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Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

patrick-breyer.de

171–180 of 338 posts

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#171
post #145
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crack down on child abuse Actually today you don't use cracking down on child abuse as a reason, you use the danger of the far-right. All the leading left-wing publications, New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, CNN, Vox have been running articles about how dangerous encrypted chat apps are: > Why right-wing extremists’ favorite new platform is so dangerous. Telegram’s lax content moderation and encrypted…

Why Telegram is mentioned (which according to HN has no security)? Is Signal mentioned?

There's no well-known millionaire founder behind Signal

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abortion is especially strange since a supermajority of Americans, across the political spectrum, of both genders, generally agree that some abortions should be permitted [1]. 70% want to keep the status quo. [2] It's even arguably a violation of the religious freedom of Jewish folks to ban abortion [3]. It's not forbidden by the Bible either - the Bible makes it clear that life begins 'at first breath' (Genesis 2:7)…

That Bible passage is about God blowing His breath into Adam who was non-biological clay up to that point. It has nothing to do with Adam taking his first breath. Obviously, Adam was never a foetus, nor was he a child, nor a teenager. As according to this passage life starts when you are a full grown man, should we allow abortions into the 108th trimester?

Yes, we should. HN threads and Twitter would enjoy a significant improvement, at the very least.

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#173
post #6

I don't understand who wants this. does any of their actual constituency want it? Or is it literally just the actual elected officials getting power hungry? Stuff like abortion, etc where I don't really understand the other side. I've at least met real people who are pro life. I've never met the people who want these clownish surveillance things but they keep coming up anyways.

Abortion is especially strange since a supermajority of Americans, across the political spectrum, of both genders, generally agree that some abortions should be permitted [1]. 70% want to keep the status quo. [2] It's even arguably a violation of the religious freedom of Jewish folks to ban abortion [3]. It's not forbidden by the Bible either - the Bible makes it clear that life begins 'at first breath' (Genesis 2:7)…

Incidentally, about a third of Republicans and about a third of Democrats disagree with their party about abortion. This difference is not reflected the congresspeople of those parties, who are more united in their position than the people they ostensibly represent.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/18/three-in-te...

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how EU regulators build good will through stunts like mandating USB-C or forcing open the App Store and GDPR protections and then turn around and do stuff like this.

Looks like they listen more to engineers, except when doing that can touch their power. Not that surprising: powerful corrupt politicians are of the same kind, no matter their nationality. Any good cartoonist out there that would make the EU version of this masterpiece? https://i.imgur.com/D93heEo.jpg

I think if they listened to the engineers they wouldn't have mandated USB-C and GDPR

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#175
post #6

I don't understand who wants this. does any of their actual constituency want it? Or is it literally just the actual elected officials getting power hungry? Stuff like abortion, etc where I don't really understand the other side. I've at least met real people who are pro life. I've never met the people who want these clownish surveillance things but they keep coming up anyways.

> Or is it literally just the actual elected officials getting power hungry?

For some maybe yes.

But in many cases they don't understand technology, they often end up with very incomplete and wrong partial understandings by extrapolating from things they do understand, but which do also have very different dynamics.

Also while they often insist on their broken understanding they are not stupid and do realize that there is a lot they don't understand. That frightens them.

Then there are real problems around child abuse/porn in the internet. But they are hard to solve without doing much more damage in other ways. But because they don't understand the dynamics of the internet they don't realize that. Like in the world they understad requiring a thing which allows people to publish things to (skimingly) check the things published isn't hard or a problem (as it's something like a printed book or newspaper, few publisher, many consumer). But if you try to apply this to modern internet platforms it all falls apart. But they don't see it for them e.g. a dating app is nothing more then a fancy "locking for people" section in a small regional newspaper or something like that.

So in my opinion it's less because of power hunger then more because of arrogance and incompetence.

And without question there are exceptions.

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#176
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I just lacking imagination? Yes. The EU is becoming a totalitarian regional government of elites. Originally it wasn't even supposed to have a military presence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_forces_of_the_European... It was supposed to prevent the need of passports. https://www.covidpasscertificate.com/europe-digital-green-pa... All the good things are going out the door and all the bad things are walki…

In the interest in saving peoples time when responding to this: don’t. It’s trolling at worst and nerd sniping at best. The author of this comment knows this full well. His comment history is full of this kind of “drop bomb” and run crap. “covid passports” being required is not exactly the fault of the EU, if anything it’s because of the freedoms the EU still has. Anti-covid rhetoric needs to die, anti-EU bad faith p…

Which can be easily seen as it proclaims "many good things" without naming a single one. It's written to play with feelings in a very cheap way.

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#177

These tyrants have to be stopped. A tyrannical government is far more dangerous to people, including children than your regular criminal. Ironically, by giving the state too much power and therefore increasing the symptoms of corruption, we allow the same sort of crimes to be practiced by corrupt state officials with little means for people enact accountability. China, the country with the most mass-surveillance in t…

It's interesting how EU regulators build good will through stunts like mandating USB-C or forcing open the App Store and GDPR protections and then turn around and do stuff like this.

It all seems pretty consistent to me. The EU commission wants more power for itself and less autonomy for companies, particularly tech giants, having failed to create any of its own.

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#178
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Minister covers it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks Tell them you're going to have their messages scanned on behalf of the government and nobody wants it. Tell them you're going to introduce measures for online safety and to crack down on child abuse, and everybody wants it. Unless you're pre-informed on the issues, whoever presents it to you can just pick the side that gets you to the answer the…

>Unless you're pre-informed on the issues, whoever presents it to you can just pick the side that gets you to the answer they want. You don't need to be "pre-informed". You just need to be skeptical. Some knowledge of history is a good start.

Hence the recent crackdown on “misinformation”. Skepticism and dissent can’t be prevented, but its spread can be suppressed. Many otherwise good people have fallen hook line and sinker for the “misinformation pandemic” propaganda campaign.

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#179

This looks like a scare-story. Firstly, the EU produces directives and regulations; it doesn't produce "laws". Secondly, the phrase "child pornography" is in quotes, as if there's no such thing. There is such a thing. Thirdly, the imputed "law" requires service providers to scan encrypted messages. That's impossible, unless the proposal is to ban properly-encrypted messages. If that were the proposal, then surely tha…

> This looks like a scare-story. Let's hope you are right. The EU has a funny history of beating through brain-dead policies. The current EU commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, is known as "Zensursula" (a portemanteau of "censorship" and her given name) in Germany because she attempted to install essentially the Chinese Firewall for Germany (complete with Stop signs) when she was still doing politics here. > Firs…

Agree about Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission. She’s completely serious about online surveillance and has been for many years. Now she has the power to push this really far.

Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

#180

Here's the uncommon opinion. Google/FB, by extension US government, already performs mass surveillance. There are actually 2 solutions to this problem. One is stopping Google/FB. The other is making mass surveillance more common, lessening the impact of mass surveillance. In that sense non-US govs taking mass surveillance is a boon to power balances and competition amongst nations and economies. Does this opinion hav…

Neither Google nor Facebook has built concentration camps in the past. The same can not be said about state actors. Thus, private companies, especially those in some other country, are inherently more trustworthy than a local government body could ever be.

> Neither Google nor Facebook has built concentration camps in the past. The same can not be said about state actors. Thus, private companies, especially those in some other country, are inherently more trustworthy than a local government body could ever be.

This is an argument beyond dystopian. Yes, governments did a lot of bad things in the past (and some are still doing this), but a future, where e.g. the government is only a bunch of companies that would probably really dystopian.

You see already a difference between the USA and e.g. Germany. We have decent healthcare, decent public education, a lot of consumer protection, (Hello DSGVO!). If it would even go further, you would have a country where are no unions& employee rights, no consumer protection laws, absolutely nothing, total surveillance.

Saying that a government is less trustworthy than e.g. FAANG is really a hyperbole

At least you can vote governments out

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