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

digitalcourage.social

261–270 of 377 posts

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

#261
post #50
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…

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"...

The European Commission (EC) is particularly sinister in so many ways and not like any previously known modern democratic entity. The EC has been constantly pushing for less democracy, less transparency, more censorship for decades. All the while the horrible president von der Leyen makes billion dollar deals with Big Pharma in complete secrecy without any repercussions or oversight. Europe is doomed if we don't destroy the EU in its current form, but how?

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources. Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything. If you ask people "do you want A, B,…

> Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. We have those now.

Direct democracy would replace politicians being vaguely influenced by social media driven trends with government policies decided directly by the social media outrage cycle. I've got no end of complaints about the current system but that doesn't incline me to go for a swim in a manure pit.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty dang simple today. If you’re a usual W-2 employee, anyone who can read and follow simple instructions can file without paying any preparer a dime. For those of us trying to collect all the weird tax situations: https://freetaxusa.com .

In Sweden and Denmark the tax service prepares a tax statement for you. In Sweden, if everything looks OK, you press a button. In Denmark, if everything looks OK, you don't even have to press a button.

Same in France, I even get tax exempts from retirement plans and taxes from stock market holdings automatically.

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

#265
post #254
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By increasing the level of democracy and decentralizing the government. Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations. If you decentralise, any damage will be localised and would affect fewer people.

I semi-agree, but the type of democracy you are referring to would involve much smaller groups with more power and would ruin the political "economy of scale" that we get from having the same laws apply to everyone over vast spaces. I think having a mostly crippled central government is probably the most realistic alternative but you can see how that is taken advantage of in the US and how it fosters unnecessary disc…

It’s how the country I live in, Switzerland, is organised, one of the most prosperous places on earth.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Privacy is a fundamental right. Politicians have passed all kinds of surveillance laws which then got declared illegal by the courts. The problem is that courts are not fast enough and the bad laws linger around for a while until they are repealed.

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

#267
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 ...

But you don't know who voted for them. In Europe, laws are also formulated by a group called "The high level group" I believe, and the members of this group are anonymous.

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

#268
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and a…

Public Unix server will get a Reissanance. Tons of folks will learn to live under small Nix account to chat privately under remote Tox accounts or over I2PD. This will only boost up populace's knowledge. Kinda like in Spain tons of people learnt to either burn cards with microcontrollers in order to pirate TV top boxes or run Nagra and satellite decoders with keys dumped fron sketchy sites to be read with Kaffeine. A…

> Public Unix server will get a Reissanance.

That server is going to get a detection order and then the operators have to spy against their own users. This is in the chat control bill.

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

#269
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"...

Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?

Check out the Chaos Computer Club. They're actively fighting this.

https://www.ccc.de

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

#270

Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Eas…

Technically minded people and criminals will know how to use this technology. The general innocent population will be surveilled. This law is useless at fighting the objective at protecting the children.
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