Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

digitalcourage.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 377 posts

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#211

Post by Ray20 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #95
afarah1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for any legislation piece. A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M. Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time. And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for. It's just the power structure of any representative legislature. "In vain do we fly to the many"...

Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is. Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war. Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands…

>advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.

I really like this position from an ethical point of view.

But in reality you will be conquered by a neighboring country with different principles in about 3 days.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#212

Post by Ray20 »

Saline9515 wrote: post #140
mystraline wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, like the Soviet Union. Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights. https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on... Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.... Women and men hav…

While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. Yes they had a "right for leisure", unless the State decided that you were a slave and sent you in Siberia to knock hard rocks for the rest of your life. Or your "rest days" were in fact forced, unpaid labor (subbotnik), no different than their previous feudal serf system. Same for a "right to a house", whe…

>While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept.

I am sure Soviet Union is THE BEST example to demonstrate the concept.

It shows perfectly that you can have anything, anywhere and as much as you want - but it won't mean anything if you take away people's economic freedom.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#213

Post by Saline9515 »

Ray20 wrote: post #212
Saline9515 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. Yes they had a "right for leisure", unless the State decided that you were a slave and sent you in Siberia to knock hard rocks for the rest of your life. Or your "rest days" were in fact forced, unpaid labor (subbotnik), no different than their previous feudal serf system. Same for a "right to a house", whe…

>While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. I am sure Soviet Union is THE BEST example to demonstrate the concept. It shows perfectly that you can have anything, anywhere and as much as you want - but it won't mean anything if you take away people's economic freedom.

It depends if you discuss about practical things - right for housing or things that are more abstract - right for privacy from the government's prying eyes, banking secrecy or in the US, freedom of speech. In the later case, I don't think that it affects the economic life.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#214

Post by aunty_helen »

McDyver wrote: post #30

They make it really difficult to fight any of this. You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind. This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying. This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if t…

I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#215

Post by idle_zealot »

ryandrake wrote: post #87
sidewndr46 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.

The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.

Is this really true, though? Couldn't you pass a law specifically banning the thing you don't want to happen, so any future law that contradicts it needs a supermajority to pass or something?

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#216

Post by dragonwriter »

darkmighty wrote: post #170
dragonwriter wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation? Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties? The first would obviously be deeply problematic even if it was possible to police, the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it.

> Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation? Of course not. Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying I guess (at least as far as I understand it). Lobbying as far as I understand (or rather, object) is when special interest groups (usually funded by large corporations) fund people to talk to legislators for them, including buying fancy dinners,…

> Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying

It basically is.

You may be thinking of who is considered a lobbyist or lobbying firm, which is (roughly, different laws on the matter have different specific definitions) someone (or some firm) who (or which) is paid to lobby on behalf of one or more other persons or entities.

> How would it be ineffective?

Because even if you are able to police it effectively, then the people that have money will instead lobby personally rather than hiring lobbyists, while hiring staff to do all the legislative drafting and organizational support work for their personal lobbying (but not actually doing the lobbying itself) as well as continuing to use the unlimited campaign financing channels opened by Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United to get people who they don't need to lobby once in office to convince them to vote in line with their interests elected.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#217

Post by alisonatwork »

LexiMax wrote: post #189
rockskon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.

I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad. I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership. I don't think it was always that…

I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.

If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?

The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#219

Post by matthewdgreen »

Saline9515 wrote: post #178

Aside from the infamous privacy aspects, I'm wondering about the feasibility and the energy cost of running continously ML algos to scan content on a phone. Given that the private malware providers aren't accountable for it, I guess that it will noticeably degrade the average battery life for phones in the EU.

Ironically, one comment a legislator made was: if you can quantify the carbon cost of this proposal, they’re much more likely to take it seriously than any arguments about privacy.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#220

Post by XorNot »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #53
afarah1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for any legislation piece. A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M. Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time. And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for. It's just the power structure of any representative legislature. "In vain do we fly to the many"...

A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...

Assuming "the people" are on your side on this is first and foremost your biggest folly.

I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to us (and we obviously represent everyone).

It leads to extremely unconstructive messaging ideas, where you assume no one can ever change their minds and if they do they are to be forever considered "lesser" for not being "right" the first time.

Post reply on HN