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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

patrick-breyer.de

331–340 of 463 posts

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.

You ... Work on aspects of your society that Russian bots can seize on? Fracture point propaganda campaigns only work because we let those issues fester.

That, unlike other proposed solutions, would certainly work. The problem is that these political fracture points are there because of opposing interests between different groups in society. This can be easily solved in more authoritarian government structures by simply choosing a winner and a loser, but in democracy not so much.

And while I don't have any doubt in my mind that there are foreign entities working to exploit these fracture points, I am very skeptical that they are the main cause of problems here. We have seen such fracture points arise and cause political strife up to the point of civil wars many times throughout history without such foreign instigation.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#333
post #289

I have to admit that I don't understand how they can push for this so often! Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?

This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for a…

https://youtu.be/jxWlJ_muK0I

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Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While the EU is not perfect and surely needs improvement in many areas, it is still better than not having it. Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? What good did the EU bring that's good enough to make up for the badness of everyone in Europe having all their private digital communications constantly scanned?

> Would you still believe this if Chat Control got though? Chat Control is being pushed by member states. The people who keep saving you are the MEPs (elected EU MPs). You would most likely already have chat control if you were not in the EU. All governments around the world are pushing for this.

Yep, that. Sorry, growing up in Poland I know the amount of horrors the EU _prevented_.

Europe without EU isn’t democracy, it’s a bunch of fiefdoms.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#335
post #328
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, setting aside the possibility this is some sort of joke/sarcasm I can't quite get, and the absolute wtf of this "scenario" which doesn't exist and all the ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy, and taking it sorta seriously, your argument completely falls down here amongst other places: >Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which ar…

>this "scenario" which doesn't exist Where do you get your information from, exactly? In criminal and intelligence circles, this is not exactly uncommon knowledge. I hope you never experience the horror of finding out that even in federal protective custody, that military intelligence is already there waiting for you. >ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy, In the Soviet Union, for example, all medical re…

Yeah this reads like a psychotic episode, so let me try the short version.

> I have been imprisoned extra-judicially, threatened with torture (I complied quickly), and served rotten food on US soil.

Would you prefer these people to have access to all of your communications? Or would you like to be able to legally encrypt your messages?

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up when everyone was saying "don't post your face, name or address on the internet" - and that's what I've done. There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet and my real name isn't attached to most of my brainfarts online. It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have. But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat whic…

> There are a total of maybe 3-6 pictures of me on the internet Incorrect, you are probably in the background of random photos on the internet, and by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.

> by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.

This can be done to you whether you have a profile or not. Having an actual profile likely means that you've signed onto some tos that allows them to add a lot more to your "shadow profile" and use it in more ways, and that any complaints about the treatment will go to forced arbitration.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU law 101: (1) EU Commission (i.e. the executive) proposes a law; (2) EU Parliament signs off on it; (3) EU Council (i.e. the equivalent of a senate, comprising national governments) puts the final stamp on it. The complicating factor being that a given law may or may not require unanimity at the final EU Council stage. In general, the governments have the final word.

The Council of the European Union (what you probably mean by EU Council) isn't a senate. Its meetings are theoretically attended by ministers related to a specific topic area, so an agricultural law might be attended by agricultural ministers, but in practice that often doesn't happen and functionaries are rubber stamping laws without reading or debating them. Almost all the "votes" pass unanimously or with a single…

Yes, I fully understand the functioning, I was just trying to keep things simple. Even Europeans don't understand this, Americans must be lost. "Council of the EU" vs "EU Council" is next-level opacity. Since the latter doesn't technically exist, I find it helpful as a less syllabic synonym for the former (where it can sit neatly alongside EU Parliament and EU Commission, leaving nobody confused). That leaves the European Council, i.e. the periodic flagship permutation of the Council. This is indeed a senate-like entity in Montesquieuian terms, that wasn't my idea.

Obviously I agree with all your other points.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.

I don’t think that bot mitigation is nearly the ordeal that the social media giants pose it to be, so long as the desired result is keeping such activity minimized (practical) and not entirely eliminated (impossible), especially in this era of increasingly capable lightweight language models. Taking Xitter as an example, there are many tells that are visible even to readers with limited info that should be as plain a…

Bot detection in the case where the activity is not human like e.g. spam, is quite easy to detect. But the problem here is that a foreign influence bot is not like that at all. It is designed to act like a human. And the areas that foreign bots attack are also political issues that the domestic population cares about, so you can't really filter by content either.

You could still mitigate this by blocking accounts that use VPN IPs or requiring invasive IDV for accounts, but isn't this sort of thing exactly the type of authoritarian user monitoring that we would like to avoid?

I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#339
post #220
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.

What is funny is that it has been pushed by the social democrats. See also what Labour have been doing in UK. Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.

I think it's a more useful analysis to add a second dimension than to try to project everything onto 'left' and 'right' (in the style of the .

Axis 1 - civil & political rights: In favour of broad social & political rights (down) -> In favour of few social and political rights a.k.a. authoritarianism (up) Axis 2 - economy: In favour of social responsibility / society ensuring people's needs are met (in the sense of 'from each according to ability, and to each according to need') (left) -> In favour of individual responsibility and a laissez faire economic freedoms (right).

On this 2d view, Social Democrats are nominally lower left, while Chat Control is an authoritarian policy (i.e. appealing to anyone on the top half of the coordinate system), so it would run counter to their nominal values.

Note that there is a significant number of the economic left who are nominally authoritarian (see for example Stalinist / Maoists), and likewise for the right so it doesn't make sense to project that as a left/right thing.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#340
post #289

I have to admit that I don't understand how they can push for this so often! Wasn't this rejected not so long ago?

This "keep asking until they say yes" strategy is by design and has been a common tactic used by the EU power centers in the past. See the way the Treaty of Lisbon was rejected in referendums, and then people were just made to vote again. Or the way the British pro-EU faction proclaimed in 2016 that Leave/Remain was a once in a generation vote to settle the issue for all time, then immediately started agitating for a…

Isn't that how politics works? People keep pushing for what they want until they get it.
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