Live data from Hacker News

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

digitalcourage.social

151–160 of 377 posts

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

#151
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are actionable items in that manifesto, and was written during the RSA munitions debate.

The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems". The cypherpunk scene is still alive and evolving, but it's fairly niche, and a tough environment for people driven by external validation while 'things are well'. But there are still people around making sure the necessary pieces are in place in case they become necessary.

> The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems".

Indeed. At the parent page of https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html (https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/), you can read:

"if you want to write code, go to OpenPrivacy.org":

> https://www.openprivacy.org/

This website perhaps gives you some inspirations.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solice is that it’s all temporary, as climate catastrophe will bring down whatever system they’re building before too long

When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off? Boom-bust cycles, including environmental ones don't do anything to harm capitalism. Rather, they just make it stronger. AI systems have locked in existing power structures forever and guarantee that we will technologically advance fast enough to solve for or at least adapt to climate change. I'd argue…

Anti vax is nutty, anti nuclear makes some sense if the goal is worldwide disarmament. I agree AI is an incredible boon for surveillance and censorship but I’m highly skeptical that it will solve climate change and currently seems to be making it worse by measurably increasing power usage. XAI is using diesel for theirs and the air quality in town is measurably worse now.

I’m with you that cruelty and domination is winning right now, and that a sizable fraction of people are fundamentally evil and an even more sizable fraction basically don’t care. I still eat meat and acknowledge that it’s immoral to do so.

Just think that whatever happens after climate catastrophe / the water wars will likely be worse but it feels natural that it will at least be a different type of worse. I don’t see the global internet as being extremely relevant then.

Idk, as an individual there’s nothing much I can do and arguing here won’t help anything so I guess agree to disagree.

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

#153
post #50
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…

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"...

On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.

Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.

From wiki:

> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"

Campaign donations, per this website:

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.

Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.

It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.

There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on everyone " should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 minority should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.

It's an interesting thought, but as presented that sounds fairly dysfunctional. If it takes 2/3 to pass and 1/3 to repeal, you may as well just say it takes 2/3+1 to pass, as otherwise anything passed can be, and likely will be, just immediately repealed.

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

#155
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 ...

How do you get to them to force them into submission? Did Americans get the child rapists off the Epstein list yet? And the unelected EU leader Ursula VDL has had private security since she was a child.

They're untouchable by the plebs, they have zero accountability.

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

#156
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel like that's true in Germany. The constitutional court would like a word I guess. They have a pretty big history regarding surveilance and such.

So shouldn't be a concern then for Germans? Somehow I don't buy that. See for example https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-artikel-5-e-v-anot... and that's not an isolated event. Before that were jabber chat nodes.

So did they go to court? I think that would be crucial to rectify that. If not, they let the rogue agents have a free hand.

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

#157
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages. That works only if all your contacts are technically educated enough. It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.

> It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing. More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail. It's becoming crystal clear that "we the people" have no power anymore, and the way we can take some of…

> More important, yes, but we still need the technical workarounds, and to educate people about them, for when preventing these laws ultimately fail.

I agree. But for now, we still have a window of opportunity to stop the law on the political level.

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

#158
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"...

On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot. Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to…

> Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help.

Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?

Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties?

The first would obviously be deeply problematic even if it was possible to police, the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it.

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

#159
post #76
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…

The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.

This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects. According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified. I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.

Once you have collected the data it won’t be uncollected, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, when the right one walks out of the door.
Post reply on HN