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Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

mullvad.net

211–220 of 534 posts

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 'unelected officials' The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that. And as pointed out before, the UK is ahead of the EU in terms of surveillance. You even have to opt in with your ISP to watch porn. The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country. The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anythin…

> The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country. It's not a new thing either. 1984 was about Britain after all...

With the US govt. literally creating a Ministry of Truth[1], and no one batting an eyelid, 1984 is actually a reality.

Our media is compromised. The recent Pfizer scandal has been buried, NYT went to great lengths to dismiss it. The article was laughable.

The phrase "conspiracy theory" is slapped on any descent. We have lost our way while we sleep through social media. We follow the script or face social isolation.

10 years ago our current society would look like China, now the general pop is adopting that as a good thing.

We are fucked and it's going to take violence and death to claw back any sense of moral decency. No one wants that, and when all our wealth has been extracted we won't be able to compete with the robots that will keep us compliant.

I know this sounds crazy, but the writing is on the wall. I can see no reason it won't happen. Crazy shit becomes reality time after time and it's accelerating.

[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3472878-joe-bidens-m...

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#213
post #177
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”. Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.

I’m truly astonished that there are people who refuse to believe that the people in power are constantly conspiring. It’s like you are completely ignoring all evidence, or discounting it as one-offs. Sure, maybe it’s not NWO or the illuminati, but you can’t possibly dismiss all the behavior we see and impacts we experience?

Sure, but it's not a singular shadowy cabal in a star chamber. There are different groups who all have an negative impact on our lives.

The banal and stupid: Elon Musk and his fellow trust fund buddies and VCs doing jello shots and going "Antifa sucks amirite?" and acting on their stupidity because they have money and power.

Banal and stupid category 2: CEO groupthink. Let's all have layoffs before there's an actual recession because activist stockholders demand it and we don't have the guts to propose something better.

Then there's the John Birch Societies of the world: the actual organized shadow political movements. The Koch brothers using massive corporate profits to fund the right wing think tanks over multiple decades. They don't take credit, but the ascent of the right wing crazies is entirely down to them and fellow travelers.

Banal and stupid category 3: the people attending the WEF/Davos. enough said.

etc. you can probably list your favorites here, and you might slice them differently than I have. What there isn't is a single central group making decisions for the rest of us, nor is there any organized left-wing cabal. If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America, I'd love to know about it, because I'd like to join that group and I've never seen one in 20 years of looking.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#214

Every time this comes up people talk about protecting privacy and anonymity and what not and while luckily for us most of the time the laws die out they still do pass on occasion. The fundamental issue to me is that society still wants to protect against pedophiles or drug dealers or whatever other group more than protect privacy. As an example, how many people here could go on television onto some talk program or ne…

I'd just point out that the TSA is known for exploitatively using it's naked scans of people.

Ensuring that the government has access to everyone's nudes includes children's nudes.

Pedophile police officers is worse than pedophile non-police, since the pedophile police would have the law on their side

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#216
post #41

We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. Anyone who is really…

> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state. In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done. Pretending there's…

> A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.

I agree with you. We are too dumb, to selfish, to humans to be able to run a a New World Order, with decades-long plans in silence. For sure one stupid member would do a tiktok video while using their funny clothes

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#217

Sometimes I feel that the world is sleepwalking straight into the pages of 1984. Proposals to monitor chats, ban encryption, legitimize location tracking create perfect infrastructure for new dictators. If some day a new Hitler grabs power in a nuclear-capable country, he'll be able to track down and destroy dissenters before they have a chance to protest. What are some simple and practical actions any EU citizen can…

Totally agree. Hitler's gestapo, Stalin's NKVD and East German Stasi would have loved the surveillance infrastructure and technology we are building up right now.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#218

Strangest thing to me about the topic is that it’s obvious vast percentage of citizens within democracies wish they lived in an authoritarian country, yet choose to live in a democracy and use the liberties they’re provided to actively destabilize and destroy it. To me this is the largest issue, not a given topic that results from it. Yes, I am aware current authoritarian countries wage propaganda campaigns, but in m…

Unpopular opinion: If you don't like democracy and use your democratic rights to actively work to dismantle it, you probably shouldn't actually be allowed to participate in democracy since you are operating in bad faith.

While I don’t agree, I do believe it’s a common perspective and one that’s important to have dialogue on.

While for sure an imperfect response, I would say that no democracy will ever be absolutely perfect, since it would require a consensus on everything and everyone understanding the topic equally prior to voicing their opinion. Further, authoritarian beliefs are only true threat to a democracy if majority support authoritarian rule, at which point I would argue it’s not a democracy.

That said, with the advancements of AI, it increasingly dangerous, since if given the tools and opportunity, an authoritarian minority might over take an unprepared majority.

Re: Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU

#220
post #51
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.

here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too in the usa gay sex was super illegal…

It is fairly easy to argue that people have more gay sex now that gay marriages are legal.
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