and any other data collected via surveillance. This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.

Peter Hummelgaard basically says yes to every new tool that the police asks for. He also is a staunch advocate of increasing punishment for every type of crime that happens to catch his attention, even in a time where our prison system is in shambles and has way too many inmates. A true authoritarian.

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