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

digitalcourage.social

251–260 of 377 posts

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

#251
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"...

Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?

Should we call the organization “government” and the fee “tax”?

It’s not a bad idea but it’s funny we need a funded people’s organisation to represent us to the democratic government!

I wonder if we need direct voting rights (for legislation etc) - now that we live in the internet age it may be feasible. Not sure how else to have the many overwhelming the few.

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

#252
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"...

Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?

Because whether the government gets it or this collective organization gets it, you’re still out a $1. Besides, very few people will actually care enough about $1 to partake in literally any amount of effort to regain it.

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

#253

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.

I don't think the assumption that "law = things the government is doing" is a good one.

I could imagine a law that specifically restricts the government's ability to do things. For example, maybe the federal government passes a law that makes it easier to sue its agents when those agents violate individual citizens constitutional rights.

Perhaps 65% of the population feels they are harmed if this law doesn't exist, and 35% of the population feels they are harmed if the law doesn't exist. Should that law be repealed?

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

#254
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic). Question is, how do we g…

By increasing the level of democracy and decentralizing the government. Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations. If you decentralise, any damage will be localised and would affect fewer people.

I semi-agree, but the type of democracy you are referring to would involve much smaller groups with more power and would ruin the political "economy of scale" that we get from having the same laws apply to everyone over vast spaces.

I think having a mostly crippled central government is probably the most realistic alternative but you can see how that is taken advantage of in the US and how it fosters unnecessary discord between people whose interests are generally aligned.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?

Because whether the government gets it or this collective organization gets it, you’re still out a $1. Besides, very few people will actually care enough about $1 to partake in literally any amount of effort to regain it.

I'm pretty sure any law that costs you 1 dollar will cost you 1 dollar per year, or 1 dollar some other shorter amount of time.

And anyway the actual law under discussion is bad not because it costs you 1 dollar per year, but because it costs you other things.

Also this how people do fight against this kind of thing, they join non-profits or other organizations, give them 1 dollar per year and use the combined might of the organization.

But yes at that point you are paying 1 dollar per year that way too, but then, as already noted this is not really a 1 dollar per year law.

And then we see that in fact people often do care about 1 dollar per year, because they are not joining the organizations, even to protect things worth more than 1 dollar per year.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At the same time, proponents have said that the whole idea of the database is to detect people with suspicious behavior. Also, this is still nothing like getting a warrant to a wire tap - any suspicion will reveal YEARS of private information about you to the investigators. Furthermore, knowing that this can be used to identify suspects, surely it will have an effect on peoples behaviors. They propose to include heal…

> How many boxes have to be ticked before a flag is raised

If the proponents are right, an infinite amount. The information will never "raise a flag" since looking at it would require the flag to already have been raised (in the form of a warrant).

> and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?

I think psychiatrists are already required to report you if they believe you're a danger to others.

> but we still see misuse of power.

This concern I sympathise with more, but I also have to imagine that this information bank could make it easier to investigate and convict this sort of misuse of power.

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

#257
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you prevent a misuse or switching to "let's just start looking into this without warrant until this popular issue(i.e. immigrants, USA, Russia, religios tensions, ethnic tensions) is solved" when the next political crisis hits?

You don't. Democracy has to be able to make those decisions to be legitimate.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is no reason to believe it wouldn't eventually be used to generate leads as opposed to needing a warrant to sift through.

Again, I'm no expert, but I do believe the law would be what would stop you. It could be poorly written, but then we should just rewrite it.

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

#259
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a great idea. I for one want to enable our governments to track down criminals and punish them for it. If they're not doing everything they can do so in this technological and digital age, then they are breaking their part of that pesky "social contract" I am being upheld to. And to people like you that oppose this and propose even more authoritarian laws that prevent me as a citizen from protecting my…

You speak as if there is a perfect equivalence between morality and law, and that every action that can be done to increase the rate at which crimes are solved is a good thing. I think that is a bit simplistic and naive.

My comment may come off that way, but I don't think there is a perfect equivalence, no. And if anything, every person has a different set of morality.

I come from a point of practicality and lack of chaos. It's bad enough that we all have different morality, but we have somehow through some semi-shared and semi-agreed process come up with a set of laws that we should all subscribe and be held-to. And on top of that, we have individuals that want to add more chaos to the mix by having us gimp and restrict the government from enforcing the laws we have already agreed to (for better or worse). They don't get to have that right anymore than I have the right to break any other arbitrary law, and I am tired of privacy advocates claiming some objective moral high ground and "universal" principle of privacy that they claim we all share or want.

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The same could be said of the entire state, or any heirarchical organization of people.

If we were truely, terminally, afraid of "the wrong one" we couldn't build anything.

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