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EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

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Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of legislation should never ever be proposed in a democratic system, so had disagree. This is an extremely totalitarian-style move from EU - governing bodies are exempt from the law, meanwhile peasants have to be watched 24/7 for wrongthink, all under guise of protecting the children.

And while all this is happening, there are cases were peoples homes get search for comments on twitter. These are often in bad taste, but what tastes even worse is that the judiciary doesn't seem to understand proportionality anymore. Mean tweets carry higher sentences than raping someone, stern look at Germany here. A judiciary in such a sorry state, that has not adapted to a changed reality, cannot be permitted to…

'Mean tweets' is such an empty meaning. Come with examples. It is on paper very easy to break the law via speech. If I post something here about how I want to reward a murder on a certain politician (or want to do it myself), I can guarantee you the police would be involved. And rightfully so.

Freedom of speech is about pre-moderation. It doesn't mean your actions do not have consequences. If you yell fire in a theatre while there is none, you should be held liable. See also the case of Gennaro P. (the Damschreeuwer) who at May 4 of 2010 yelled during two minutes of silence of Rememberance of the Dead.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a massive assumption that reform will win the elections.

Yelling 'racist' at Farage for over a decade hasn't got rid of him. Maybe 4 more years of doing the same thing will do the job? Can't see the Tories bouncing back in a few mere years. Labour are heading rapidly into the same unelectable territory. Which leaves us with Reform vs a Green-LibDem coalition? But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy. And some will never forgive the Lib Dems f…

> But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy.

Well, populist lunacy is how Reform got so popular, so I can see why it would be tempting for the Green party.

Main thing that's weird right now with the UK is that because it's first-past-the-post and the current polling is Reform:~29%, Lib/Lab/Con/Green:~16%, I would not be surprised by any of these parties forming a minority government nor any one of them getting a massive parliamentary majority.

That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#273
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people. Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.

This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years). The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitutio…

Odd, I've never seen a theory of state creation that starts with the benefits of scaling "electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing". Those are quite modern benefits, so seem like odd choices to illustrate your point.

I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.

This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.

I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.

Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.

So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. The EU is flawed beyond and possible reform, but I feel the alternative of a segmented Europe is even crazier to think about

> I can empathise with this, but I still believe in an economic union in Europe. I believe that EU countries having trading agreements, sharing technology and sharing intel would be good but what we have now as the EU is not that. It has become a single point of failure that is too easily gamed by lobbyists. Before the EU, you needed to have lobbyist in 27 countries to get all of them to agree to something, now you j…

Yeah I agree with that. I think Europe needs a post-EU future

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#275
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Net migration in the UK is falling, and fast. It grew under a party that is ideologically closer to Reform than the government currently in power.

IMO, statistical fluke, more likely a few years of delayed migrations post-pandemic got squeezed together and it's now back to the previous trend: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c246ndy63j9o

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#276
post #6

Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.

If you are not really subject to public control and re-election, it makes it much easier. EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly af…

For democracy and government [1] to work it has to remain small and localised. The US had the right idea by expressly limiting the reach of the federal government to very explicit narrow things mentioned in the constitution (of course this was expanded by unconstitutional means over many governments over many years now but that is getting off topic).

The EU seems to be taking the opposite approach - countries push any unpopular law into the growing EU layer to prevent local backlash affecting them. As comments around this call it - "political laundering". A great term that I shall be borrowing.

[1] Relatedly, the philosopher Jimmy Carr has a great line about the failing of communism is about scale. It works locally at the family level but it can't scale to the level of a country.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#277
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that EU does not control the internet, nor all means of communication. Nor perfect form of monitoring exists so question is moot in itself. Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise. and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.

The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so. > Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise. Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send. "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the…

> "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.

It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text.

It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#278
post #181
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the state is continuity of the state. The state is always the natural enemy of the people - specifically the liberty and privacy of the people. Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.

What alternative do you propose?

Let's not fall for the is/aught fallacy: Identifying that something is a certain way doesn't make one in any way shape or form inherently more qualified to say what it SHOULD be like instead.

Re: EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

#279
post #6

Even living nearby in the UK it blows my mind how quickly the EU proposes, kills and then revives and passes controversial legislation in such a short timeframe.

"European Council has no legislative power, it is a strategic (and crisis-solving) body that provides the union with general political directions and priorities, and acts as a collective presidency." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Council
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