I'm not sure it's what I'd want to happen, but it's not really that strange. There are plenty of things we allow the state to do that we wouldn't allow companies to also do.
> That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part.
How is that hypocritical. We allow the state to have organized groups with automatic weapons and tanks, and don't allow private individuals or corporations to.
Is that the path you're choosing to go: that everything is justifiable because governments can have nuclear reactors and you can't?
But I'll go the extra mile: it's hypocritical because it's a citizen right within EU, it's a double standard, and it's being enforced on public/private organizations. You can't have rights and not have rights at the same time, you either have them or you don't.
In EU there are no rights for owning automatic weapons, nuclear reactors, organized armed groups, etc etc.
My point was that we allow governments to have powers we don't allow private entities to have. The ability to use force, to detain you, to take your land even if you don't want them to, etc.
My point is that hypocrisy is a strange argument, because we already have a huge amount of things that the government can do, even if they would otherwise violate property rights/freedom of movement/etc, that private entities cannot.
>Definition of hypocrisy
>1: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel
After years of propaganda, debates and discussion for data protection and privacy rights for EU citizens, and approving such rights by law, you don't think it's hypocrisy that they approve a law that strips citizens from such rights.
They believe people have the right to have their data protected and to know what data is being collected, and demand collectors and processors to not hoard data and take only what is necessary. This is literally bulk collecting of chat logs and process them, without people consent.
I still don't get your point, there are no rights for citizens to use force, detain others or take land. At least in the EU countries I know. So what rights are being stripped from citizens?
It's the same if the USA government said they will abide by the people's rights to own weapons, but decided to ban the sales of all weapons so people can't buy them.
I don't see how it's hypocritical. The government says "X is bad, private entities cannot do X, but sometimes the government needs to do X". How is that not hypocritical when X is "shoot you in the head" but is hypocritical when it's "collect data".
Which isn't to say it's the right move. I'm just saying your argument here is weak.
Pretty sure most constitutions forbid the state to put people under surveillance. The EU doesn't have that so it is valid to ask what the EU actually still provide to its citizens.
There is in fact a battle right now over who has primacy here. Allegedly it is everyone against Poland, but the details are more nuanced.
Control for whom? Before gdpr the general stance in the industry was we never delete user data, just mark a field saying its deleted in the db and that's that. It's been a total shift.
And it's not just that, I've seen first hand that even internal communication about customers are treated with more care as they can legally request all their data.
"We asked 100 people who were interested enough to write to their MEP about digital privacy and 80% of them said digital privacy was important"
People who are motivated enough to know and comment about these proposals are not a representitive sample of the population.
If you were to stand outside Old Trafford and ask people who the best football team in the UK is, you'll get the vast majority saying Manchester United. Do the same thing in London and you'll get people saying it's Arsenal. Aside from both being wrong, you can see the bias.
Accredited polling companies adjust results to minimise sample bias, but even then have to be careful to avoid leading questions as shown in this 'documentary':
Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan horse called CSAM.
Surprise surprise, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were right all along, but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor.
Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
Yeah well as long as the people allow you the internet. Without us all financing the internet, the anarchists using it for anonymous banking might find themselves a bit naked... I find it horribly suspicious crypto, depending on public electricity grids and state-funded internet infrastructure, is being sold as an anti control measure when really, it sounds a lot like a cash grab and a criminal money laundering system.
Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending but oh surprise a lot more to control of the cash grab speculative aspect - and hard to carry $600M of them in a hurry after a heist, unlike recent defi exemples.
>How can you exchange bank notes electronically?
They are called "transfers" and you can do them at a bank or on a licensed broker.
The first question is why would you want to transfer money from A to B electronically without any kind of reasonable guarantee or safeguard? The major use case is to avoid paying taxes. Feel free to add any other usage scenario that isn't skipping taxes directly or indirectly.
No, they don't. They may be a method of censorship resistance, but they weren't designed that way.
Audited for backdoors? Wishful thinking. Someone some years ago said they've added (some years before) backdoors to the OpenBSD IPSec implementation. The consensus is "its probably bullshit" and not "no, we checked and we can guarantee there is no backdoor". The lesson (in case you missed it) is that for crypto code, there are a hand full of guys that actually understand what is going on and how to implement and bypass something, and half of them work for the government. OpenBSD is too obscure for someone to care? See the TrueCrypt case.
>It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom.
You say that like its a separate concept from privacy and anonymity. Its not. The government is (should be) just a non-profit corporation. Other than that, those concepts are fundamentally equivalent.
>> and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
You (and many other respondents) are responding to "Tor is supplied by the government, and therefore is an evil trap". What the OP seems to be saying is "Tor is an anarchist stand against the man, it's actually funded by the man".
There are literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies. The term does not imply anonymity nor privacy, just the concept of a somewhat decentralized ledger that relies on cryptography to ensure the authenticity and integrity of transactions. In those hundreds, certainly there are different goals with different currencies. The question remains though - are those who focus on privacy and anonimity field-tested? Are there cases of demonstrable attacks on the anonymity characteristics of a given implementation that can attest for their robustness? AFAIK no, but feel free to add any independent analysis or incident I may have missed.
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
OpenSSL is also open-source and every year there is a new vector of bad news. Being open source in some projects - specially crypto projects - means that motivated attackers can identify potential vulnerabilities quite easier, instead of "more people will look at it, ergo it will have fewer bugs". There is a huge potential for planned defects to go unnoticed on a complex cryptography product.
Open-source means independent audit is possible, and the developers can't be coerced in the dark to add backdoors. This is in theory of course. In reality, it just makes it much less probable.
Snowden reported that the CIA use it to anonomynise their research activity. Previously they used proxy servers but spooks would sign into social media or personal email, thus compromising the location as being CIA. Thus, The Onion Router was born. They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise.
> That is not a problem for open source that has been audited.
Big leap of faith. You probably won't need both hands to enumerate people capable of correctly audit a piece of modern crypto software in the hole world, and probably half of them work or have worked for governments. Even using those resources, one thing are obvious flaws, other are weakening of the robustness of the protocol in certain conditions. Even with your top 5 (first hand), no one would guarantee the protocol and implementation is free of backdoors.
> We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
I'm not a tor expert by far, and even I know that if you have enough entry and exit nodes under your control, you can identify both source and target of traffic. It makes sense for the USA to use a communist/Iran(terrorists!) excuse to pursue that goal. So, it makes sense to create a layered secure communication channel that only you can reverse, and pitch it worldwide as a safe means of communication for "dissidents".
That's a small subset of people that's been very vocal and against everything that is related to power.
In reality many people are against this,though less and less care to the point of doing anything. Anything that's pretensed upon "protect the children" is a massive red flag.Why? Because obviously nobody wants to harm the f8cking children.
Same goes for 9/11, the patriot act, GDPR(which ironically or not, depends on who you're asking, actually facilitates tracking instead of protecting people's privacy), contact-tracing, green passports, crypto regulations, etc.
Ultimately people will always find a way because the aspiration for freedom is greatest, but many seem to not care about what happens on the sideways during this journey, which is kind of terrifying.
I think you're being very generous by considering anything that happened in the past 10 years a swing towards greater privacy.
Sure the EU gave FAANG a slap on the wrist, but I know of now government that rolled back the increased surveillance that terrorist legislation gave them.
There is some enforcement, but the GDPR is widely flouted, most conspicuously with the cookie "consent" banners - they're supposed to give equal choices (to meet the standard of informed consent and not "consent bundling") but they're riddled with dark patterns.
Then there's the Irish who "oversee" Facebook and Google and do SFA.
So the GDPR is not enforced [to a level anywhere near what the legislation is supposed to do].
If I understand it correctly, the recent CJEU ruling on GDPR [0] should improve the Irish DPC limitations by allowing enforcement in other member states where violations have occurred (under certain specific conditions).
User sebow, your account is shadow-banned since 2017. I am unable to reply directly. (HN readers, enable "showdead" in your profile page to see what's going on.)
> in the entire EU there have been _only_ 800, let's say 1k such violations?
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not all violations with fines/punishment are made public, and a vast majority of non-egregious violations will not result in a fine/punishment in the first place because the competent DPA will send a letter outlining what's wrong, how to fix it, and what the consequences will be if it's not fixed.
Those transgressors will simply very quickly come into compliance to avoid the trouble and the affair will not be made public.
Yeah it's an odd claim since the Snowden revalations came out in IIRC 2011 and the government viciously attacked him in the press as they built a massive data center for surveillance on a scale never seen in history. The programs that Snowden exposed never got ended, no laws were ever passed preventing them from happening. All we got was some encrypted chat apps and I think it would be naive to believe the government can't read and search any facebook chat it wants, for example.
Others are pointing out the 2021 "Gang violence in Europe" claim doesn't make sense either soo...
Swedish police used FBI-provided data to arrest 155 indiviuals. Weirdly, the Swedish police cannot collect such data themselves, but need to act if they "stubble" across information indicating imminent crime.
Traveling, communication, rights - everything is a degraded experience because of 9/11 and the governments have made it a habit.
Obviously, Terrorists have won. I don't know how aware the American public is, but Afghanistan is being overrun by Taliban as we speak, causing another refugee crisis in Turkey that could easily spill into the continental Europe and the UK. Just before the pandemic, the Turkish govt was blackmailing EU with letting the refugees go wherever they want, you can expect this to repeat as the Turkish public is overwhelmingly against(polls show %80 want the refugees go) hosting refugees as many as %10 of its population. EU almost went bust with only 1M, Turkey alone hosts 5M to 8M at the moment and the Afghans are arriving in thousands everyday.
You can expect the governments to try to manage the situation by increasing their toolset. You can expect increased surveillance and decreased rights trend to continue. You can expect people with different aspirations to try to take advantage of it.
>>EU should not allow migrants, it should be the Arab countries that should take them.
Even though it's the EU countries that have contributed to the plight of people in places like Afganistan and Syria? That's super convenient point of view - very nice way to wash your hands of any responsibility.
And I'm saying this as an EU citizen - every country, including my own, that has participated in military excurisions in the middle east in the last 30 years has created this crisis for themselves. Saying that "oh, arab countries should take them" is beyond brutal, it's barbaric.
Apparently it can. Likely many more. And many more will come. Climate change and all that. If you're looking for static times then you should probably go and invent a time machine, you are headed straight for a period of upheaval, whether you like it or not.
> Saying that "oh, arab countries should take them" is beyond brutal, it's barbaric.
It's really not, so it's quite irrational to include that level of hyperbole to make your point emotionally loaded rather than factual.
Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan and Iran - both countries which are a helluva lot more culturally and religiously aligned with the majority of Afghans.
> every country, including my own, that has participated in military excurisions in the middle east in the last 30 years has created this crisis for themselves
This is nonsense. Religious fundamentalism & oppression of the populace has created this situation - both of which were aided & abetted by (you guessed it) Iran & Pakistan. Both countries are the biggest funders of the religious fundamentalists as well as offering state level support and safety for those leaders.
Turkey is not an Arab country and has more than an order of magnitude more refugees per capita(and 5x-8X in absolute terms) than EU. Why would Turkey bear the burden?
Unless you find a way to make UAE etc. take the refugees to achieve the "Arabs take the migrants" goal, prepare for a dramatic increase in immigrants. If it happens that EU decides to fight it back, they will need all the surveillance power and get the rights removed to be able to enforce the restrictions on the movement of millions.
Spot on. GP is completely unrealistic in both worldview and proposed solutions, the EU will quite simply have to learn how to deal with this in a decent manner or it will cease to exist. The ultra-right fringe that uses every opportunity to protect their precious all-white genepool is in for a rough ride.
I live in Sweden. There are clear problems with gang violence. But non-immigrant Swedish people don’t encounter that at all in their live; crime mostly stays in the migrant communities. For a long time, crime in migrant communities wasn’t even reported of, because of a wrong idea of political correctness. Now you can see it in the news regularly, but I have yet to know a single Swedish person who is actually affected by any of this.
Sweden surely has a very difficult immigration problem to tackle. But it’s worth noting that it’s the migrants who suffer from this, not the existing Swedish residents.
That article underlines my point. There is a significant rise in gang violence. But the people being shot are from the migrant communities, too. I think you may make the mistake of reading “Swedish person killed” and assuming that Swedish person was not an immigrant.
Which isn’t to say it’s not a problem. It’s a huge problem. But it’s also important to keep in mind who’s actually suffering here.
Speaking specifically of 9/11, no, not really. Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit such a crime on American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military and then finally and hopefully turn against their own government.
Obviously, none of the above happened - American government used the attacks as a pretext to spend another trillion dollars on a pointless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and then used them again at home to remove private liberties and introduce laws that would have had no chance otherwise. I'd argue the average American never bothered looking up why US was attacked beyond a "brown people hate freedom brrrrrrrrrr" nonsense.
So no, terrorists didn't win. They failed at their stated goals miserably, but the world's population still lost as the noose of global surveilence is getting tighter and tighter every year.
So they'll win when Hollywood makes a movie that portrays them as noble savages? I'd say they certainly did a great deal of damage to our basic freedoms, not to mention sense of self. We were right to go into Afghanistan. And right to kill Bin Laden. We weren't right to use it as a pretext to degrade our own democracy.
> American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military
The way you put it, It looks like Al Queda had a noble goal. It's a shame that they did not win then.
But I am more cynical than that, I don't believe in the idealistic goals of these organisations. In my opinion, all local warlords fight for power, glory and spreading their influence.
Looking at the final situation, I would say that they achieved exactly that. Globalism is dead, the liberal culture of the west is significantly degraded thus cementing their influence in the region. Their power is now much less contested and they can rule happily thereafter.
Very well put. Only a self-hating American could slap the label of nobility or idealism on a group that's founded on murdering women and children. In the name of drawing comparisons to how horrible and lacking in idealism America is, of course. Well we all commit violence. Well we're all tribal. No, we're not. You located the exact difference between us and them: The liberal culture was degraded by their expansion and our failure. Nothing more needs to be said to "liberals" who want to defend the ruthless barbarians of the Taliban.
The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how you can read my comment and think I'm defending the group or even that their goals were noble. It's bending the intepretation of what I said so much it hurts.
Maybe let me try again - terrorist group says their goal is X. Terrorist group fails to achieve goal X. Therefore, terrorists didn't "win", by their own definition of winning.
I'm not trying to misread you. On reflection, "letting the terrorists win" is a really loaded phrase. So loaded you might be on the same side of an issue and still misunderstand where someone's coming from. As a guy who participated in sometimes violent protests against the Patriot Act, and our initial lockdown and our invasion of Iraq and the general warlike stance in NYC after 9/11, our interpretation of the terrorists "winning" was that they could put America into a posture where we lost our civil liberties as a result of the fear they were able to inculcate in in the populace. Now, at the time, Bush said if we stopped shopping or you know, otherwise engaging in mass capitalist idiocy, that would mean the terrorists won. To me, they won, because they saw a weakness in our free society where by a careful application of very directed force they could open the dam for totalitarian control and a breakdown of open, free, liberal democracy. By that measure, they succeeded remarkably well, but they really only had to use our own inertia against us.
So I don't mean to misread you. I think our society as it stood was a lot more noble than the Taliban. In some ways it still is. They have brought us down a bit toward their level, and that's something worth fighting against.
The terrorists have - on a shoestring budget no less - done more harm to the USA, it's standing in the world and its ability to do business than many years of cold war between the USA and the USSR have done. They succeeded wildly beyond their - and probably anybody else's - imagination and the damage they did is felt every day, including the increased polarization in the United States which is having its effect as we speak.
Denying this is closing your eyes to some major problems and as long as you deny something you are categorically unable to fix it.
> including the increased polarization in the United States which is having its effect as we speak.
The increased polarization in the United States is a product of the end in the mid-1990s of the overlapping pair of partisan realignments starting just before WWII and a return to the normal condition encouraged by the US electoral structure of a strong, stable, sharp partisan divide, combined with modern mass media technology.
The 2001 terror attacks are coincidental, not a cause.
Denying this is closing your eyes to major structural problems with the political system in the United States and, as long as you deny something, you are categorically unable to fix it.
You are completely entitled to your own opinion, but personally I believe that the 2001 attacks accelerated the divide to the point that it may have made the difference between Trump getting elected or not. Without the Iraq war a whole pile of stuff that laid the ground for Trump would not have happened.
We agree that this was already happening prior to 2001, but I simply doubt it would have resulted in the extreme situation that we have today. Social media, similarly is an accelerator, not a cause.
We are pretty aware of what’s going on in Afghanistan. It’s been on the front page of every major news site for the last however many weeks.
But I’m not sure why. Are they trying to make me think that leaving Afghanistan is bad for America? I think it’s good. Time to stop spending money there. Trump and Biden are right to leave.
Surprising that even media outlets like the NYT seem to be writing doom and gloom about leaving. Biden just not be making globalists very happy with this.
The US is leaving the Afghan government without means to defend itself, after spending two decades there de facto in control.
So it's a huge mess, where they've been in control more or less, but they've failed to make the transition into a local civilian state into a stable one.
The offshoot of this is a wave of refugees that will engulf the neighboring countries, decreasing political stability in the Eurasian area.
This is a clear message to all governments - "Washington can no longer be trusted, it's a game of each for his own sovereignty now on".
I'm not saying US should be the guarantor of world piece, but this unmitigated disaster of immediate retreat is causing diminishing of political capital for Washington. It won't be considered as a dependable party from now on.
> So it's a huge mess, where they've been in control more or less, but they've failed to make the transition into a local civilian state into a stable one.
I think Afghanistan has failed itself. U.S. put a trillion dollars and 20 years into it and it collapsed within a month (at best). At some point you admit failure and move on.
I think the rest of your messaging is confusing. Washington can't be trusted, but we shouldn't be the guarantor of world peace? Should I stay or should I go?
What do you want us to do? Stay in Afghanistan forever? Where and when does it end?
"What do you want us to do? Stay in Afghanistan forever? Where and when does it end?"
Like I said, I don't want Washington to do anything. I'm a disinterested observer.
I can be a disinterested observer while saying something is an objective failure. It does not mean necessarily that there might have been any other outcome, or that I was rooting for some other particular policy.
It's either that or don't go there in the first place. Afghanistan has been cynically used by world powers over and over again to get at each other and as a convenient battle field. Leaving it to the Taliban will only guarantee another chapter in that series.
I mean it seems like it's just returning back to 2000 before the U.S. and NATO allies invaded. The Taliban ruled then, and they're going to rule again in the future because after 20 years and over a trillion dollars it just didn't work.
And what good does staying do? If we stay we're bad, awful imperialists and playing global police. If we leave we're bad too for letting Afghanistan return to the year 2000. If you're damned either way might as well save money. Maybe the EU can step up and commit resources and money and prevent this outcome you're describing. Why does America have to do it?
I think most Americans hold this viewpoint too. If you don't like it, I think it might be beneficial to go back and look at the years of "America in Afghanistan bad" international press. No wonder Americans said "fuck it we're done".
Funny enough the more controversial war (Iraq) seems to have brought about the more successful long-term change. U.S. forces are effectively out and the Iraqi government is running Iraq. Would be great if the Iranians would stop meddling but is what it is.
No, this is much worse because now the Taliban will end up much more powerful than they ever were prior to 2000. This will have no end of consequences and all of them negative.
The populace has learned that the Taliban are the winners, when before they were just another contender, besides that they are now better armed and are able to claim victory over the United States which serves as a tremendous recruiting poster.
Well they did win. They beat the U.S. just as they beat others. We spent too much money and time. 20 years and a trillion dollars. Iraq was able to form a government. The Afghani people just didn’t have the ability to do it with our help (or we failed at helping enough). We lost. Time to go home.
>> Are they trying to make me think that leaving Afghanistan is bad for America?
No man, this is what's wrong with Americans who believe in Trump. "They" are not "trying to make" you "think" something. It's just the fucking news. Turn on France24 or Al Jazeera or BBC - you're not their audience. They're covering the fall of a new city in Afghanistan every day.
There is some psychosis among Americans who spend too much time online where you think every piece of news must be slanted bullshit trying to win an infowar on your brain. It's not. This is pure fucking cause and effect. America pulled out, which we wanted, and now the Taliban is going to massacre a lot of women and children, which America doesn't give a rat's ass about. That's the situation.
No one cares if they convince you or Joe Biden or America. This is just what's happening. For my 2 cents, I don't think we should have left before we eliminated the Taliban.
> No man, this is what's wrong with Americans who believe in Trump.
Don't want to do a back and forth here, but do want to make it clear I don't "believe" in any president. I certainly didn't vote for Trump in either election. He can be right about some things even if he's almost universally wrong on policies according to my own views.
> "They" are not "trying to make" you "think" something. It's just the fucking news. Turn on France24 or Al Jazeera or BBC - you're not their audience. They're covering the fall of a new city in Afghanistan every day.
But they're covering it with an opinion "America should do something", "this is bad", etc. Which is fine to have I guess, but that's the same spirit that got us in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. Which is the point of my comment.
I mean, I think they're covering it with the opinion of "why the fuck would you fight a 20 year war and just drop the ball completely now," which is fair, considering that when we invaded they were uniformly like "why the fuck is America invading." I want to strongly separate Iraq from Afghanistan in this, because there was absolutely no reason for us to invade Iraq or to promote the Arab Spring or any of the other absurd things we did post-9/11. These were actually all distractions from and drains upon the mission in Afghanistan. We have an obligation to prevent the Taliban from taking hold there again. And any renewal of their power directly impacts our security. We had no moral right to withdraw, and Biden did it as fast as he could just because it was popular. I understand why it was popular, but that doesn't make it right for us or the people who are trapped there. It makes us look weak and it destroys the hope that people around the world place in us. For better or worse, we are the only power capable of holding back the forces of chaos around the world, and that is where we put our footprint because these specific people, the Taliban aided and abetted an attack on our civilian population. We should never make peace with them, because they have no concept of peace. They will attack us at the first opportunity.
I predict within a couple months they will execute American hostages and we will have to return to Afghanistan. It may be something like Carter's self-immolation in Iran. If so it will only lead to a more isolationist right-wing regime under Trump or someone else in the US. Isolationism does not work. America is a global power and needs to act as one. Globalism is the future and it shouldn't be controlled by China and Russia while we retreat from it. I'm no neocon or fan of Bush-style pre-emptive strikes. But we're the only ones who have some accountability and the capacity to prevent genocide, and we should do it.
Agreed. But America is still an idea. Many other countries have massacred their indigenous population. Many other countries have enslaved people. Many other countries have fought unjust wars. There's a lot America has to be ashamed of.
And yet America is still a great idea. That's what gives us accountability. That's why we can't retreat from the world into isolationism.
[edit] Just to expand on this, I'm from the immigrant side of America, and the working class side. In other words, I'm not a rich white guy whose family sailed here on the Mayflower, and I'm not someone with "white privilege" or whatever. This is the place you go if you have something you want to build, make, say, do, create, or a freedom you wish to exercise that you cannot exercise in your home country. Now. A lot of old-school right wing Americans think they don't want more immigrants. But without immigrants, America is nothing. The force of change and justice and creative power in America, in my mind, has always been about immigration and the freedom it unleashes in people who were repressed elsewhere in the world. And that is why we have a responsibility to help people, like the people in Kabul right now, who are being crushed by horrific violent forces like the Taliban.
Simplified, there are several groups of people in the United States: immigrants, people that forgot they once were immigrants themselves that want to close the door on others now that they have theirs, people and their descendants that were brought there against their will and Native Americans.
All of these groups have their own idea of what America should stand for and their lack of agreement is materializing in a societal schism that I don't believe can be bridged under a single political system.
And yes, America has a responsibility to Afghanistan, but mostly because they are one of the major forces behind the current mess in the first place.
>2021: Gang violence increases in Europe, swing pendulum to mass surveillance.
Many Western Europeans on HN and reddit will deny this problem even though it is an actual problem and unfortunately our governments are already using it as an excuse for mass surveillance.
Military SIGINT planes flying over Copenhagen in 2017 to stop gang shootings should have triggered global outrage about mass surveillance:
We are heading the road of China and Russia where people try to get out because they don't want to live there anymore. No place for privacy or diverse opinions.
The default state (and almost universal state) of human societies throughout history has been authoritarianism.
Authoritarian's universally believe individuals left to themselves make bad decisions either because they're too stupid or too cruel so we need benevolent leaders like themselves to order society.
Only in the last few hundred years countries in Western Europe began to reject this and accept while some individuals may make bad decisions the cost of "benevolent" leaders is too great.
Today in the West we seem to be forgetting that freedom comes with costs and this can only lead in one direction. We should understand China isn't the exception, they are the norm. It was in fact the West who was always more likely to revert to the mean than for China to embrace freedom. People like Orwell understood this very well.
The more freedom individuals have the more likely individuals will say and do things leaders don't like and if our leaders no longer celebrate this disagreement as progress they will seek to restrict freedom. Of course, some actions are almost universally seen as bad and in these cases it's worth carefully restricting freedoms, but this clearly isn't one of those cases. And most attempts to limit freedom of speech also aren't.
No one ever had Facebook or iCloud before, though. The damage an individual could do was somewhat limited. If they wanted to produce child porn, they had to go through a complicated printing process. If they wanted to denounce vaccines or immigrants, they could stand on a box and yell about Jesus or something, but at most they might reach a few hundred people. The framework we have created has given them the ability to reach audiences that they frankly shouldn't be able to reach, because their own intelligence doesn't warrant it. To the degree that we can stripmine those platforms and shut down the bad actors, moderate the fuck out of them, send them into a black hole, I'm all for it.
But personal devices? Secure files you maintain for your business? No - this is a move on the part of the 0.1% to enlist the technical priesthood in spying on the 1-5%. It's a means to try to force fear on the functionaries closer to the apex of the system. Like some other reactionary revolutions, it draws support from a lower base, but its targets are exactly the people who carry out the sensitive functions of the state. That's somewhat scary. However, it's also a bit toothless because clearly it will force anyone who needs to keep their communications private to use other channels. Until or unless that becomes prohibited, as in China.
Then again, I'd never underestimate the spinelessness of the western bureaucrat when it comes to conforming to rules and regulations.
If you look at the current EU commission, this is clearly something where they think the can build a profile. I hoped more people could see this as the insecurity of leadership that it is.
I don't think the EU parliament hat the integrity or competency to evaluate the repercussion of such a law. So no, I don't think the parliament is a trustworthy democratic defense, if they get a say at all that is.
On principle I would agree. But such laws are so often carried on the back of fear-mongering that I just don't care about making an honest argument about it. It will be ignored anyway, in fact any serious technical advisor was ignored. So why not just reject everything that comes forward here? Spite politics work at least and have an impact. Not only positive, but that isn't in the hands of any honest critic.
this has been addressed several times here on HN in the past and it's still false.
No one removed digital privacy in EU.
The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members, Breyer is the only German that was elected and the only one from a western European country.
They need to get titles on newspapers, they're good at doing it, but sometimes they go on a hyperbole.
Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it.
If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each one of them lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop.
To add some more details: this is not a private company spying on its users, this is a coalition formed by 25 sovereign countries passing a law that harmonize the different legislation around searching for potentially unlawful digital communications.
But the article 5a) specifically states that
> Notwithstanding their legitimate objective, these activities constitute an interference with
the fundamental rights to respect for private and family life and protection of personal
data of all users. Any limitation to the fundamental right to respect for private and
family life, including the confidentiality of communications, cannot be justified merely
on the ground that certain technologies were previously deployed when the services
concerned did not, from a legal perspective, constitute electronic communications
services. Such interference is only possible under certain conditions. It needs to be
provided for by law, respect the essence of the rights to private and family life and to the
protection of personal data and, in compliance with the principle of proportionality, be
necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union or
the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others as enshrined in Article 52 (1) of the
Charter. Where such measures permanently involve a general and indiscriminate
monitoring and analysis of communications of all users, they interfere with the right to
confidentiality of communications.
Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world. The EU currently has tenuous protections that are in danger of being superceded by concerns that are perceived as higher precedence. The article does seem to be doing a reasonable job of highlighting one such process and sets it in context with the bigger issue.
> The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members [...]
Just because a political opinion has almost no supporters doesn't mean it's wrong. Historically, privacy alarmists got it right more often than not. None of the scenarios outlined in the article seem particularly over the top to me.
> Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it.
I don't know this person, if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it. But being against data retention seems a reasonably stance in my opinion.
> If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each of them the lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop.
I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas. But the debacle behind the upload filter / copyright directives has shown to me that those agendas either don't include digital rights (in which case they apparently default to deferring to industry lobbyists) or their agendas are not particularly well aligned with citizens' interests.
> Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world
This is not the case though.
This case is EU against tech giants not wanting strict laws around data manipulation.
They have been subjected to the law in Europe, which is a fundamental right for us Europeans.
I know people here are against public intervention, but we generally trust the public in EU, more than Google or Apple for sure.
> if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it.
I'm not saying they are untrustworthy, on the contrary, they are to be trusted, but sometimes they shoot to the moon.
> I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas
I mean that if you read the personal website of an EU representative whose entire career revolves around data retention, you will only find his/her radical opinion on the matter, because it's their job to present it.
Even if you go out and have a drink with them, they won't stop talking about it (it happened to me personally many times).
> Even if you go out and have a drink with them, they won't stop talking about it (it happened to me personally many times).
Are you an lobbyist than? I can't imagine any other reason Breyer would talk personally to someone with our opinions while having a drink together.
> > Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world
> This is not the case though.
Quite a distorted view on reality given all the surveillance laws passed over the last few years…
It feels by now as there would be new attacks on peoples freedom form the government almost on a daily base. Enjoy the a look at the tip of the iceberg:
> Are you an lobbyist than? I can't imagine any other reason Breyer would talk personally to someone with our opinions while having a drink together.
No, I lived in Bruseels for a while with my girlfriend at the time that worked for the parliament.
Brussels is a small city and elected representatives are humans, just like us, they go out just like the rest of us.
I was shocked too when I realized they can't stop talking about their job, not even for a second.
> Quite a distorted view on reality given all the surveillance laws passed over the last few years…
Specifically, which one?
In Europe I mean.
I'm familiar with statewatch, they are a reliable source, but they treat civil liberties as an absolute value, a parliament represent every possible political opinion that the people elected, they have different jobs and represent different interests.
Democracy is not the same thing as "the perfect place where nothing we disagree with ever happens".
As a term of comparison: do you think people are more surveilled in Europe or in the United States? (just mentioning the two champions of liberal democracy, even countries like Japan are worse put than these 2 in terms of state surveillance.)
So why are you talking like a typical right-wing lobbyist?
> > Quite a distorted view on reality given all the surveillance laws passed over the last few years…
> Specifically, which one?
> In Europe I mean.
> I'm familiar with statewatch, they are a reliable source, but […]
Anybody having a look at the statewatch website will instantly notice that your question doesn't makes any sense given that we're counting the latest surveillance laws by the dozens (maybe even by the hundreds by now), and that your claim to know the website seems dishonest therefore.
Also you're trying to relativize that source by all what follows that "but"…
> As a term of comparison: do you think people are more surveilled in Europe or in the United States?
The rest of that question is even loaded with a whole battalion of subtle attempts to completely derail that thread. Nice rhetoric for someone who's not professional in that field. ;-)
I am vouching for your comment because I think you made fair criticism and I don't wanna let no stone unturned.
I am a programmer, I don't work in politics, never had, never will.
I have no horse in the race.
Honest to the god(s) that you might or might not believe in.
It's simply not what I am good at.
I just attended informal meetings with people working for EU institutions, it's not uncommon in Brussels, I met many more when I was working in the music concert industry, we shared few drinks and talked about the bands that played that night, not all the people working in EU institutions lobby, but the elected representatives usually do.
It's simply how things are.
I also have a few with people working for the UN in Rome, where I was born and live.
They enjoy a pint the same way I do, we happen to live in the same neighborhood, there's nothing fishy about it, believe me.
I have no chances of becoming the next Kofi Annan.
increased. A lot! (not thanks to US tech companies of course, but the laws in EU are trying to fix their excessive power and overreach)
My (ex) girlfriend worked as a technical consultant on this law.
I also usually agree with the Pirate Party and many critiques to some EU proposals are my critiques.
I also voted for them in my country, I personally knew some of the candidates, we've been friends for a long time
In my country we specifically focused on the right to distribute copyrighted material (via torrent or other technologies) that was of importance for the public.
Like for example old movies or documentaries or film screenings in public open spaces, especially in smaller towns where there are no theatres.
Or material in possession of public broadcast networks that was paid by the taxpayers.
The national Television of my country produced something like hundreds of live recordings of bands that came here, but most of them never saw the light of day.
In their archives there is, for example, a two hours Sonic Youth live, from 1989, recorded at the TV studios that actually was a full fledged concert hall for classical music. How cool is that? It never aired.
But if you distribute it or show it to someone, technically you're breaking the law, even though citizen paid for it with their taxes.
Unfortunately we elected zero representatives.
Nevertheless how this vote is being presented is hyperbolic, to say the least, and doesn't reflect the work being done.
The law presented has as a primary objectives making the tech giants responsible while protecting the EU people from their abuses.
They are prohibited to spy on you, unless they have been authorized by the law.
That's the spirit.
Without legislation, in Europe what's not prohibited is permitted and people would be at the mercy of what corporations want to do with their data.
> They are prohibited to spy on you, unless they have been authorized by the law.
> That's the spirit.
Don't turn things upside down!
The spirit is that they are now REQUIRED to spy on all their customers.
Before that they where not allowed to do it any more as there were no exceptions to the new e-privacy laws.
So the companies stopped spying on people as it became illegal.
That caused mayor panic in the EU government as they couldn't use those company's data for mass surveillance any more (law enforcement has access to that data; by now even secretly without court warrants! Before that they had "general warrants" for secret services, "national security" interests, and such).
First thing the EU did was giving the companies an "emergency allowance" to do mass surveillance again.
This law now turn that "emergency allowance" into proper rules, which not only allow mass surveillance, but make it mandatory.
The story (like I told) up until the current point can be read here (frankly in German, by the biggest IT online-media there):
(There you can also see how "powerful" the EU parliament is, and that they again pass laws that are obviously against the constitution. Laws that than must be fought for many years in front the EU courts before those laws get eventually declared illegal; at this point the EU just passes a new illegal law; they're using this "trick" since inception by the way. It worked fine locally in the countries for decades now. At least it's like that in Germany, but I don't think the other countries are an exception as the EU does it also like that since day one).
Don't get me wrong with this last aside: I'm a big fan of the idea behind the EU. But the execution of this idea is more and more turning into a nightmare. Everything that would not be possible locally is cheated thru the EU institutions; than they claim locally "The EU wants it so. We must obey!". But the truth is, the EU is ruled by the governments of the countries, not by the people of said countries, so "the EU" actually does what the governments tell them — the obvious trick being here to "blame the EU" afterwards, pointing away form themself.
> Don't turn things upside down! The spirit is that they are now REQUIRED to spy on all their customers.
By the law.
Just like any shop owner is required by the law to report the same things if they happen in their shops.
The purpose if the law is to MANDATE some behavior, it's not a simple advice.
It's by design.
No need to turn anything, this is the law working as intended, the opposite would be no law hence no rules.
> But the execution of this idea is more and more turning into a nightmare
I've heard this sentence so many times that I would be rich if I received a euro every time.
Truth is EU is simply what European people want it to be.
Ironically Germany supported the EU membership for the former eastern block and now those are the countries that are causing the majority of the controversial issues.
> But the truth is, the EU is ruled by the governments of the countries,
Again, working as intended.
Governments are elected bodies.
But also wrong: the parliament is elected by the EU people directly.
I think it's time this silly argument dies, if we wanna have a fair conversation about EU.
A bit of anecdata: I've joined Google 7 years ago to support an append-only very-large-scale database. About that time legal told us that an upcoming EU law will require selective deletion from the database. That was technically impossible and just against the design assumptions of the thing. Google spent millions of dollars to develop a solution to this conundrum over the next couple years. It was ready by the time GDPR came into force.
This assault on privacy is premised on a very flimsy concern over CP, which is a problem but is absolutely no reason (just as terrorism isn't) to deprive citizens of their rights. I'm just curious - first of all, what happened to the large amount of child pornography and the industry around it that existed in Denmark throughout the 1970s? The pendulum certainly swings both ways, but it's strange and interesting that the fact that it was legal to produce CP in swathes of Europe has simply been swept under the rug. I'd assume those images and films are now hashed and searched for, but I'd also assume there are hard copies of them laying around in a plurality of Danish households. How do you prosecute possession of something that was legal at the time?
Secondly, just to keep using liberal ol' Denmark as an example, since the legal age of consent there is still 15 years old, how do you "harmonize" spying on adults there with spying on minors in the rest of Europe? It's okay to read every 15 year old's text messages and look at their photos because it might be illegal in some other country? What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?
Sexual assault is one thing, but it's worth taking a minute to realize how arbitrary and ridiculous some of these laws are before you start throwing children into jail for texting... let alone stripping away basic civil liberties on the basis of "some people are bad so we can't have nice things."
Which is fascinating, because when I was a kid the drinking age in some places in America was still 18. It had always been 21, but the protesters against the Vietnam draft made it a big point that they could be sent to war but weren't allowed to drink at home so states lowered the drinking age to 18 through most of the 1970s. When I turned 18, Las Vegas and New Orleans were the only places in America that still had that law in place, and since then they both reverted to 21.
Now can they have sex in public ? Cause I guess that s the rationale: an image on a phone, or a discussion is more shareable than two teens fondling under a quilt. Also, the abuse potential.
Find enough innocent to change the jurisprudence, but I d bet that you can find so many more quilty parties that the law had to go one way.
Now I have a daughter and I was 16 before mobile phone existed. I m thinking what I would do if I see her sexting: probably nothing after 16 and a soft warning between 14 and 16 and a very strict one before, just because consent can only exist with maturity. Now if the guy is 30 and she s 16, I d tell her she s being an idiot sending him anything: it's not like he cares about her as a person, most likely and she s going to suffer under my responsibility or at best put him in danger. But, 16, starts to be her choice to listen or not and difficult for me to enforce anything.
I think what's more fucked up is that in Germany for example it's legal to have sex with a 14 year old if you're 30 as long as the parents consent. It gives a whole different perspective to when people talk about other "less developed" countries.
I actually think that there were other EU countries that had even lower age limits than Germany.
Someone under 18 could have sex with someone over 14 (but also still under 18).
As soon as one of them is older than 18 it becomes child molesting, and the grown up is in serous trouble.
The law makes not sense of course. It was a more or less recent change. The old regulation may seem bizarre given that example of the parent, but it was more close to reality in most cases.
Before that a 18 year old was not in trouble when sleeping in consent with a slightly younger friend (which is a common situation in reality). Now you would automatically get prosecuted as child molester if authorities would find out; no matter a relationship and consent!
That's the outcome of the CP witch-hunt in Germany… Quite normal things are now outlawed and can ruin lives of young lovers quite substantially.
You're wrong, the other commenter is actually correct in recommending the Wikipedia article. For some reason the German age of consent article is weirdly specific[0]. It references legislation that applies both for 14 year old and above 21 year olds.
It's somewhat related to determining whether the child was capable of "sexual self-determination". But typically the abuser will only get punished if both the child and its parents file a legal complaint(at least that's what the law says).
I'm going to leave my opinions on this at the front door, but given how easily this law can be abused it's almost comical how often the german government has used the excuse of "think of the children" when they passed mass surveillance laws.
By the way as others have pointed out while the 14 and 17 year old can have sex legally, sending any kind of nudes actually triggers another law that may lead to imprisonment[1]. Making any kind of "pornographical" material available to children under 18 is a felony. Who would have known that the porn my classmate shared in highschool on VCR, if shared on an iPhone nowadays could have led to him being sent to the juvenile detention center.
That’s how it is in the US, the federal government criminalize electronic sexual communication with a minor, but in person seduction in many/most states A-OK. A hurdle, but imagining the malicious compliant person that understands the boundaries more than the minor gives me the shivers. “Hm they’re so distant over text but they’re always keen to meet up yay”
This sort of goes to how much society should or shouldn't step in as a parent for people who are shitty parents. The vast majority of underage sexual assaults in the US are committed by family members or family associates. Right there in the trailer park. And there ain't shit that breaking into everyone's email is going to do to change that.
At least in Germany a 15 year old sending nudes to a 18 year old would bring the grown up in danger for prosecution for possession of "CP".
Police was riding schools for stuff like that already after teens used monitored channels (like "private" social-media messages) to exchange such pictures.
Thanks for the links, my German is basic at best, so I used the Google translate version in English and, AFAIK, minors receiving it in a class chat or from other people not knowing it are liable of owning CP
> Twenty years ago it was assumed that no one would inadvertently own child pornography.
> As soon as a 13-year-old sends a pornographic medium of herself and it ends up in a class chat in some form, every member of this chat can be liable to prosecution.
Unless I am missing something, It doesn't refer to two minors sending each other pictures, even though I agree that the scale the phenomenon has assumed in the past 20 years is somewhat scary.
You get only cases when the authorities get to know.
Teachers are for example required to report cases in class.
But the same laws apply of course to any such content minors create and send to each other. Only that it doesn't get reported in any case (until now e2e encrypted chat is completely private for example; Apple is working on changing that though).
But there are cases where things got reported to authorities by social media companies, when kids used unencrypted messaging for example. Where else all that giant numbers of child porn on social media come form? Form a few cases before all the new laws to thousands of cases now?
No real pedo would exchange such material in the open as it's commonly known that those companies are scanning for it. That's mostly children not aware that they don't communicate really privately!
With the new law in place the numbers of such cases will skyrocket likely. As now it's going to be mandatory to scan for such content and directly report it to the authorities.
They can than say, "look, the amount of child pornography cases on the internet is skyrocketing. We need more online surveillance to fight this epidemic! To do that effectively we finally also need to solve the encryption problem"…
This game has been going on for quite some time now. The goal is also clear: More surveillance. This new law now is just the next step on a long journey. CP (besides "terrorism") is the vehicle to sell things to the people. It's always "terrorism" or child porn when they want to cut down the next civil rights…
I don't disagree with you and I am worried myself.
But this specific law is simply asking tech giants to comply, it is not over reaching, like the Apple new features that creates perceptual hashes on people's phones and than upload them to Apple servers, potentially forever.
Some control over content was to be expected, but until the EU mandates that every cloud provider should look for something controversial (political affiliation, controversial opinions etc. etc.) they can't be enforced and they can't be collected by companies operating in Europe or on European citizens' data.
There are many stories like this; there are even cases where someone got convicted of child pornography for sending nudes of themselves to their {boy,girl}friend.
It's bonkers. But it happens. Unfortunately all of this has become something of a taboo, but teenagers having sex is ... kind of normal. What exactly is and isn't acceptable is very hard to decide as a general matter, and far too often any conversation is shot down with "pedophile apologist!" or, in this case, baseless "you must have done something wrong!" assumptions.
When I was 10, I found a bunch of that legal CP of naked 10 year olds from Denmark. They were not hardcore, but to me it was just pictures of kids my age naked which was more interesting than the adult pornography I had already seen. Now in retrospect, I don't know why adults would have interest in them, and it's pretty sick. At that age though, you don't think about what adults are up to. You're like oh so that's what that girl in my class would look like naked. So for the same reason, it's not right to prosecute a child for being a child pornographer, for reasons that would have been patently obvious to Franz Kafka, i.e. if you aren't capable of making a decision to consent to appear in pornography, how the fuck can you be held criminally responsible for taking a picture of your own dick? (or asking your girlfriend for a selfie)
> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?
No, but he would be. She would merely be in possession of it.
For the record, Denmark has, indeed, punished a large number of underage offenders for spreading child pornography through social media. It's mostly been regarding clips spread without the participants' consent though.
Not sure whether other countries go by the age of sexual consent, but I've personally never heard any other definition of child porn than "sexually explicit/suggestive content involving people under the age of 18". Assuming that's valid everywhere, then it would indeed be child pornography since the Dane was under 18.
EU-wide harmonization of such laws would be a welcome step to take before privacy-invading measures were to be taken, and such legislation definitely should address underage sexting.
In the US, the harmonization of legal ages of consent operates under what are called "Romeo and Juliet laws", which vary from state to state, but essentially aim to prevent minors from falling into the criminal justice system as a result of sex with someone within a few years of their own age.
https://legaldictionary.net/romeo-and-juliet-laws/
The blog post seems to be written in a slightly sensationalist manner. I tried to find out "what this actually means" but that's also difficult from reading the post itself. The "How does this affect you" section states:
> All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically.
What, even the stuff that I have end-to-end encrypted?
Even this from the first line of the post:
> The EU decided to let providers search all private chats,
175 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadAnyone got any links to the other side of this same argument, hopefully as well presented, so us readers can read both to come to our own conclusions?
Basically the EU is saying, companies can't do it... but we can!
That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part.
GDPR was about EU citizens rights and privacy. In fact they uphold public institutions to these standards, and have issued fines.
How is that hypocritical. We allow the state to have organized groups with automatic weapons and tanks, and don't allow private individuals or corporations to.
Is that the path you're choosing to go: that everything is justifiable because governments can have nuclear reactors and you can't?
But I'll go the extra mile: it's hypocritical because it's a citizen right within EU, it's a double standard, and it's being enforced on public/private organizations. You can't have rights and not have rights at the same time, you either have them or you don't.
In EU there are no rights for owning automatic weapons, nuclear reactors, organized armed groups, etc etc.
My point is that hypocrisy is a strange argument, because we already have a huge amount of things that the government can do, even if they would otherwise violate property rights/freedom of movement/etc, that private entities cannot.
After years of propaganda, debates and discussion for data protection and privacy rights for EU citizens, and approving such rights by law, you don't think it's hypocrisy that they approve a law that strips citizens from such rights.
They believe people have the right to have their data protected and to know what data is being collected, and demand collectors and processors to not hoard data and take only what is necessary. This is literally bulk collecting of chat logs and process them, without people consent.
I still don't get your point, there are no rights for citizens to use force, detain others or take land. At least in the EU countries I know. So what rights are being stripped from citizens?
It's the same if the USA government said they will abide by the people's rights to own weapons, but decided to ban the sales of all weapons so people can't buy them.
Which isn't to say it's the right move. I'm just saying your argument here is weak.
There is in fact a battle right now over who has primacy here. Allegedly it is everyone against Poland, but the details are more nuanced.
Seems like data control was just the first step to data management.
And it's not just that, I've seen first hand that even internal communication about customers are treated with more care as they can legally request all their data.
If there is some temporary marginal privacy benefit for users, it is a side effect.
I suspect that is nothing like the actual feeling of the residents of the EU
People who are motivated enough to know and comment about these proposals are not a representitive sample of the population.
If you were to stand outside Old Trafford and ask people who the best football team in the UK is, you'll get the vast majority saying Manchester United. Do the same thing in London and you'll get people saying it's Arsenal. Aside from both being wrong, you can see the bias.
Accredited polling companies adjust results to minimise sample bias, but even then have to be careful to avoid leading questions as shown in this 'documentary':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
The term useful idiots come to mind. There is no lack of them.
Tor is open-source and can be audited for government backdoors.
Mostly Monero. Paying for censored content with Bitcoin can be traced back to you and will get you in jail the same as paying via bank transfer.
And Monero is the odd one out here -- most other cryptos don't really help against censorship resistance.
Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending but oh surprise a lot more to control of the cash grab speculative aspect - and hard to carry $600M of them in a hurry after a heist, unlike recent defi exemples.
How can you exchange bank notes electronically?
The first question is why would you want to transfer money from A to B electronically without any kind of reasonable guarantee or safeguard? The major use case is to avoid paying taxes. Feel free to add any other usage scenario that isn't skipping taxes directly or indirectly.
It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom.
You say that like its a separate concept from privacy and anonymity. Its not. The government is (should be) just a non-profit corporation. Other than that, those concepts are fundamentally equivalent.
Even Monero?
> and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government
How does it matter if it's open-source?
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
You (and many other respondents) are responding to "Tor is supplied by the government, and therefore is an evil trap". What the OP seems to be saying is "Tor is an anarchist stand against the man, it's actually funded by the man".
There are literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies. The term does not imply anonymity nor privacy, just the concept of a somewhat decentralized ledger that relies on cryptography to ensure the authenticity and integrity of transactions. In those hundreds, certainly there are different goals with different currencies. The question remains though - are those who focus on privacy and anonimity field-tested? Are there cases of demonstrable attacks on the anonymity characteristics of a given implementation that can attest for their robustness? AFAIK no, but feel free to add any independent analysis or incident I may have missed.
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
OpenSSL is also open-source and every year there is a new vector of bad news. Being open source in some projects - specially crypto projects - means that motivated attackers can identify potential vulnerabilities quite easier, instead of "more people will look at it, ergo it will have fewer bugs". There is a huge potential for planned defects to go unnoticed on a complex cryptography product.
That is not a problem for open source that has been audited.
We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
Their activity. Not yours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-ns... https://edri.org/our-work/secret-documents-reveal-bnd-attack...
Big leap of faith. You probably won't need both hands to enumerate people capable of correctly audit a piece of modern crypto software in the hole world, and probably half of them work or have worked for governments. Even using those resources, one thing are obvious flaws, other are weakening of the robustness of the protocol in certain conditions. Even with your top 5 (first hand), no one would guarantee the protocol and implementation is free of backdoors.
> We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
I'm not a tor expert by far, and even I know that if you have enough entry and exit nodes under your control, you can identify both source and target of traffic. It makes sense for the USA to use a communist/Iran(terrorists!) excuse to pursue that goal. So, it makes sense to create a layered secure communication channel that only you can reverse, and pitch it worldwide as a safe means of communication for "dissidents".
In reality many people are against this,though less and less care to the point of doing anything. Anything that's pretensed upon "protect the children" is a massive red flag.Why? Because obviously nobody wants to harm the f8cking children. Same goes for 9/11, the patriot act, GDPR(which ironically or not, depends on who you're asking, actually facilitates tracking instead of protecting people's privacy), contact-tracing, green passports, crypto regulations, etc.
Ultimately people will always find a way because the aspiration for freedom is greatest, but many seem to not care about what happens on the sideways during this journey, which is kind of terrifying.
2001: Terroist attack, swing towards mass surveillance.
2010: Gov't went too far, surveillance seen as a greater threat than terrorism, swing pendulum back to privacy.
2021: Gang violence increases in Europe, swing pendulum to mass surveillance.
Can anyone guess what will happen 2030?
Sure the EU gave FAANG a slap on the wrist, but I know of now government that rolled back the increased surveillance that terrorist legislation gave them.
Then there's the Irish who "oversee" Facebook and Google and do SFA.
So the GDPR is not enforced [to a level anywhere near what the legislation is supposed to do].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-eu-court-says-natio...
Yeah.. GDPR works >assuming< everyone reports every violation of privacy, which is absurd to believe it would be the case.
> in the entire EU there have been _only_ 800, let's say 1k such violations?
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not all violations with fines/punishment are made public, and a vast majority of non-egregious violations will not result in a fine/punishment in the first place because the competent DPA will send a letter outlining what's wrong, how to fix it, and what the consequences will be if it's not fixed.
Those transgressors will simply very quickly come into compliance to avoid the trouble and the affair will not be made public.
If you go to the comment's page [0] you can click "vouch" to reincarnate the comment if you believe it should be part of the discussion.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28140345
Did something happen in 2010 that reduced surveillance and strengthened privacy rights?
If so, I think I may have missed it.
Others are pointing out the 2021 "Gang violence in Europe" claim doesn't make sense either soo...
Post 2010:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_global_surveill...
Which culminated in: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...
Post 2021:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM
At least in Sweden, there is ongoing discussion to legislate Police mass surveillance capability at the expense of individual freedom.
What are you referring to here?
Swedish police used FBI-provided data to arrest 155 indiviuals. Weirdly, the Swedish police cannot collect such data themselves, but need to act if they "stubble" across information indicating imminent crime.
Obviously, Terrorists have won. I don't know how aware the American public is, but Afghanistan is being overrun by Taliban as we speak, causing another refugee crisis in Turkey that could easily spill into the continental Europe and the UK. Just before the pandemic, the Turkish govt was blackmailing EU with letting the refugees go wherever they want, you can expect this to repeat as the Turkish public is overwhelmingly against(polls show %80 want the refugees go) hosting refugees as many as %10 of its population. EU almost went bust with only 1M, Turkey alone hosts 5M to 8M at the moment and the Afghans are arriving in thousands everyday.
You can expect the governments to try to manage the situation by increasing their toolset. You can expect increased surveillance and decreased rights trend to continue. You can expect people with different aspirations to try to take advantage of it.
Swedish cities are now plagued by massive problems due to the large influx of migrants.
Another wave would destroy any hope of returning to normality in Sweden.
Even though it's the EU countries that have contributed to the plight of people in places like Afganistan and Syria? That's super convenient point of view - very nice way to wash your hands of any responsibility.
And I'm saying this as an EU citizen - every country, including my own, that has participated in military excurisions in the middle east in the last 30 years has created this crisis for themselves. Saying that "oh, arab countries should take them" is beyond brutal, it's barbaric.
It's really not, so it's quite irrational to include that level of hyperbole to make your point emotionally loaded rather than factual.
Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan and Iran - both countries which are a helluva lot more culturally and religiously aligned with the majority of Afghans.
> every country, including my own, that has participated in military excurisions in the middle east in the last 30 years has created this crisis for themselves
This is nonsense. Religious fundamentalism & oppression of the populace has created this situation - both of which were aided & abetted by (you guessed it) Iran & Pakistan. Both countries are the biggest funders of the religious fundamentalists as well as offering state level support and safety for those leaders.
Unless you find a way to make UAE etc. take the refugees to achieve the "Arabs take the migrants" goal, prepare for a dramatic increase in immigrants. If it happens that EU decides to fight it back, they will need all the surveillance power and get the rights removed to be able to enforce the restrictions on the movement of millions.
Sweden surely has a very difficult immigration problem to tackle. But it’s worth noting that it’s the migrants who suffer from this, not the existing Swedish residents.
Here is an example about shootings:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/fatal-shooting...
The thing is you can't just get the good migrants and those that are bad voids the whole idea.
At least until sufficient harsh laws can curb the problem.
Which isn’t to say it’s not a problem. It’s a huge problem. But it’s also important to keep in mind who’s actually suffering here.
Speaking specifically of 9/11, no, not really. Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit such a crime on American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military and then finally and hopefully turn against their own government.
Obviously, none of the above happened - American government used the attacks as a pretext to spend another trillion dollars on a pointless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and then used them again at home to remove private liberties and introduce laws that would have had no chance otherwise. I'd argue the average American never bothered looking up why US was attacked beyond a "brown people hate freedom brrrrrrrrrr" nonsense.
So no, terrorists didn't win. They failed at their stated goals miserably, but the world's population still lost as the noose of global surveilence is getting tighter and tighter every year.
The way you put it, It looks like Al Queda had a noble goal. It's a shame that they did not win then.
But I am more cynical than that, I don't believe in the idealistic goals of these organisations. In my opinion, all local warlords fight for power, glory and spreading their influence.
Looking at the final situation, I would say that they achieved exactly that. Globalism is dead, the liberal culture of the west is significantly degraded thus cementing their influence in the region. Their power is now much less contested and they can rule happily thereafter.
Maybe let me try again - terrorist group says their goal is X. Terrorist group fails to achieve goal X. Therefore, terrorists didn't "win", by their own definition of winning.
Is that less.....offensive?
So I don't mean to misread you. I think our society as it stood was a lot more noble than the Taliban. In some ways it still is. They have brought us down a bit toward their level, and that's something worth fighting against.
Denying this is closing your eyes to some major problems and as long as you deny something you are categorically unable to fix it.
The increased polarization in the United States is a product of the end in the mid-1990s of the overlapping pair of partisan realignments starting just before WWII and a return to the normal condition encouraged by the US electoral structure of a strong, stable, sharp partisan divide, combined with modern mass media technology.
The 2001 terror attacks are coincidental, not a cause.
Denying this is closing your eyes to major structural problems with the political system in the United States and, as long as you deny something, you are categorically unable to fix it.
We agree that this was already happening prior to 2001, but I simply doubt it would have resulted in the extreme situation that we have today. Social media, similarly is an accelerator, not a cause.
But I’m not sure why. Are they trying to make me think that leaving Afghanistan is bad for America? I think it’s good. Time to stop spending money there. Trump and Biden are right to leave.
Surprising that even media outlets like the NYT seem to be writing doom and gloom about leaving. Biden just not be making globalists very happy with this.
So it's a huge mess, where they've been in control more or less, but they've failed to make the transition into a local civilian state into a stable one.
The offshoot of this is a wave of refugees that will engulf the neighboring countries, decreasing political stability in the Eurasian area.
This is a clear message to all governments - "Washington can no longer be trusted, it's a game of each for his own sovereignty now on".
I'm not saying US should be the guarantor of world piece, but this unmitigated disaster of immediate retreat is causing diminishing of political capital for Washington. It won't be considered as a dependable party from now on.
The situation is even more horrific from PR point of view since US helped to empower Taliban in 1980's to retaliate against Soviet forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
I think Afghanistan has failed itself. U.S. put a trillion dollars and 20 years into it and it collapsed within a month (at best). At some point you admit failure and move on.
I think the rest of your messaging is confusing. Washington can't be trusted, but we shouldn't be the guarantor of world peace? Should I stay or should I go?
What do you want us to do? Stay in Afghanistan forever? Where and when does it end?
Like I said, I don't want Washington to do anything. I'm a disinterested observer.
I can be a disinterested observer while saying something is an objective failure. It does not mean necessarily that there might have been any other outcome, or that I was rooting for some other particular policy.
It's either that or don't go there in the first place. Afghanistan has been cynically used by world powers over and over again to get at each other and as a convenient battle field. Leaving it to the Taliban will only guarantee another chapter in that series.
And what good does staying do? If we stay we're bad, awful imperialists and playing global police. If we leave we're bad too for letting Afghanistan return to the year 2000. If you're damned either way might as well save money. Maybe the EU can step up and commit resources and money and prevent this outcome you're describing. Why does America have to do it?
I think most Americans hold this viewpoint too. If you don't like it, I think it might be beneficial to go back and look at the years of "America in Afghanistan bad" international press. No wonder Americans said "fuck it we're done".
Funny enough the more controversial war (Iraq) seems to have brought about the more successful long-term change. U.S. forces are effectively out and the Iraqi government is running Iraq. Would be great if the Iranians would stop meddling but is what it is.
In what specific ways?
No man, this is what's wrong with Americans who believe in Trump. "They" are not "trying to make" you "think" something. It's just the fucking news. Turn on France24 or Al Jazeera or BBC - you're not their audience. They're covering the fall of a new city in Afghanistan every day.
There is some psychosis among Americans who spend too much time online where you think every piece of news must be slanted bullshit trying to win an infowar on your brain. It's not. This is pure fucking cause and effect. America pulled out, which we wanted, and now the Taliban is going to massacre a lot of women and children, which America doesn't give a rat's ass about. That's the situation.
No one cares if they convince you or Joe Biden or America. This is just what's happening. For my 2 cents, I don't think we should have left before we eliminated the Taliban.
Don't want to do a back and forth here, but do want to make it clear I don't "believe" in any president. I certainly didn't vote for Trump in either election. He can be right about some things even if he's almost universally wrong on policies according to my own views.
> "They" are not "trying to make" you "think" something. It's just the fucking news. Turn on France24 or Al Jazeera or BBC - you're not their audience. They're covering the fall of a new city in Afghanistan every day.
But they're covering it with an opinion "America should do something", "this is bad", etc. Which is fine to have I guess, but that's the same spirit that got us in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. Which is the point of my comment.
I predict within a couple months they will execute American hostages and we will have to return to Afghanistan. It may be something like Carter's self-immolation in Iran. If so it will only lead to a more isolationist right-wing regime under Trump or someone else in the US. Isolationism does not work. America is a global power and needs to act as one. Globalism is the future and it shouldn't be controlled by China and Russia while we retreat from it. I'm no neocon or fan of Bush-style pre-emptive strikes. But we're the only ones who have some accountability and the capacity to prevent genocide, and we should do it.
Had. But after all the failures this has eroded quite a bit.
And yet America is still a great idea. That's what gives us accountability. That's why we can't retreat from the world into isolationism.
[edit] Just to expand on this, I'm from the immigrant side of America, and the working class side. In other words, I'm not a rich white guy whose family sailed here on the Mayflower, and I'm not someone with "white privilege" or whatever. This is the place you go if you have something you want to build, make, say, do, create, or a freedom you wish to exercise that you cannot exercise in your home country. Now. A lot of old-school right wing Americans think they don't want more immigrants. But without immigrants, America is nothing. The force of change and justice and creative power in America, in my mind, has always been about immigration and the freedom it unleashes in people who were repressed elsewhere in the world. And that is why we have a responsibility to help people, like the people in Kabul right now, who are being crushed by horrific violent forces like the Taliban.
All of these groups have their own idea of what America should stand for and their lack of agreement is materializing in a societal schism that I don't believe can be bridged under a single political system.
And yes, America has a responsibility to Afghanistan, but mostly because they are one of the major forces behind the current mess in the first place.
Many Western Europeans on HN and reddit will deny this problem even though it is an actual problem and unfortunately our governments are already using it as an excuse for mass surveillance.
Military SIGINT planes flying over Copenhagen in 2017 to stop gang shootings should have triggered global outrage about mass surveillance:
https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-vaaben-...
Did I miss something?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM
We are heading the road of China and Russia where people try to get out because they don't want to live there anymore. No place for privacy or diverse opinions.
Authoritarian's universally believe individuals left to themselves make bad decisions either because they're too stupid or too cruel so we need benevolent leaders like themselves to order society.
Only in the last few hundred years countries in Western Europe began to reject this and accept while some individuals may make bad decisions the cost of "benevolent" leaders is too great.
Today in the West we seem to be forgetting that freedom comes with costs and this can only lead in one direction. We should understand China isn't the exception, they are the norm. It was in fact the West who was always more likely to revert to the mean than for China to embrace freedom. People like Orwell understood this very well.
The more freedom individuals have the more likely individuals will say and do things leaders don't like and if our leaders no longer celebrate this disagreement as progress they will seek to restrict freedom. Of course, some actions are almost universally seen as bad and in these cases it's worth carefully restricting freedoms, but this clearly isn't one of those cases. And most attempts to limit freedom of speech also aren't.
But personal devices? Secure files you maintain for your business? No - this is a move on the part of the 0.1% to enlist the technical priesthood in spying on the 1-5%. It's a means to try to force fear on the functionaries closer to the apex of the system. Like some other reactionary revolutions, it draws support from a lower base, but its targets are exactly the people who carry out the sensitive functions of the state. That's somewhat scary. However, it's also a bit toothless because clearly it will force anyone who needs to keep their communications private to use other channels. Until or unless that becomes prohibited, as in China.
Then again, I'd never underestimate the spinelessness of the western bureaucrat when it comes to conforming to rules and regulations.
Which, to be fair, isn't entirely wrong. :)
That doesn't mean that the "authoritarians" would make any better decision of course.
I strongly believe such a legislation would not be able to pass EU parliament if it would require actually breaking E2E encryption.
That's why we over here call it a democracy-simulation.
Breyer is one of the very few trustworthy people in that system. One should listen to his concerns as they're real.
I have several qualms about this proposal but the crying-wolf manner it is being presented is just ridiculous.
The author could have used the opportunity to raise the real risks (especially the false positive risks) instead of pushing for fear-mongering.
No one removed digital privacy in EU.
The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members, Breyer is the only German that was elected and the only one from a western European country.
They need to get titles on newspapers, they're good at doing it, but sometimes they go on a hyperbole.
Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it.
If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each one of them lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop.
To add some more details: this is not a private company spying on its users, this is a coalition formed by 25 sovereign countries passing a law that harmonize the different legislation around searching for potentially unlawful digital communications.
But the article 5a) specifically states that
> Notwithstanding their legitimate objective, these activities constitute an interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private and family life and protection of personal data of all users. Any limitation to the fundamental right to respect for private and family life, including the confidentiality of communications, cannot be justified merely on the ground that certain technologies were previously deployed when the services concerned did not, from a legal perspective, constitute electronic communications services. Such interference is only possible under certain conditions. It needs to be provided for by law, respect the essence of the rights to private and family life and to the protection of personal data and, in compliance with the principle of proportionality, be necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others as enshrined in Article 52 (1) of the Charter. Where such measures permanently involve a general and indiscriminate monitoring and analysis of communications of all users, they interfere with the right to confidentiality of communications.
Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world. The EU currently has tenuous protections that are in danger of being superceded by concerns that are perceived as higher precedence. The article does seem to be doing a reasonable job of highlighting one such process and sets it in context with the bigger issue.
> The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members [...]
Just because a political opinion has almost no supporters doesn't mean it's wrong. Historically, privacy alarmists got it right more often than not. None of the scenarios outlined in the article seem particularly over the top to me.
> Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it.
I don't know this person, if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it. But being against data retention seems a reasonably stance in my opinion.
> If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each of them the lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop.
I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas. But the debacle behind the upload filter / copyright directives has shown to me that those agendas either don't include digital rights (in which case they apparently default to deferring to industry lobbyists) or their agendas are not particularly well aligned with citizens' interests.
This is not the case though.
This case is EU against tech giants not wanting strict laws around data manipulation.
They have been subjected to the law in Europe, which is a fundamental right for us Europeans.
I know people here are against public intervention, but we generally trust the public in EU, more than Google or Apple for sure.
> if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it.
I'm not saying they are untrustworthy, on the contrary, they are to be trusted, but sometimes they shoot to the moon.
> I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas
I mean that if you read the personal website of an EU representative whose entire career revolves around data retention, you will only find his/her radical opinion on the matter, because it's their job to present it.
Even if you go out and have a drink with them, they won't stop talking about it (it happened to me personally many times).
They do it constantly.
Are you an lobbyist than? I can't imagine any other reason Breyer would talk personally to someone with our opinions while having a drink together.
> > Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world
> This is not the case though.
Quite a distorted view on reality given all the surveillance laws passed over the last few years…
It feels by now as there would be new attacks on peoples freedom form the government almost on a daily base. Enjoy the a look at the tip of the iceberg:
https://www.statewatch.org/observatories/
No, I lived in Bruseels for a while with my girlfriend at the time that worked for the parliament.
Brussels is a small city and elected representatives are humans, just like us, they go out just like the rest of us.
I was shocked too when I realized they can't stop talking about their job, not even for a second.
> Quite a distorted view on reality given all the surveillance laws passed over the last few years…
Specifically, which one?
In Europe I mean.
I'm familiar with statewatch, they are a reliable source, but they treat civil liberties as an absolute value, a parliament represent every possible political opinion that the people elected, they have different jobs and represent different interests.
Democracy is not the same thing as "the perfect place where nothing we disagree with ever happens".
As a term of comparison: do you think people are more surveilled in Europe or in the United States? (just mentioning the two champions of liberal democracy, even countries like Japan are worse put than these 2 in terms of state surveillance.)
> No, […]
So why are you talking like a typical right-wing lobbyist?
> > Quite a distorted view on reality given all the surveillance laws passed over the last few years…
> Specifically, which one? > In Europe I mean.
> I'm familiar with statewatch, they are a reliable source, but […]
Anybody having a look at the statewatch website will instantly notice that your question doesn't makes any sense given that we're counting the latest surveillance laws by the dozens (maybe even by the hundreds by now), and that your claim to know the website seems dishonest therefore.
Also you're trying to relativize that source by all what follows that "but"…
> As a term of comparison: do you think people are more surveilled in Europe or in the United States?
Why do you try to derail this conversation?
I'm surely not baiting into whataboutism…
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque
The rest of that question is even loaded with a whole battalion of subtle attempts to completely derail that thread. Nice rhetoric for someone who's not professional in that field. ;-)
I am a programmer, I don't work in politics, never had, never will.
I have no horse in the race.
Honest to the god(s) that you might or might not believe in.
It's simply not what I am good at.
I just attended informal meetings with people working for EU institutions, it's not uncommon in Brussels, I met many more when I was working in the music concert industry, we shared few drinks and talked about the bands that played that night, not all the people working in EU institutions lobby, but the elected representatives usually do.
It's simply how things are.
I also have a few with people working for the UN in Rome, where I was born and live.
They enjoy a pint the same way I do, we happen to live in the same neighborhood, there's nothing fishy about it, believe me.
I have no chances of becoming the next Kofi Annan.
My (ex) girlfriend worked as a technical consultant on this law.
I also usually agree with the Pirate Party and many critiques to some EU proposals are my critiques.
I also voted for them in my country, I personally knew some of the candidates, we've been friends for a long time
In my country we specifically focused on the right to distribute copyrighted material (via torrent or other technologies) that was of importance for the public.
Like for example old movies or documentaries or film screenings in public open spaces, especially in smaller towns where there are no theatres.
Or material in possession of public broadcast networks that was paid by the taxpayers.
The national Television of my country produced something like hundreds of live recordings of bands that came here, but most of them never saw the light of day.
In their archives there is, for example, a two hours Sonic Youth live, from 1989, recorded at the TV studios that actually was a full fledged concert hall for classical music. How cool is that? It never aired.
But if you distribute it or show it to someone, technically you're breaking the law, even though citizen paid for it with their taxes.
Unfortunately we elected zero representatives.
Nevertheless how this vote is being presented is hyperbolic, to say the least, and doesn't reflect the work being done.
The law presented has as a primary objectives making the tech giants responsible while protecting the EU people from their abuses.
They are prohibited to spy on you, unless they have been authorized by the law.
That's the spirit.
Without legislation, in Europe what's not prohibited is permitted and people would be at the mercy of what corporations want to do with their data.
> That's the spirit.
Don't turn things upside down!
The spirit is that they are now REQUIRED to spy on all their customers.
Before that they where not allowed to do it any more as there were no exceptions to the new e-privacy laws.
So the companies stopped spying on people as it became illegal.
That caused mayor panic in the EU government as they couldn't use those company's data for mass surveillance any more (law enforcement has access to that data; by now even secretly without court warrants! Before that they had "general warrants" for secret services, "national security" interests, and such).
First thing the EU did was giving the companies an "emergency allowance" to do mass surveillance again.
This law now turn that "emergency allowance" into proper rules, which not only allow mass surveillance, but make it mandatory.
The story (like I told) up until the current point can be read here (frankly in German, by the biggest IT online-media there):
https://www.heise.de/news/EU-Parlament-erlaubt-flaechendecke...
(There you can also see how "powerful" the EU parliament is, and that they again pass laws that are obviously against the constitution. Laws that than must be fought for many years in front the EU courts before those laws get eventually declared illegal; at this point the EU just passes a new illegal law; they're using this "trick" since inception by the way. It worked fine locally in the countries for decades now. At least it's like that in Germany, but I don't think the other countries are an exception as the EU does it also like that since day one).
Don't get me wrong with this last aside: I'm a big fan of the idea behind the EU. But the execution of this idea is more and more turning into a nightmare. Everything that would not be possible locally is cheated thru the EU institutions; than they claim locally "The EU wants it so. We must obey!". But the truth is, the EU is ruled by the governments of the countries, not by the people of said countries, so "the EU" actually does what the governments tell them — the obvious trick being here to "blame the EU" afterwards, pointing away form themself.
By the law.
Just like any shop owner is required by the law to report the same things if they happen in their shops.
The purpose if the law is to MANDATE some behavior, it's not a simple advice.
It's by design.
No need to turn anything, this is the law working as intended, the opposite would be no law hence no rules.
> But the execution of this idea is more and more turning into a nightmare
I've heard this sentence so many times that I would be rich if I received a euro every time.
Truth is EU is simply what European people want it to be.
Ironically Germany supported the EU membership for the former eastern block and now those are the countries that are causing the majority of the controversial issues.
> But the truth is, the EU is ruled by the governments of the countries,
Again, working as intended.
Governments are elected bodies.
But also wrong: the parliament is elected by the EU people directly.
I think it's time this silly argument dies, if we wanna have a fair conversation about EU.
Can you debunk (some of) the specific claims made in the article?
It is not true, digital privacy is in fact still intact and it is, anyway, no less effective than it was yesterday.
On the contrary, the Google/Apple of the World could spy on you with he excuse of "searching for CP", now they cannot unless authorized by the law.
Sexual assault is one thing, but it's worth taking a minute to realize how arbitrary and ridiculous some of these laws are before you start throwing children into jail for texting... let alone stripping away basic civil liberties on the basis of "some people are bad so we can't have nice things."
In some countries, you can have sex at 14, but only do sexting at 18. Total mindfuck.
Find enough innocent to change the jurisprudence, but I d bet that you can find so many more quilty parties that the law had to go one way.
Now I have a daughter and I was 16 before mobile phone existed. I m thinking what I would do if I see her sexting: probably nothing after 16 and a soft warning between 14 and 16 and a very strict one before, just because consent can only exist with maturity. Now if the guy is 30 and she s 16, I d tell her she s being an idiot sending him anything: it's not like he cares about her as a person, most likely and she s going to suffer under my responsibility or at best put him in danger. But, 16, starts to be her choice to listen or not and difficult for me to enforce anything.
Glad she s still 3 :D
Laws are far from being logical or always making sense.
I actually think that there were other EU countries that had even lower age limits than Germany.
Someone under 18 could have sex with someone over 14 (but also still under 18).
As soon as one of them is older than 18 it becomes child molesting, and the grown up is in serous trouble.
The law makes not sense of course. It was a more or less recent change. The old regulation may seem bizarre given that example of the parent, but it was more close to reality in most cases.
Before that a 18 year old was not in trouble when sleeping in consent with a slightly younger friend (which is a common situation in reality). Now you would automatically get prosecuted as child molester if authorities would find out; no matter a relationship and consent!
That's the outcome of the CP witch-hunt in Germany… Quite normal things are now outlawed and can ruin lives of young lovers quite substantially.
Can you look first into Wikipedia, online law publication to verify before spreading misinformation?
You are morally obligated to edit your post and correct it with the true facts.
It's somewhat related to determining whether the child was capable of "sexual self-determination". But typically the abuser will only get punished if both the child and its parents file a legal complaint(at least that's what the law says).
I'm going to leave my opinions on this at the front door, but given how easily this law can be abused it's almost comical how often the german government has used the excuse of "think of the children" when they passed mass surveillance laws.
By the way as others have pointed out while the 14 and 17 year old can have sex legally, sending any kind of nudes actually triggers another law that may lead to imprisonment[1]. Making any kind of "pornographical" material available to children under 18 is a felony. Who would have known that the porn my classmate shared in highschool on VCR, if shared on an iPhone nowadays could have led to him being sent to the juvenile detention center.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzalter#Schutzalter_14_Jah...
[1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/184.html
The other child posts are correct, I'm wrong.
My confusion comes mostly form a not realized, but once planed change in this laws.
In the end the current legislation seems quite sane.
But this can't be said about the laws governing messaging intimate content between teens. That's the other source of my confusion.
Anyway, thanks to bmn__ and rjzzleep for pointing out my error!
It depends on what country they are, right now.
Age of consent in both France and Denmark is 15.
For example in many countries age of consent threshold is not enforceable if both are minors and the age difference is at most 4 years.
A 15 years old sending nudes to a 17 years old girl would not be punished as CP.
Police was riding schools for stuff like that already after teens used monitored channels (like "private" social-media messages) to exchange such pictures.
> is not enforceable if both are minors
15 and 18 are __not__ both minors
Now even minors can get prosecuted for CP. I should have mentioned this explicitly in addition.
https://www.heise.de/news/Kinderpornografie-Immer-mehr-Ermit...
https://www.heise.de/news/Kinderpornografie-Kinder-und-Jugen...
> Twenty years ago it was assumed that no one would inadvertently own child pornography.
> As soon as a 13-year-old sends a pornographic medium of herself and it ends up in a class chat in some form, every member of this chat can be liable to prosecution.
Unless I am missing something, It doesn't refer to two minors sending each other pictures, even though I agree that the scale the phenomenon has assumed in the past 20 years is somewhat scary.
Teachers are for example required to report cases in class.
But the same laws apply of course to any such content minors create and send to each other. Only that it doesn't get reported in any case (until now e2e encrypted chat is completely private for example; Apple is working on changing that though).
But there are cases where things got reported to authorities by social media companies, when kids used unencrypted messaging for example. Where else all that giant numbers of child porn on social media come form? Form a few cases before all the new laws to thousands of cases now?
No real pedo would exchange such material in the open as it's commonly known that those companies are scanning for it. That's mostly children not aware that they don't communicate really privately!
With the new law in place the numbers of such cases will skyrocket likely. As now it's going to be mandatory to scan for such content and directly report it to the authorities.
They can than say, "look, the amount of child pornography cases on the internet is skyrocketing. We need more online surveillance to fight this epidemic! To do that effectively we finally also need to solve the encryption problem"…
This game has been going on for quite some time now. The goal is also clear: More surveillance. This new law now is just the next step on a long journey. CP (besides "terrorism") is the vehicle to sell things to the people. It's always "terrorism" or child porn when they want to cut down the next civil rights…
But this specific law is simply asking tech giants to comply, it is not over reaching, like the Apple new features that creates perceptual hashes on people's phones and than upload them to Apple servers, potentially forever.
Some control over content was to be expected, but until the EU mandates that every cloud provider should look for something controversial (political affiliation, controversial opinions etc. etc.) they can't be enforced and they can't be collected by companies operating in Europe or on European citizens' data.
It's a big difference IMO.
Yes.
When I was 15, I had nudes of a 17 year old. Age of consent is 16 in the UK but sexual images of people under 18 is illegal.
Having that content was illegal; and I have the criminal record to prove it.
Did you have those nudes with the consent & permission of the 17 year old in question?
Is there more to this story than you are letting on?
It's bonkers. But it happens. Unfortunately all of this has become something of a taboo, but teenagers having sex is ... kind of normal. What exactly is and isn't acceptable is very hard to decide as a general matter, and far too often any conversation is shot down with "pedophile apologist!" or, in this case, baseless "you must have done something wrong!" assumptions.
No, but he would be. She would merely be in possession of it.
For the record, Denmark has, indeed, punished a large number of underage offenders for spreading child pornography through social media. It's mostly been regarding clips spread without the participants' consent though.
Not sure whether other countries go by the age of sexual consent, but I've personally never heard any other definition of child porn than "sexually explicit/suggestive content involving people under the age of 18". Assuming that's valid everywhere, then it would indeed be child pornography since the Dane was under 18.
EU-wide harmonization of such laws would be a welcome step to take before privacy-invading measures were to be taken, and such legislation definitely should address underage sexting.
At least in Germany it is a common pattern to pass controversial laws when big sporting events are happening...
> All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically.
What, even the stuff that I have end-to-end encrypted?
Even this from the first line of the post:
> The EU decided to let providers search all private chats,
Which "providers" are being referred to here?