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Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

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181–190 of 203 posts

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#181
post #56
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark? The Swiss? Norway? And I was in Serbia lately, and while it was not as developed as NW-EU, nobody there described it as decaying (and many said they experiences decay when living in western nations over the past 2 decades).

Denmark is the architect of Chat Control. Even the extreme version that requires all E2E communications be accessible to the government. Denmark is not just decayed, it is completely rotten.

Controversial proposals like Chat control are often pushed by hard lobby through the current eu presidency state because of their possition. It is likely that if Denmark wasn't heading eu at the time they would have little to do with Chat control. Also likely they were one of the more resilient countries to propose this.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#182
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

theres a world of difference between a left party, even radical left like die linke, and ddr style communist dictatorship. and i dont like the greens views on nuclear power but they might be the only one who can save germany from afd fascism and cdu family-values flavored petty authoritarianism. if your definition of center right is fdp then get ready for even more corruption and corporate capture of everything that…

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I live in Germany, and you are completely wrong. In my state the Greens have ruled for 15 years and the economic success was pretty good with the state having a higher GDP/capita than the rest of Germny and even the EU. They also managed to reduce the state's debt. Accomplished a myriad of other things, too.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mistakes of the past did not change anyone's mindset about human rights and freedom As if anybody who experienced this themselves has a big influence on current politics...WW2 ended 81 years ago

Mindsets are quite hereditary at the collective level, if you didn't notice.

I noticed, but then those next generations wouldn't change their mindsets, cause they had that mindset from childhood on.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#184
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What service should be cut or tax increased in order to pay for it?

Data is there. Bundle it up in torrent and let community handle it. Cheaper than current system.

I think implying it's that simple is naive

In reality every public department would need more data staff to collate, prepare and publish data and maintain ownership of it, as a bare minimum. They'd be responsible for accuracy and any mistakes.

Not disagreeing with the idea but it does need funding. So I repeat my question

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#185

Worth noting that this is a push from the CDU who are leading the government, but their coalition partner the SPD has already come out pretty strongly against this, so it's rather unclear if this would ever actually go through (not to mention challenges from constitutional courts). The CDU cannot unilaterally push through legislation without the SPD. The SPD has rolled over for the CDU in the past on things, but they…

Their coalition partner is only publicly against it if there is little chance this criticism has any practical political effect. The SPD as a party is very much in favour of more or less all surveillance laws for citizens, and the contrary for public officials.

Sometimes they pretend otherwise, but only if the above rule applies. Not a dependent partner if you want to preserve freedoms for transparency and against surveillance.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#186
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd generally agree, but my follow up question would be: which western country isn't?

Poland is now in the Western sphere of influence and it is not in decay. A weak case can be made for Ireland but it’s harder to extract effects of tax haven status. But Poland certainly. Going to be a higher income populace than the UK soon at this rate. The US is unusual as a federation. Some parts decline, others rise. I think it’s resilient. And every time something goes wrong, America pulls out a magic new techno…

> Poland is now in the Western sphere of influence and it is not in decay.

Polands fertility rate in 2025 was 1.1. It is some sort of dystopia allready for people.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requests from outside of eu, the requester should pay the full cost of compilation and then some. Why not make those emails public to begin with? There's no need to compile/publish if all data is public to begin with.

Unfortunately, not all data held by an organisation is generated and held in a publishable format. The data in this example is created incidentally within email chains as part of a broader process. It's really not cost effective to publish real-time data that's been requested by these firms. So in principle, I agree that where there is substantial data held that the public are interested in, it should be published. H…

Could those email chains be turned into a mailing list available by default, like lkml.org ? Then nothing would need to be done to make it "cost effective to publish".

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#188
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark? The Swiss? Norway? And I was in Serbia lately, and while it was not as developed as NW-EU, nobody there described it as decaying (and many said they experiences decay when living in western nations over the past 2 decades).

> And I was in Serbia lately [..] With OP postulating that it is to enable corruption, and a sub-reply affirming that it is therefore the trait of a country in decay, bringing in Serbia as a counter-example is hilarious. Serbia ranks 116th in the corruption perception index, Germany 10th. (Lower is better)

Corruption perception lags actual corruption. Countries that are becoming more corrupt are perceived as less corrupt. Countries that are becoming less corrupt are perceived as more corrupt.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#189
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is fertility so important? Maybe the other western countries are equally infertile, but just allowed many immigrants in (which counts are population expansion) that also have more children on average. How are Japan and Korea holing out? They are further down the infertility down-spiral.

Most popular boys name, per place: - Warsaw: Nikodem - Oslo: Mohammad - Berlin and Brandenburg: Mohammed - England as a whole: Muhammad Mind you that the names top these lists in spite of usually being present in there in multiple spelling versions. E.g. if all different spelling versions of Muhammad were combined it would top the Dutch statistics as well.

That's because Muslims have their naming concentrated on a single name so much that anywhere you have a sizable number of Muslims, the most popular name in that place is Mohammed, even though most people aren't named Mohammed.

We should be asking why Muslims avoid Warsaw. That's odd.

Re: Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

#190

For decades, we have become accustomed to similar anti-constitutional moves from the CDU/CSU. Remarkably, while the German government fails to implement such policies, former CDU chancellor candidate Ursula von der Leyen is pushing them through at the EU level. For some reason, she is now at the helm of the EU. According to German law, anti-constitutional actions are normally considered terrorism.

I can explain this: when a citizen opposes a politician, the citizen is a terrorist. It doesn't matter what the actual disagreement is.
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