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The disguised return of EU Chat Control

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Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#341

Post by latchup »

danielscrubs wrote: post #326
latchup wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about that time in 2020 the Swiss voted in favor of an immigration restriction proposal that was so fundamentally incompatible with existing EU treaties, the government was forced to bullshit their way out of implementing entirely because doing so would have basically ended Switzerland as a nation? This is the kinda thing that really cannot happen in a working system. The only reason the government is not sued in…

They have the eight highest MEDIAN wealth per capita, USA is in place 15th. 42 homicides year 2021, so an extremely safe country too. Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist. They are literally in top 10. I can tell you our politicians where usually picked up from high school, never been to college, and had worse grades than the general public. So direct democracy might be like capitalism… the…

"Our" politicians? What makes you think I am American? Of course Switzerland is less dysfunctional than the US, that wasn't the point of discussion at all (and an extremely low bar to begin with). It was to show that direct democracy has lead to undesirable outcomes.

> Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist.

Well, it's good thing I did not do that. I said the average person cannot begin to comprehend every facet of the modern world they live in. Your limited reading comprehension is not making a very compelling counterpoint here.

In my many years of living here, I have never seen a Swiss person treat their own illnesses, design their own trains, hunt their own meat, and do their own plumbing all at once – they delegate tasks they understand themselves to be incompetent in to specialists. Yet somehow, at the ballot box, their otherwise healthy and productive understanding of their own limited competence makes way for a strange form of celebratory group hubris, landing them in a constitutional crisis like a drunk driver in a ditch.

Maybe instead of trying make decisions they have no hope of truly understanding in an incredibly slow and inefficient process, they can just elect people they trust to be specialists in narrow fields to make these decisions for them for a fixed time span? Wow, exciting, we just fixed a flaw in democracy the Greeks knew about 3000 years ago by resorting to the same god damn system everyone else already uses: representative democracy. Which also sucks in its own, different ways, but at least it is much less likely to set the entire f-cking country on fire over night. That's kinda neat.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#342

Post by [deleted] »

criley2 wrote: post #336
tock wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's tax 1% of that yearly, meaning we just gained $78 billion dollars per year! Congrats, with a $7 trillion yearly federal budget, your +$78 billion covers about 1% of federal spending. Excellent point. I'm glad you see how much of a pittance 1% annually is. Though I've made the same point before(remember I said 1% of 1B is just 10M, thats a joke for billionaires). Increase the % as you wish. 1% does nothing for…

>Increase the % as you wish. 1% is your number. Feel free to tell me the magical wealth tax % that fixes all income inequality and maintains strong ability to own private businesses. This is your argument and it's lazy to tell me to do your work for you. >My whole point is that its a problem that needs to be solved. How we can solve it is a great thing to discuss. Your entire argument so far is that it can't be solve…

[deleted]

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#343

Post by intended »

pona-a wrote: post #335
intended wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is good. I urge anyone who thinks otherwise to wade into this arena themselves and see what they find. It is incredibly easy to be on the sidelines and hold an opinion. It is your right to do so. However if even a tiny bit of you is the kind of person who is driven to understand, and to hold opinions based on defensible positions, do your legwork. Personally, I keep an arms length from the child safety side…

Why does the emotional intensity of the crime justify accepting massive collateral damage to innocent people? It's an appeal to trauma. Why can't we turn the tables on this? Have you been woken up at 3 AM by police battering down your door? Had your home torn apart, computers seized, children screaming? Waited months for an apology that never comes while your name sits in search results next to 'investigation'? I urg…

The emotional intensity of the crime of child abuse? So we are removing the emotional valence of crimes, and then comparing it to the emotional state of being in fear of police over reach?

I mean, if you need that level of handicap to make your position become defensible, then you don’t really have an apples to apples comparison.

As for leg work, would you feel better to know that I have been on the other end of doxxing attempts, and that team mates I know have had it worse?

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#344

Post by intended »

throwaway938761 wrote: post #312
intended wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is good. I urge anyone who thinks otherwise to wade into this arena themselves and see what they find. It is incredibly easy to be on the sidelines and hold an opinion. It is your right to do so. However if even a tiny bit of you is the kind of person who is driven to understand, and to hold opinions based on defensible positions, do your legwork. Personally, I keep an arms length from the child safety side…

The innocent people caught in the net aren't the only victims though. Entire families will be broken by the 50% false positive rate. You can easily end up doing more harm than the abusers with your line of thinking. Granted, assuming law enforcement is reasonably competent, the false positives shouldn't result in anything other some wasted time for whoever has to look into it...but that's quite the assumption to make…

Everyone has the freedom to hold their opinions.

I am saying that if you are type of person who wants to be accurate, you should look deeper into this space. There’s many opinions that are easier to hold when not having to test them. I had to change my positions.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#345

Post by mvdwoord »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #285

I wish I would not have a standard post for topics like this: Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently…

Sad but true. Many such cases as well not only limited to this field. There is a huge scandal in the Netherlands where it has been shown that Tax officials have repeatedly, and knowingly, did unlawful things which literally drove some people to suicide, and did irreparable damage to lots of people / families. They also repeatedly lied to parliament about this.

We have the proof. We do fuck all about it. And yeah, the Dutroux case (as well as e.g. Rotherham c.s.) hit hard. Too hard for most regular people to even properly come to terms with it.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#346

Post by pona-a »

intended wrote: post #343
pona-a wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the emotional intensity of the crime justify accepting massive collateral damage to innocent people? It's an appeal to trauma. Why can't we turn the tables on this? Have you been woken up at 3 AM by police battering down your door? Had your home torn apart, computers seized, children screaming? Waited months for an apology that never comes while your name sits in search results next to 'investigation'? I urg…

The emotional intensity of the crime of child abuse? So we are removing the emotional valence of crimes, and then comparing it to the emotional state of being in fear of police over reach? I mean, if you need that level of handicap to make your position become defensible, then you don’t really have an apples to apples comparison. As for leg work, would you feel better to know that I have been on the other end of doxx…

This was merely a rhetorical exercise, holding a mirror to the initial argument. If you found it disingenuous, I hope you can see the thesis: "Wade into this arena and see for yourself" works equally well to justify opposite positions depending on which victims we center. This is a foundational legal principle going back to Beccaria and Voltaire.

You've experienced being falsely targeted and the harm it causes. How is an algorithm sending a false report to police different from a dox? Does your personal safety get overruled by theoretical public safety? Do you expect algorithmic accusations to be questioned more carefully than human ones, or institutional action to be gentler than the vigilantism you experienced?

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#347

Post by intended »

pona-a wrote: post #346
intended wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emotional intensity of the crime of child abuse? So we are removing the emotional valence of crimes, and then comparing it to the emotional state of being in fear of police over reach? I mean, if you need that level of handicap to make your position become defensible, then you don’t really have an apples to apples comparison. As for leg work, would you feel better to know that I have been on the other end of doxx…

This was merely a rhetorical exercise, holding a mirror to the initial argument. If you found it disingenuous, I hope you can see the thesis: "Wade into this arena and see for yourself" works equally well to justify opposite positions depending on which victims we center. This is a foundational legal principle going back to Beccaria and Voltaire. You've experienced being falsely targeted and the harm it causes. How i…

Calling it a rhetorical exercise is… well sure.

Disingenuousness is a high bar for the argument you formulated - which is why it went no further. Disingenuousness is a matter of being insincere.

You ask others to eject the emotional cost of CSAM from their calculations, while emphasizing the most extreme version of police search in yours. Something I never did.

Further, you assumed that I had no standing to ask people to go deeper into the field. Yet, once I make the mistake of saying that I know what that feels like - yet am making the request I am (to look into this field) you double down.

The issue is not that I need to understand you - you are free to your opinion.

I AM saying, that more people need to look into the corners of online safety that we are happy to argue about. ESPECIALLY techies.

I am saying that a 50% accuracy rate is pretty damn good, because I expected it to be even worse.

I don’t know how to put it man - better people than me need to pay attention to where the gears of technology and speech engage with the fleshy parts of our information machinery.

Hell - something like sharing threat intel across major tech firms, is a challenge even today.

In tactical terms - the ideological position against government over reach is being flanked and the tolerances overwhelmed by unending tides of incidents and extreme situations.

If the position is to be defended, then it needs active measures, which mean people other than me have to get the details of what is going on and frame it for others to act on.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#348

Post by rambojohnson »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #315
brigandish wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the saying goes, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” EU law and its constitution have primacy.

Sort of. It's not quite like anything else. The EU has mostly trade and standardization powers, and lots of the other stuff is an outgrowth of that. But mostly, EU law just sets a baseline, and almost all execution of it is devolved to the member states. Edit: the EU does not have a constitution but a constitution shaped update of the Treaties. Now, lots of politicians are happy to blame the EU for unpopular stuff, b…

I'm not going down this semantic rabbit hole, which is way beside the point. :)

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#349

Post by rambojohnson »

Centigonal wrote: post #269
rambojohnson wrote: post #228

the comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies. you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel. stop trea…

Let's be pragmatic about this. Chat Control and this new thing are not post-hoc rationalizations, they are attempts to justify a proposed change. If this posited wannabe-surveillance state wanted to institute ubiquitous surveillance, it would just unilaterally do so a la PRISM. To our knowledge, they have not done this and are instead trying to rationalize the creep of surveillance somehow, which indicates that publi…

across "democratic societies" around the world, they're pushing the goalposts while the elected officials are arguing for pragmatism, which inspires that servile middle of the road idealism in the voting bloc, while everybody knows that in times like these pragmatism is another form of cowardice.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#350

Post by CamperBob2 »

tock wrote: post #264
CamperBob2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to solve every problem but it does help solve the problem of one unelected person holding too much power and influence. It does? Really? What are they teaching kids in school these days? According to the books I studied, nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone.

> It does? Really? Yep. > nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone You don't believe in democracy and equal rights? Anyway billionaires love their 10 digits not 8.

You don't believe in democracy and equal rights?

Not if it gets us a Trump, twice. What has democracy done for us lately?

It appears that democracy just devolves into mindless yet profitable populism, given enough time and technology. Stupid voters are easier for ill-intentioned people to herd, using the modern tools we've built to do just that. Social media has made it possible for the first time to exploit a fatal bug in democracy that we always knew was there. AI will slam the coffin lid shut.

I don't see a way back, personally, but confiscatory taxation of everybody that you think has too much money isn't a way forward. The people being taxed will demand a return on their investment, and now they know how to get it.

The problem isn't the money, the problem is the power.

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