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EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

cointelegraph.com

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Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#121

Post by Levitz »

kurthr wrote: post #98
azmodeus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote them out and never vote for their parties in your general elections If your Member of European Parliament supports chat control stop voting for their parties and politically support their opposition

Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!? Asking your politicians to lie to you is not a substitute for changing their incentives. The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the popula…

>Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!?

Not quite a fan of deportations, but I'd rather risk people going back on their word than the alternative here.

I wholeheartedly refuse to vote for anyone who publicly supports this. It is integral to democracy itself. If my only alternative is "The party of kicking kittens and opposing chatcontrol" I will 100% support them.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#122

Post by ajb »

This is at least partly because the people opposing it don't know how to make a mainstream political case.

The case for is "catch child abusers".

People opposing it are talking in abstractions like privacy and right to use encryption. Which are important but you need to identify concrete harms that ordinary people identify with. You can't oppose a harm people can visualise and feel emotional about with an abstraction.

Opponents need to say "if this passes your kids might be taken away because of a bot looking at your photos" . "Even if you send a picture of your own kid to your own mum, you will have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by some minimum wage worker at G4S from a completely different culture, who has to process 20 pictures a minute"

The opposition mostly sounds butthurt that politicians are making tech decisions. And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks chat control is a terrible idea.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#123

Post by shafyy »

hintklb wrote: post #108
shafyy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. The issue with EU is that it's not really representative, and this is being critised for a long time and I hope should change in the near future. The EU parliament (the only directly elected body of the EU) does currently not have enough power.

I'm a European citizen and I disagree. Compared to the US and a lot of places in the world, Europeans generally care less and have more trust in their government. There is a general sense that elected officials generally do what is best for the people. This leads to less scrutiny and push back in general. Definitely way less than in the US.

This probably differs from country to country though. I have worked and lived in Switzerland (I know, not EU), Germany and US, and it does not feel like people don't care here in EU. In fact, in terms of people going out on the streets and demonstrating, it takes a lot less in countries like Germany and France to so compared to the US, in my experience.

For example in Switzerland, there's the instrument of a "Volksinitiative". If you can collect 100k signatures, the government must hold a national election on this issue. And these are quite common and popular in Switzerland. In Germany, those unfortunately only exist on a state-level, not federal level, but are also common.

So, in my experience, people are very much involved in government here. This might be different in different EU countries of course. Or maybe you have a vastly different bubble you live in than I do.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#125

Post by saltcured »

dylan604 wrote: post #78
sackfield wrote: post #32

This pops up every few years, and I bet once it gets in it never goes away. It seems asymmetric that one side only has to win once to win permanently while the other side has to win constantly. Is there any mechanism to stop this in the EU and make this kind of legislation explicitly barred?

It's funny to me that in the cops vs robbers scenario, it is the bad guys that have to be perfect to avoid getting caught while the good guys only have to get lucky once to catch the bad guys. Your use of this then would translate to the governments wanting to read all the mail to constantly stay informed would be the bad guys where the other actors only have to get lucky once by having a mission complete would be th…

Metaphors matter, but often bias us.

Cops vs robbers? Christians vs lions in Rome?

Or, we're merely fish in a barrel and trying to convince ourselves we have any control over whether we get shot?

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#126

Post by nradov »

sackfield wrote: post #32

This pops up every few years, and I bet once it gets in it never goes away. It seems asymmetric that one side only has to win once to win permanently while the other side has to win constantly. Is there any mechanism to stop this in the EU and make this kind of legislation explicitly barred?

Leave the EU.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#127

Post by namibj »

gotoeleven wrote: post #118
okucu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can only speak for Germany and the mass deportations here are done by liberals. They also let 40k+ people drown in the Mediterranean, support literally every single war, support multiple genocides and export weapons to all dictatorships known to man. At this point I'm not sure the actual Nazis would be worse than liberals. Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of m…

What "mass" deportations in germany are you talking about? I can only find any news references to two flights, totaling ~100 people in the past year. Surely even a normal level of deportations, let alone "mass" deportations, would generate more deportations than this? And you're really not sure this is less draconian than nazis?

Normal deportations get booked on commercial flights, not herded onto charters.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#128

Post by domq »

johndhi wrote: post #51

Can someone explain how the same group of countries can simultaneously issue book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy to the nth degree, and run around the world trying to force others to do the same, yet also propose these kinds of things?

Simple. The former is economic warfare against the US, under pretense of the EU “parliament” giving a hoot about its constituents. The latter is plain old fascism.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#129

Post by zackmorris »

sackfield wrote: post #32

This pops up every few years, and I bet once it gets in it never goes away. It seems asymmetric that one side only has to win once to win permanently while the other side has to win constantly. Is there any mechanism to stop this in the EU and make this kind of legislation explicitly barred?

This is the same problem in the US. Legislation (that protects the environment, minorities, the ability to compete in the market, etc) that took years, even decades to get signed into law, is getting repealed today by the current administration via executive order or simple majority vote. Because sabotage is much easier than building something.

Unfortunately the only answer that I know of is eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty.

I decided to look up who that saying is attributed to, and apparently it's John Philpot Curran, not Thomas Jefferson. But I like Orwell's saying better, because it shows why all of you are just as ineffectual at steering government policy as I am:

https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#130

Post by domq »

tene80i wrote: post #87
johndhi wrote: post #51

Can someone explain how the same group of countries can simultaneously issue book-long regulations about how everyone needs to respect privacy to the nth degree, and run around the world trying to force others to do the same, yet also propose these kinds of things?

Probably something like: Privacy is valuable, so corporations shouldn't be freely able to trade your data for advertising purposes. But CSAM leads to unimaginable harms carried out on vulnerable people, and so is worth giving up some privacy to stop/reduce.

... You have no idea how the internet works do you. Why are you here?
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