US government demands direct police access to European biometric data. The "Enhanced Border Security Partnership" poses an unprecedented threat to civil liberties in Europe.
I think it is vital we continue to discuss it here, but at the same time my conversations with my extended family show that people overall do not share my concerns over these at all. I do not get upset, because coming from a former soviet union country, I am trying hard to understand their frame of mind ( partially to see if there is a way to counter it ) and lot of it seems to a result from a deep trust in the system.
In fact, just yesterday, the related conversation resulted in and I am paraphrasing 'you need to let go of some control and trust the system.'
I will never understand this level of trust in your own government institutions.
Disclaimer: I’m totally against any normalization of the collection/sharing of biometric data. But just to play Devil’s Advocate:
Let’s say I’m a boring white midwestern HVAC contractor with a mortgage and 2.5 kids. Big Bad China acquires a picture of my face and my fingerprints. Also my DNA, why not, just for argument’s sake! I never plan to visit China. How does this biometric sharing affect me, my rights, my safety, monetarily or otherwise? Connect the dots for me because it’s hard for me to argue the privacy angle if I can’t even explain the danger of a simple scenario like this.
The typical counter argument goes something like China installs a webcam in your bathroom and broadcasts the stream on purely national TV. How does that affect you? It’s just some personal video that’s never going impinge on your life.
Another way of putting it: all personal information should by default be kept private, until there’s a specific need from you for that information to be processed by known people.
This doesn't actually answer the question, though, as people value their home interior video privacy a lot more than they value their biometric privacy.
- Your data could be sold by China to your insurer.
- Or they could buy your insurer and use the information they have on you.
- They could use it for some corporate espionage.
- Perhaps you or your boss need to be convinced that you should sell Chinese HVAC equipment instead of Korean.
- Maybe one of your kids will get married to someone from China and you have been critical of their government online. They may visit China and be punished for that.
> Disclaimer: I’m totally against any normalization of the collection/sharing of biometric data. But just to play Devil’s Advocate:
> Let’s say I’m a boring white midwestern HVAC contractor with a mortgage and 2.5 kids. Big Bad China acquires a picture of my face and my fingerprints.
1) If you cannot imagine the potential problems, then why do you believe the contents of your disclaimer?
2) Let's say you are not "a boring white midwestern HVAC contractor"
The problem with a totally separate government having your data, is that they are not bound by your government's laws. What prevents a foreign government from selling your data to private entities, which then resell these data to criminals? Or, a more likely scenario, said foreign government isn't as careful about vetting who has access to that kind of data (because they don't have the GDPR there), leading to criminals from your own country getting access to it?
That is: even if you never plan to visit the remote country in question, the data can come back to your country (or a third country you might want to visit). And it might not even get there intact: what happens if your fingerprints get mislabeled as someone else's?
I very much share your concern and frustration, but even I take convenience over principle in some matters. I happily use TSA PreCheck, despite hating the fact that you have to put yourself on a government list to restore a level of dignity while traveling that the same government took away in the first place.
It's a constant struggle with a lot to sacrifice for your principles. See Richard Stallman for an example of someone who no doubt endures many inconveniences in his life in his ardent avoidance of nonfree software.
Global Entry and TSA Pre probably saved me >100 hours of queuing in the last 3-5 years, and I imagine I’d also have missed a handful of flights had I needed to endure the regular checkpoint queues in order to make a tight connection.
It’s definitely a concern for me too, but like you, convenience trumps principle sometimes and travel is already unpleasant enough that “taking a stand” and making travel more unpleasant (including being an “Opt Out” at checkpoints and making the TSA do a pat down) isn’t something I’ve been willing to do.
Likewise, this will become a mandatory integration for states to participate in VWP starting in 2027, and there is a LOT of additional burden for those states citizens in having to apply for and be granted a U.S. visa over and above just using ESTA - paperwork, >= 10x filing fees, an Embassy or Consulate visit, then getting your passport (collection) after the visa has been inserted. Plus at the end of the day the U.S. is getting all the same information via the slower process.
I would guess most European states will integrate and this will be short-lived indignation (a “storm in a teacup”) followed by it being the new normal.
There it is.
We make our choices and our children live with the consequences.
I have always opted out of TSA body scans and have been a 100k flier. Frequent fliers know which cattle lanes to use for no scans. Arrive a few minutes early and they even wipe your hands with a cloth and let you know if your hands are dirty.
I always opt out ( with one time exception when my employer submitted stuff for me without even letting me know - HR.. ) and I tend to get a speech about how it is safe and I get more radiation getting on the plane ( which is technically true ), but I always truthfully respond that my family has some history for cancer ( and radiation is cumulative ) and I hope he considers this as he continues his employment.
I am thankful that I do not have a job that requires me to travel much and I can allow myself to do a roadtrip ( and it helps that I actually enjoy stopping by biggest corn castle ).
I absolutely understand the parent. It is not impossible that I would react similarly if I had to fly more often.
We're bothered, but maybe not enough to do away with visiting family/friends/coworkers/conferences/cons/national parks/etc. Also having various privileges (white, Western European, male, middle class, etc) dulls the concerns.
Or, maybe closer to home, that several European states were complicit in helping the US to kidnap, torture and imprison their innocent citizens (the euphemism for accidentally kidnapping and torturing some completely random person is "erroneous rendition" https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10618427).
Am I the only one that doesn't really consider "fingerprints and facial images" to be biometric data? When I think "biometric", I think hair samples, DNA, blood type, even though I know fingerprints and eye color are technically biometric.
Just cutting some hair won't do it. Given that DNA is in the follicle, you would have to extract a hair, e.g. pull it out. Doing so without consent or demanding it is a violation of medical ethics and/or assault.
I think you might be conflating biometrics (literally measurements of your biology) with confidentiality? And it's not just you, the public discussions and system designs around these often seem to confuse this as well. There are two broad topics around biometrics, but they intersect a bit.
One topic is around the dependability and practicality of such metrics as authenticators. The other topic is around surveillance and anonymity. The overlap is in the question of whether we have control over whether we are being authenticated or not. When used in a transactional system, we need to couple our authenticated identity with some positive action to give consent, i.e. that we want the transaction to occur and we accept the responsibilities of being one party to the transaction. In a surveillance system, we are being identified and our movements or actions attributed to us whether we want to or not.
Both topics have a potential for false positives and false negatives. Can someone "steal" my identity by impersonating me and causing transactions or other activities to be attributed to me without my knowledge? Or can someone through violence or coercion cause me to participate in these transactions or other activities against my will? Does the introduction of the authentication system reduce the risks or make them worse?
To what degree can we live our lives without displaying our identity to the public at large and/or while being able to assume some of our movements or activities can be kept confidential? We can choose whether to have our names or ID numbers emblazoned on our clothes. We can choose how often to present other non-biological identifiers like payment cards or mobile phones. It is much less practical to conceal our externally visible biometrics. The databases combining our biometrics and other identifiers continually shift the balance here, as it becomes ever easier to tie different observations together without our consent.
To be honest, I am not even sure whether I should care about the biometrics access being discussed in the original post. Generally, international travelers are already exposing their identities and movements not just at border controls but also via commercial bookings and interactions throughout their travel. I think I am more disgusted by the commercial brokers trying to create total information awareness of consumers than I am of governments monitoring border travel. The commercial brokers are trying to create a much finer-grained record of activities for everybody.
Its easier for someone to obtain and identify your DNA than it is your fingertips or even your face.
Just think of how much you leave around all the time. If that's all on records with facial images, your face is certainly an identifiable metric of your biology.
Obtain perhaps, but identify no. Identification requires a database of samples to match against. Way more FP and FI databases than DNA databases, so not much to use as a gallery for identification..
> Obtain perhaps, but identify no. Identification requires a database of samples to match against.
Those databases already exists (just look at the MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, 23andMe etc companies). Furthermore, DNA has the advantage, that you can find someone via relatives. The person to be identified doesn't have to be in the database. It's sufficient if his brother or father is in that db. Afaik this is not the case for fingerprints.
Generally correct, but it's interesting that identical twins have similar but distinct fingerprints. The exact prints are different, but they tend to have the same broader patterns of print.
Fair point about those existing DNA databases, however I still think there is a sigbificant difference between “opt-in” databases, like MyHeritage, and the FP/FI databases in scope here (the OP) where its law mandated registration in case of travel (Schengen) or asylum, visa etc. There are a lot of the latter, and its not exactly opt-in or delete on request
That's a surprising statement to read. All your examples allow for statically significant unique identification (of a person).
I think that's where the threat actually lies. I'm equally worried about traces I leave with my Visa/MasterCard than those I leave with my uncovered face or fingerprints.
The main difference being that I can easily control the traces I leave with my cards, less so the traces I leave with my ohone, and it takes a significant effort to lkit traces from my face or fingers.
Say no and hang up. If they start something, respond in kind, and ask our allied countries to stand united.
The US needs the world far, far more than the world needs the US, and it's time the world realizes this. Forcing this nation of war-criminals and foreign policy bullies in line is long overdue.
It is possible that you are missing a developing new axis of powers forming, which is part of the reason why those policies are slowly being implemented. As a globe, we are being divided into spheres of influence and US/EU happens to be one of those.
Starting from WWI western world is moving from what was basically complete freedom of movement to a corral. Think the best response would be something in line of go fuck yourself. No visa waiver - be my guest and have your tourism industry go belly up. Once tourism industry goes economic cooperation might eventually follow. Maybe this will teach our masters a bit.
P.S. Being originally from USSR freedom of movement was one of the things I've admired greatly about the west. After 30 years it is being vaporized in front of my eyes. This is insanity and is very sad. And we are doing this crap to ourselves. Osamas and Putins of the world must be having time of their lives.
I hope we see some strong posturing from EU leaders. It seems like Europe is trying at least to fight in the right direction on this, while the anglosphere slowly becomes another version of China.
This is asuming that EU will work in their (our) interest.
For me it seems that most of EU works with interests of other actors, especially US, from Ursula downwards, so they might give the US access and ignore their own people... again.
Where is this coming from? The vast majority of what the EU does doesn't concern anyone but the EU, and is sometimes actively hurting non-EU entities like American corporations. Be it the GDPR, the Digital Markets or Services Acts, the Covid recovery funds, farming subsidies, various projects to improve random hyper local infrastructure, etc etc etc.
Idk if you've been asleep the last 10 months regarding the politics of Ukraine, which isn't even an EU member. VdL bends over backwards on anything the US asks of her.
How she even became the head of the EU council can only be explained with corruption.
And that's also the main reason why the right is on the rise on the EU, because they don't want an undemocratic overlord. The irony is real.
Yep... people are getting really fed up with the current state of the EU (especially the unelected leadership), and even when locally some "alternative" is elected, they go along with whatever the heads in EU tell them...
Considering the history, sooner or later another failed artist will represent a real "alternative", and considering i'm a slav in the first line of slavic countries the the south, I'd prefer some EU-wide changes before that happens.
> Yep... people are getting really fed up with the current state of the EU (especially the unelected leadership
You're going to have to provide a source here. All the polls I've seen have indicated that the vast majority of EU citizens support thr actions of the EU with regards to Ukraine (helping them with financial, humanitarian and military aid, and hosting their refugees) and Covid (the relief funds).
The vast majority of EU people and member states support helping Ukraine over bending over backwards to Putin's genocidal regime.
von der Leyen is a terribly incompetent person, and shouldn't be allowed anywhere close to a place with power. Nonetheless the current EU actions are in line with what the EU wants. The only exceptions are annoying fringe groups, and Hungary which is ruled by such a fringe group.
> Ukraine, which isn't even an EU member
So fuck 'em and let them die at the hands of a brutal invader or do you mean something else? Appeasement doesn't work, and the countries that have the most to lose if Ukraine falls, like Poland and Romania, are very much in the EU.
> No visa waiver - be my guest and have your tourism industry go belly up.
Unfortunately for your plan, Yellowstone will still be Yellowstone, and New York will still be New York.
I agree with your attitude, but this "well, let them hang themselves" attitude just means the US ends up with the money and the data (via a slower path). A lack of visa waiver won't significantly negate tourism; there are a lot of attractions in the US.
I understand before ww1 passports werent even a thing, it was a "temporary" measure.
However, freedom of movement within the EU works flawlessly, its just that once youre in a new place and want to settle down, the old habits prevail, opening a bank account and such should be easy, but good luck with that.
Probably the most interesting part of this is if states don’t integrate by 2027 they will no longer be eligible for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). That adds a lot of friction for citizens of that state to travel to the U.S. for any reason.
I mean it sounds like you’d be giving up all the same data just through a slower process.
From the presentation:
For all travellers (and asylum seekers) before entry into USA
Hit/ No hit query of the foreign databases
On hit: retrieval of existing data record in pull procedure
A part of visa issuance by a U.S. Embassy is a background check against both US databases and those of the local country. I believe all visa appointments perform digital capture of fingerprints, face, along with anything on an e-Passport.
So this gets the U.S. nearer to equivalence in VWP with what they can already do with the visa processes?
If you don’t want the U.S. to hold your biometric information it sounds like you just won’t be traveling to that country any longer.
Exactly and you shouldn’t have traveled to the US after 2007 if the biometrics was your concern. Fingerprints and photo have been captured by the immigration officer at the port of entry, regardless of visa type, since that time.
Received a long term B1 visa in 2011, after going to the embassy and had the biometrics taken. Reapplied in July 2022, and was able to get a waiver for the in-person interview, as the embassy still had my biometrics (my travel would have been delayed by several months otherwise)
So the change is the “watch list” lookup / handover of records for hits. Hate to be in the camp saying that “if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” but I honestly assumed that those checks were already done.
So what? If the rules are the same for all eu countries and with reciprocity, then the US will be isolated, and any eu-us business will be harder to do, and EU will do more trade with other countries, which also won't give biometric data to US, and US will be locked out of them too.
Sure, but you’re going to disclose all of the same biometric and criminal database information should you then do the U.S. visa application, so this does nothing to improve your privacy or stop the U.S. having this information.
You need to travel to the U.S. with these changes? You still use ESTA and VWP, and the U.S. pulls what they need via an IT integration.
You need to travel to the U.S. and these changes get a “No” from EU states? You go through the visa process for tourism or business, they get your biometrics and background checks through that process. It takes longer. It costs more money. It is more onerous to you as an applicant.
Every time you cross the border as an alien you are fingerprinted and photos are taken (exceptions are given for diplomats).
In short, it’s the same outcome for U.S. travel and your only way to stop the U.S. having this information is to not travel there…
If you don't travel to usa, they don't get this data. Their country, their rules,... if they only let other countries alone, the world would be a lot nicer place.
To be honest I am already avoiding to travel to the US as much as I can. No appetite for hours of queues at security and passport controls. Their airports are worst than many third world countries.
It varies massively by airport and by time of year, and you just go into “Non U.S. Citizens and Permanent Residents” (there’s almost never a “Europe” line).
On airports, there are a set of U.S. airports like Los Angeles which always seem to have long queues, and a few where CBP is more prone to asking 20 questions of everyone.
On times of year, visiting cities when a big convention is happening can be much slower, as can traveling near a holiday like Thanksgiving.
I’ve witnessed and stood in a 3 hour queue at San Francisco and that was my #1 motivator to go get Global Entry sorted.
I remember when I went to the UK for the first time, I knew the language, but was never confronted live with a London accent.
I did not know the postal code system(every little borough out there belongs to London, but has zones and postal codes) , nor did I know the public transport options.
I simply went there to visit a friend which had moved there, that is all.
So just before the transit area after coming off the plane, a ginger and a brown haired fellow stopped me and started asking questions, without showing a badge or identifying themselves.
They were plain clothed officers, guessing they are police was rather easy, they had very bad choice of çlothing style.
So they ask where are you going and why.
Purpose of stay and lenght, how will you get there and blabla, many follow up questions.
Do you have a return ticket, whats her name.
I told them, thats your job to find out and I intend to travel by cab, am I good to go now.
They let me go on my way.
This is the kinda people who will be dealing with our data, hell no.
I will fill out whatever if I ever wanna go to the us, but I prefer to not hand over any data upfront.
One question that always seems to be unclear and insufficiently negotiated is reciprocity. What is the US going to offer in return. If they do offer to reciprocate, it actually needs to be delivered before the deal is live.
That said, I think it is a shitty deal for these leaky, insecure, bad faith entities to be able to negotiate off to the side with our sensitive personal data like this.
Probably, and the EU was talking a big game about that a few years ago. But between Nordstream 2 and the Ukraine war the EU seems to have shown how willing it actually is to decouple...
Exactly. Even when the harm to Europe is as blatant as the examples you cited, the cowardly leadership does nothing. This lack of representation for citizens' interests will lead to a lot of resentment and perhaps even extremism, as it has in the past.
But is it really? The EU can just respond with: "no". And while that would hurt the economy of the EU it would also hurt the economy of the US. I do not really see any reason for the EU to say yes to this unless the EU gets something in return.
Nord Stream AG is a Swiss holding company. Try a little harder next time. And the Russians have only been hostile towards the far-right controlled Ukrainian government (which murdered over 10k of its own Russian-speaking civilians in the Eastern oblasts before February 2022), not Germany.
> What is Germany getting in return for having Nordstream 2 blown up by the US/allies?
Nothing, because that didn’t happen. (Most likely, Russia blew up the not-being-used pipe as a capacity demonstration aimed at Baltic Pipe, to raise the perceived cost by government decisionmakers of continuing support for Ukraine; they probably also juice the propaganda about the US being behind it, to promote internal strife in the West between the people that can be influenced by that propaganda and their governments.)
> Besides 10x energy prices and its industrial economic base set back 10 years.
Since NS2 wasn’t being used, that didn’t happen as a result of it being destroyed, either.
But that doesn't say that America or anyone else was behind it either.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence after all.
Theres no conclusive proof that any particular party was behind it, but given that a single pipe was left (something America wouldn't do if it was looking to take out Germanys capacity to use Russian gas) the only obvious conclusion was that it was Russia.
Of course it doesn't say that explicitly-- are you unfamiliar with the purpose that the Washington Post serves?
You think because one pipeline survived that it was intentional? After all of the US disasters in the Middle East you somehow still believe in its omnipotence?
And one pipeline surviving means little when the new pipelines that were destroyed had much better economics for Russia (and Germany, for that matter).
We have no public evidence yet to know with absolute certainty who is responsible. But an honest assessment of the motives, benefits, costs, not to mention blatant declarations of Biden and State Department flunkies make it 99% clear who was responsible. Whether the British pulled the trigger or some other errand boy is of little consequence.
> We have no public evidence yet to know with absolute certainty who is responsible.
correct.
> But an honest assessment of the motives, benefits, costs, not to mention blatant declarations of Biden and State Department flunkies make it 99% clear who was responsible.
They were clearly not talking about physical attacks when they talked about that, but I guess Russian propaganda is going to hook onto whatever it can.
> Whether the British pulled the trigger or some other errand boy is of little consequence.
But it could easy be the Russians who pulled the trigger, they easily had the most to gain and the easiest way to pull it off too. Russia gains a lot by destroying the pipelines.
- they threaten a number of NATO countries energy infrastructure indirectly
- they attempt to force Germany into certifying the new pipeline which would be a big win for Russia
- they get out of any contractual clauses they had about non supply of gas.
LOL, now that you bring up these absurd arguments (again), I remember you.
"they attempt to force Germany into certifying the new pipeline which would be a big win for Russia"
So Russia blew up its own pipelines to force Germany into certifying those pipelines?
"they get out of any contractual clauses they had about non supply of gas"
No one at the Kremlin cares about contracts that are easily invalidated by acts of war and illegal sanctions.
"they threaten a number of NATO countries energy infrastructure indirectly"
-So Russia blew up its own energy infrastructure delivery to Europe (that it spent 10 billion to build and would have earned lots from) to threaten energy infrastructure indirectly?
There we go-- when presented with the illogical nature of your statements and inconvenient facts that are readily available with a Google search, you resort to the "Russian propaganda" trope. Even The Washington Post (PR firm for the US security state) is literally saying Russia didn't do it. Eventually, the "paper of record" will reveal which Western power did the deed in an "exclusive," when it's no longer relevant to decision-making, as they always do.
> There we go-- when presented with the illogical nature of your statements and inconvenient facts that are readily available with a Google search, you resort to the "Russian propaganda" trope. Even The Washington Post (PR firm for the US security state) is literally saying Russia didn't do it. Eventually, the "paper of record" will reveal which Western power did the deed in an "exclusive," when it's no longer relevant to decision-making, as they always do.
It's Russian propaganda that America did it, something you are very insistent on with literally zero evidence.
It’s impossible that it was the US that blew Nordstream, because it would have made the European allies very upset, and there is NO WAY the US wanted to make them upset.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34151395). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We're trying for something different here.
I suspect, without proof but read next paragraphs for some evidence, that the US offer their surveillance net. If EU police is searching for someone, even in our own territory, it's easier for US intelligence agencies to locate and eavesdrop on the suspect with the tech that we know.
El Pollo Carvajal [0] was arrested in Madrid, September 2021. Although it was our police that made the arrest, it was the US that provided his exact location. Some say that local authorities had no desire to catch the man, actually he had already been arrested in 2019 and "disappeared" apparently due to some bureaucratic error. If I'm not mistaken, he's awaiting extradition.
The end of terrorist band ETA [1] (that Wikipedia charmingly defines as "separatist group") happened after a continuous string of high-profile arrests in France. Again, our neighbours haven't been always very collaborative, but had no option when alerted of exact location of people in the Interpol watchlist.
Sure, I was responding to the question "what are they going to offer in return" with "probably they're already giving us something in return," it's an ongoing collaboration, only their part is not always public, so the deal seems one-sided.
Reciprocity is a well understood legal precedent when it comes to things like deportation, I can imagine the European courts asking things like this when the Feds start clamoring for access.
The USA offers to continue the free visa agreement. If that ends, for reciprocity there won't be free visas for USA travelers to Europe too. It's lose lose but one of the two parties is always going to lose more than the other one. Which one? In the case of tourism probably Europe loses more from less USA tourists because of visa friction than the USA loses from European tourists staying at home. Business? It will take more time to setup a travel but people that have to travel will travel anyway.
Business can be conducted via webex and zoom ornon neutral 3rd party grounds if need be.
I would feel sorry if american tourists would need a visa for europe, as the americans which do travel and get aroynd are the nicest people, first timers get to see the world from another perspective.
I prefer if americans travel for holidays rather than....forgive me...in military uniforms.
In theory, the European governments could always waive reciprocity on their end and continue allowing travel from the US, if that's the biggest thing stopping them from refusing. On the other hand, that wouldn't leave the US with any "consequence" for not reaching a deal.
Note that it's not at all unprecedented for US/Europe/etc travelers to be offered visa-free access without reciprocity for exactly this reason. The whole concept of "passport power" implies there are a lot of countries that give US citizens access without a visa without the US and other countries giving them the same.
Curious about free visas, as EU citizen in 2018 we had to go through full ESTA US visa approval process just to have a freakin' connecting flight in Miami to South America including paying for it, nothing free.
Its due to badly designed Miami airport compared to literally anywhere else in the world I've been, that you can't connect within 'safe' restricted zone after security checkin. No, you basically need to exit airport with all security involved (walk around checkins, go outside if you want) to get to your next flight, and walk throught all security again. At least luggage was transferred automatically, but most airports in undeveloped countries can manage that too.
It’s not especially valuable or private anyway. If you leave something everywhere you go (ie you can’t protect it without a spacesuit), and there’s nothing special about it compared to anyone else’s (in terms of economic value), it can’t be either of those things.
People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it. (There’s actual discrimination issues on this one of course, not to mention family drama…)
This is not thoughtful. Everything is somewhere, so therefore nothing is special as compared to anything? Nevertheless, businesses and dictatorships somehow find value in the information collected and organized in files and databases.
I didn't say anything about "the information collected and organized in files and databases". And I don't think businesses find your fingerprints very helpful in selling you things.
Mostly the value in tracking you comes from profiling you, i.e. building relationships between facts, mostly metadata about what you do over time. But biometrics aren't metadata and aren't what you do.
I did mention "discrimination" but redacting data in case future governments are racist isn't all that useful; they're the government, you can't hide from them, and since discrimination isn't based on real objective categories then you can't predict what it will be based on. There's no biometric for being a Cagot.
Fingerprints and DNA are valuable with regard to identifying a particular person (or to place them at a certain location, like the scene of a crime). It's easy to enter a country with someone else's cell phone. It's much harder to enter a country with someone else's fingerprints or DNA. Isn't that the goal here? To have a more reliable method identify who has entered a country?
> People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it.
That's not why people are sensitive about their DNA. It's more to do with the fact that health insurance companies could know if they are particularly susceptible to a myriad of mendelian (gene-linked) diseases and disorders "just by looking at it". Another reason to be sensitive about DNA- if my brother's DNA was found at a crime scene and my DNA was in a database like 23andMe, police could start going after my family members as suspects. This has happened.
> To have a more reliable method identify who has entered a country?
On the US’ side yes, but it’s not more reliable tracking because the US doesn’t have exit customs and so doesn’t actually verify if people have left the country again.
Though nobody’s against biometrics because of this surely? I don’t think anyone campaigns for the right to enter on fake passports. Spies maybe.
As for health insurance, there’s no country where they’re allowed to act on opinions like that, aside for asking if you’re a smoker. They’re specifically banned from genetic testing on top of that, but they wouldn’t be secretly collecting that info anyway.
Given the US has army bases all in and around Europe, more than any European country, I bet the US wouldn't comply.
It's rarely talked about, but you gotta imagine, the fact the US controls most of the land and sea is a big factor in how diplomatic issues are resolved.
In the 80s USA sent troops in italy to kidnap a terrorist that had surrendered himself to italy. They had to call up all the available carabinieri on the island to counter the USA troops.
In 2003 we (USA) kidnapped Abu Omar off the street on Italy and shipped him off to Egypt where he was tortured for years. We have vassals and client states, not allies.
Numbers like that don't mean anything out of context. Military deployments are best estimated in terms of firepower; a cruise missile battery may have a greater strategic impact than 1000 troops. Likewise, the strategic situation in the 1950s, along with its recent past and foreseeable future, was vastly different from that of the present.
You think that the US could play the army card against countries (allies) with troops in when the most spectacular failures of armed conflicts after WWII belong to the US (not least because how the US population relate to conflicts abroad, here including WWII as well)? Just to forget about the economic ties for a moment.
We are talking about a sub-set of security instruments and preventions, one of the many available, are we sure that an armed conflict - or just threat - would worth the trouble?
What Microsoft doesn't have, AWS does. Several european governments store all passenger/traveler data (including biometric photo scans at the very least) in S3.
I sincerely hope that the EU will give the appropriate but unprintable response to this request. At the time the biometric data was first collected plenty of people warned about this exact thing and we were repeatedly assured that it would never happen. Let's see if that is still true today. Never is such a long time...
I haven't been back there since 2007 and have no intention to ever go back there. I missed a couple of funerals of friends because of that but the typical 'welcome' (I use the term loosely) afforded by DHS to visitors to the USA has persuaded me that I have better things to do with my life.
The decision not to re-visit was made somewhere between the point where my shoes were confiscated because they might be used as weapons and the time when I spent 6 hours on a bridge trying to get into Canada because they could not imagine a person carrying a Dutch passport had a legitimate interest in crossing the border into Canada.
At one point I had a company in the US, spent a ton of money there annually and was seriously considering immigration, go figure.
Sorry, I did read it and by my reading it looks like a non-reciprocal request for access to a lot of EU data that isn't supposed to leave the EU at all, ever, especially not in bulk.
What alternative reading do you have?
The problem with the approach outlined in the document is that it tries to break open the EU by approaching member states individually, possibly even to access data from other member states, something that I have a serious problem with.
There is no "bulk" access to data. When visitors apply for a visa, they'd send a search request with biometric data (I assume fingerprints). Only if there was a hit - that the person was a known subject of interest such as a terrorist or wanted criminal, would any data be shared. This was outlined quite early in the linked slides.
> the time when I spent 6 hours on a bridge trying to get into Canada because they could not imagine a person carrying a Dutch passport had a legitimate interest in crossing the border into Canada.
AFAIK that only happens with planes and boats, where the transporting company is on the hook for sending you back if the border at the destination turns you away. I've driven into Canada numerous times and never encountered any sort of American checkpoint before the Canadian border. But when I get onto a ferry in America that goes to Canada, they do check my passport first before I get onto the ferry.
This was the bridge into Canada at the Sault Ste. Marie checkpoint. The traffic was backed up for a very long stretch and it is the only time I've been stopped there outbound from the USA so maybe they were looking for something specific, still, it really upset my plans at the time, and I was already pretty tired from the trip and only about 45 minutes driving time from home.
Add it to the list of authortarian demands. Many have already been waiting more than six months for the US to drop the outdated Covid vaccine requirement.
Wanna spend some time out in Gitmo because your phrasing had wrong speak?
This is the introduction to draconian policies/laws in which you have no rights to opt out of this, representation caring to uphold your rights, or courts that are principled. Wanna get out, but still have family.. oh wait better give up more rights/risk going to jail to see them in the us. (Or they'll be interrogated back at home).
The point in this post is not to criticize you, but to criticize the lack of caring that a 6 month waiting for a visa is a systematic failure in need or ability.
As a US citizen I would absolutely love that (a short, unprintable answer from the EU to the US). And would cheer if the EU were in a position to deliver this. But...
The way it looks to me (sorry, not trying to offend) is that while the EU may be an OK construct for the peacetime prosperity it is not functioning well during the times of conflict. As of today, it does not have military strength, energy security or economic strength from which it can deliver such an answer. And when you have to depend on someone else for the protection you have few options for saying "no". My 2c.
That isbthe spirit, much love from across the pond.
Here, everyone left to right were saying, this will never happen.
The people who said that are all retired wealthy, their parties still exist, let us hold them accountable.
They always say they will get something in exchange, but it is all lies, the moment you are bargaining for something in exchange, youve already lost.
Keep in mind, never give anything to the EU either, they cannot be trusted blindly either, theyre just somewhat more accountable.
If they would be the worlds superpower, I am not sure how benevolent they would be.
Everywhere on earth, the regular citizens have the same domestic nuissance, snoopi governments, all parties somehow collecting big data as if it were their business model.
Anyone who knows a lawyer, a govt tax agency worker and such will know, the data tue govt has will never be used for good, it will even be twisted in their favor.
Left or right does not matter, probably never did, if we had democracies, theycall such things bipartisan, the total left or right wing goverments had leaders like franco, pinochet, mao, stalin and such.
Anarchists keep saying the biggest atrocities were always from governments, not sure what to say about that, governmnents are always humans as well.
There is some issue at hand with power. Even in Switzerland, with its "direct democracy", the police state is quite invasive, discretly in the background.
Maybe human civilization is simply still in its infancy regarding governing the population.
100 years ago we had ww1, bit more back, feudalism etc.
The thing is that every time the EU shows any interest in integrating its military forces into a something new that would be under the control of the EU rather than individual member states, the US argues against it at both the diplomatic and PR levels. This pattern has been going on since at least the Clinton administration.
> I sincerely hope that the EU will give the appropriate but unprintable response to this request.
I hope not normally the EU just complies behind the scenes. I understand why that's unprintable but I wish they wouldn't lie to the population about how they handle this.
Exactly, there is no question that this is already in some FAANG data center in one way or another, which is the same as in possession of the US gov. They just want to formalize the deal.
Maybe have travellers sign away their biometric data as part of the visa waiver? Then the
EU can claim not to be beholden to the US (the travellers are) and the US still gets data of travellers.
The demand is for travellers only according the pdf, not for all EU citizens.
This does not seem too onerous - people working in the US from EU already have to submit to much fingerprinting, AIDS tests and what not, and you don't hear much complaining about it.
Reading through the slides, it appears that what has been discussed is sharing signature and fingerprints for travel into the USA. There is a lot of weasel words, but it's probably worth nothing that the USA currently collects this information for foreign nationals coming into the USA (as the EU does for Americans traveling into the EU). This is being done in the context of a DB query as part of the e VISA application.
It's worth noting that almost all of this is still the output of the 9/11, where US and Saudi systems did not communicate and resulted in known terrorists in Saudi Arabia being able to travel at will into the USA.
I don't like biometrics, but the hyperbole needs to be tuned down a bit here.
I know that wasn't a serious comment, saying that federal government agencies follow their mandates and never break the law.
PS I see that you have edited your comment to add a link, https://www.aclu.org/other/nsa-spying-americans-illegal. That link shows that the government illegally spys on citizens, which is the opposite of what you meant to show.
Why break the law to spy on Americans? We give all our private information out to any website that asks and shout out political opinions out into the void on Twitter. Just buy the list of people really interested in fertilizer and not farming from some data broker. Totally legal private sector transaction!
You’re right! I meant to say they can’t legally do it but Five Eyes helps them do it legally:
In other words, the NSA can only spy where it is explicitly granted permission to do so by statute. Citizens concerned about surveillance do not have to answer the question, "what law restricts the NSA's spying?" Rather, the government is required to supply an answer to the question "what law permits the NSA to spy?"
And yet, part of what Snowden leaked was that they were storing all Americans' data, somehow making the internal legal argument that searching their databases was when it became an actual search, not when they stored that information about Americans in their db.
yes an unaccountable agency that does not have to report to anyone, and can classify all of their actions under national security directives would never violate their mandate. Never..
Let me tell you about this new crypto investment I have...
Maybe this is the reason they started demanding this now, that before they could just ask Britain but because of Brexit, Britain has lost access to European biometric data?
I'm not sure that hyperbole is possible when you're discussing the necessity of having worldwide biometric "terrorist" lists that countries like Saudi Arabia would participate in.
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edit: How would you code "terrorism through public demonstrations of driving while female" or "terrorism through being Yemen?"
"Terrorism though applying for a marriage license after being mildly critical in the WaPo."
I suppose on the plus side at least they actually sentence them, some countries just lock them up in extra judicial camps or orders a drone strike and never says a word.
It's so horrible. They probably think that they're helping atheists by sending them to the afterlife early. But what if the atheist is right and when you die, your last moment alive becomes frozen in your consciousness forever.
>> what if the atheist is right and when you die, your last moment alive becomes frozen in your consciousness forever.
I’m sorry what? Is this the predominant/common belief among other atheists? Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken with is more likely to think you just turn off, everything goes black, back to the void of unlife.
I’m not sure what others believe. But I bet that right before you die, it feels like you are running towards a light at the end of a tunnel. But for each step you take, you shrink by half. Making a moment feel like an eternity.
This is misinformation. Saudi Arabia is not well regarded when it comes to religious freedom, and it has a law against apostasy (when a Muslim renounces their beliefs), which is a capital offense, but they don't classify atheists as terrorists.
All these PEP, sanction lists, ofac monitoring, financial sanction lists already exist and every company with a worthwile monetary turnover ever facing an audit runs these background checks.
The laws are there, they are called the aml directives, the lists are there.
And most of the entries there are provided by eitjer uk or us entities, youll usually find foreign military personells data there, dob, rank, id number, name but not much else.
It is bit of a joke as many muslim people have similar names and joe shmoes get flagged for nothing very often.
Meanwhile, the people on these lists are very high up within their own government hierarchy, they probably have 5 differe t passports.
Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication.
Yea, monitor peps, fugitives and terrorists, but find a way without combing through the whole worlds innocent citizens.
> Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication.
And surely this critically sensitive data is not left on a shared location with loose permissions, or sent around as an email attachment, right? ...right?
I'm worried about the ability of this data to enable authoritarianism and I'm also worried about it being handled by those with the competence of the average government official.
"Never blame on malice what you can blame on stupidity", however the problem is government has both of those in spades.
Critical sensitive data? You can access the lists directly in several different formats, all publically available... Wouldn't be much of a sanctions list if you couldn't
That "just" is holding an enormous weight there, friend. Have you seen the query responses themselves to know whether they're not not getting back bulk info? And have you seen the giant private-public systems they'll want to funnel this info into?
Just from my own research on surveillance, I got back a bunch of records in a FOIA lawsuit that included the the query results of a bunch of license plate scans. Large XML blobs. For whatever reason, they didn't redact a few thousand pages of those query results.
A lot more info was in those query responses than you'd imagine. For example, SSNs of people whose license plates matched the first three digits of a "person of interest"'s car.
Mind you, this was after them arguing for months, with affidavits, that they don't have audit logs. So, yeah.
On the related topic of Arabic names, I currently visiting Tunisia. The other day I asked one of my friends how to spell her name using Latin letters, and she said “you can use one C, two Cs, one K, it doesn’t matter.” Now I’m wondering how many people have problems because their names have been casually spelled a few different ways and linked to someone else’s name in accident.
This is a problem with all transliterated languages.
It’s worse for Arabs because until modern times they didn’t have “conventional” surnames. Their name was a composition of a given name plus that of their forefathers’, often appended with “Abu” (meaning father in Arabic), and sometimes the addition of a clan name. In my ancestral home of Egypt, the government often standardized everyone about 100-150 years ago with whatever names they were carrying at the time.
So you could be completely unrelated to someone and have a partially matching last name.
Combine that with America’s gleefully racist views of Arabs - particularly after 9/11 - and you have a recipe for disaster with no-fly lists.
There is nothing scientific about anti-money laundering. It is one of the ways modern nations hang themselves with self-inflictes inefficiencies for very little gains. Because it's run by police organisations, you cannot criticise it as you would be labelled as a friend of terrorists.
I wish we lived in a world where our governments had integrity, prioritized the interests of the masses, and could be trusted to use powers like this in pursuit of those interests. Sadly we don’t.
They executed shia cleric for being... shia cleric. If it would help them catch them they would put him on such a list to get similar persons deported from host countries.
the problem with such treaties is they are very shady in their wording and if there is a possibility to interpret it in this direction it will be interpreted in this direction
> (as the EU does for Americans traveling into the EU)
This doesn't seem true unless the US citizen is resident in a Schengen area country or (as a technicality) is also an EU/Schengen area citizen, as the EU seems slightly more in favor of government collection of biometric data for automated immigration purposes. I'm not sure about the reverse, as even the CBP seems to be moving towards facial recognition in place of fingerprint data, but it seems like most non-US/Canadian visitors are required to provide fingerprints.
That's changing from May 2023 with 'ETIAS'. "non-EU visitors to the block, including UK nationals since Brexit, will need to register information about themselves prior to travel. As well as passport details, automated barriers at borders will eventually gather biometric information such as facial image data and fingerprints. ETIAS will be mandatory for citizens of such countries as the UK, United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada".
Yeah, we should 'trust' them after they lost the biometric data for all of the Afghanis they fingerprinted. I was going to have my visa application but I guess I'll defer it.
> It's worth noting that almost all of this is still the output of the 9/11, where US and Saudi systems did not communicate and resulted in known terrorists in Saudi Arabia being able to travel at will into the USA.
The intelligence community missed a lot of clues right at their finger tips that could have prevented 9/11. Do you think biometric tracking would have prevented 9/11? Because it sure sounds like it.
Your thinking seems to be based on the idea that "the government" are the good guys. This is extremely naive - and you even mention an example of a government that does not respect basic human rights.
These tools will be abused and must be rolled backed to save freedom and democracy. Authoritarian states working together on a techno-based total control vision is a very bad development.
Thinking about it, I do not understand how any neutral person would take your position - it reads like astroturfing propaganda work.
The "but we just do what the others do" claim (which is afaik false) also made this seem fishy to me.
Especially as every hacker knows: When there is data, this data will be abused, sooner or later. There hasn't been any recorded exception to this rule. Anywhere. Ever. It's like a law of nature.
That's why the zeroes rule of data protection reads: Do not produce data. Only not existing data can't be abused.
> […] but it's probably worth nothing that the USA currently collects this information for foreign nationals coming into the USA (as the EU does for Americans traveling into the EU).
Such legislation would basically allow syphoning off all the data of everyone from the EU databases.
They could (and would) just go through all possible name combination an see if it's a hit (I'm sure there will be no safeguards in place for that; oh, whoops, the British did this already when Brexit happened).
The precious data will then be stored in a "commercial cloud" service. What could possibly go wrong here?...
> It's worth noting that almost all of this is still the output of the 9/11, where US and Saudi systems did not communicate and resulted in known terrorists in Saudi Arabia being able to travel at will into the USA.
> I don't like biometrics, but the hyperbole needs to be tuned down a bit here.
The entire official response to 9/11 is the hyperbole, not the criticism of those measures.
This is yet another violation of the forth Amendment right to privacy by the United States federal government as outlined by the Bill of Rights which applies to all people, not just US citizens and is self-evident and inalienable. Democracy worldwide is in absolute shambles as the United States government abandons the rule of law in favor of absolute dictatorship.
Unfortunately the First is the only Amendment that still exists to some extent, the others are long time broken in court, by federal and local government and police forces.
Whether it's good local privacy laws in your country or a good privacy-respecting TOS from a company, both are basically worthless when a bigger entity comes barging into the picture.
So your government collects biometric data but passes laws promising not to misuse it... you may very well find that those promises are worth less than dirt when a country with leverage over your own starts making demands that your government feels obliged or coerced to obey.
Or you give lots of your personal data to a software company that promises privacy in their TOS. Great.. until that company gets bought out by the likes of Google or Facebook, then those promises evaporate and good luck doing anything about it.
The solution is to never trust any promises of privacy, and don't hand over personal data to anybody unless it's taken from you at gunpoint. It doesn't matter what promises are given, because all promises can be broken with enough leverage.
I recommend that Europeans petition their governments to delete such databases now, so that compliance with American demands simply won't be possible. Delete the databases now so your governments can't fold to pressure later.
Even if you're certain America today and into the indeterminate future has no leverage over your country, can't subvert your elections, bribe or blackmail your politicians, threaten sanctions or worse, then you still have to worry about American spies simply stealing that data.
Such private data should never be collected in the first place. You may as well stack up gold bars in your home, in plain view of street-level windows. Such concentrations of data/wealth are asking for trouble. Get rid of it now and you won't have to worry about keeping it secure in the future, no matter what world events may unfold.
Understandable position, but I think you should be aware that the US Government is capable of moving fast and decisively in rare but unpredictable circumstances. Only 44 days elapsed between 2001/9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act on 2001/10/25.
Things usually don't change that fast, but nobody can truly predict the geopolitical landscape even half a year into the future.
I get the sense you do not quite understand how much essentially all of Europe is a vassal state of the group of people that also has a stranglehold on America.
I am inside the US and have been inside and lived in many countries. As an immigrant from Asia, I am happy most in the US and so are millions of permanent immigrants including tens of thousands from Europe every year :)
That's because the US allowed Europe to do social spending instead of military spending in order to keep them from going Communist. And anyway, the result was a monstrously armed US and a defenseless Europe, so it was ultimately a win-win for America.
The US wanted to block communism for sure but we aren't organized enough to do subtle things in Europe. We didn't "let you" choose social safety nets over military spending, I say that in part because I've been hearing about insufficient euro military spending for many years. We must have advocated for block commies and military spending. ;-) The US must have tried to suppress communist parties in Italy etc after ww2, probably did terrible things.
The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. And what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society was created by Rhodes and his principal trustee, Lord Milner, and continues to exist to this day. To be sure, this secret society is not a childish thing like the Ku Klux Klan, and it does not have any secret robes, secret handclasps, or secret passwords. It does not need any of these, since its members know each other intimately. It probably has no oaths of secrecy nor any formal procedure of initiation. It does, however, exist and holds secret meetings, over which the senior member present presides. At various times since 1891, these meetings have been presided over by Rhodes, Lord Milner, Lord Selborne, Sir Patrick Duncan, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Lord Lothian, and Lord Brand. They have been held in all the British Dominions, starting in South Africa about 1903; in various places in London, chiefly 175 Piccadilly; at various colleges at Oxford, chiefly All Souls; and at many English country houses such as Tring Park, Blickling Hall, Cliveden, and others.
This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. All of these terms are unsatisfactory, for one reason or another, and I have chosen to call it the Milner Group. Those persons who have used the other terms, or heard them used, have not generally been aware that all these various terms referred to the same Group.
It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Group is of such significance that evidence of its existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look. This evidence I have sought to point out without overly burdening this volume with footnotes and bibliographical references. While such evidences of scholarship are kept at a minimum, I believe I have given the source of every fact which I mention. Some of these facts came to me from sources which I am not
permitted to name, and I have mentioned them only where I can produce documentary evidence available to everyone. Nevertheless, it would have been very difficult to write this book if I had not received a certain amount of assistance of a personal nature from persons close to the Group. For obvious reasons, I cannot reveal the names of such
persons, so I have not made reference to any information derived from them unless it was information readily available from other sources.
...
I should say a few words about my general attitude toward this subject. I approached the subject as a historian. This attitude I have kept. I have tried to describe or to analyze, not to praise or to condemn. I hope that in the book itself this attitude is maintained. Of course I have an attitude, and it would be only fair to state it here. In general, I agree with the goals and aims of the Milner Group. I feel that the British way of ...
Ineffective is an ungenerous appraisal, when we consider what the world looked like mid 19th century when this project got started, and how it does now. They were quite effective up to the demise of USSR. The entire world speaks English.
William Engdahl's book Gods of Money [ch. 18 - Theft of a Nation] addresses the period you mention and what was happening. There was also an ideological shift in this period, since after the end of Cold War, Neo-Conservatives have been (and remain) in ideological charge. The Wolfowitz Doctrine always struck me as decidedly un-Anglo given its willfully provocative stance, lacking any nuance or subtlety. In fact the behavior of US post Cold War remains somewhat perplexing, even in terms of purely American national interests. There may have been a regime change.
In the mid 19th century, the British Empire was peaking as the largest empire in history. It was a long road to get to that point, and this secret society was created as the Empire was just beginning its decline.
The 20th century saw the rise of American military, economic, and cultural imperialism, which carried Anglo-American culture further as the British Empire declined relatively.
Sure, I'll concede that there are shady people in government trying to do things that are broadly objectionable and sometimes illegal, but to think this means certain individuals or secret societies have a "stranglehold" on global politics or economics goes much too far. There are far too many factors at play for a small group of people to wield the level of outsize power necessary to guide these processes. It's really a very large and ever-changing group of people who "control everything", and this happens in a highly uncoordinated manner.
Just once I want to find out the vast shadowy conspiracy controlling everything is the Hare Krishnas, or the Mormons or... the Armenian Mafia. The Phoebus lightbulb cartel. A coven of witches. Anyone but "the Jews." Again.
Even the current moral panic and conspiracy complex around transgendered people leads to anti-semitism if you follow the strings and thumbtacks.
Yeah, one would think post-Brexit and post-pandemic and post-Russian invasion of Ukraine people would in general be more aware of interdependence in trade, finance, manufacturing, etc. but apparently not. (Yes, they did say that before WWI, and today it's a million times more intertwined)
It still matters game theoretically who loses more on not having a trade, and US having the reserve currency means that it has clearly more power over EU than the other way around.
While without swaps between central banks there will (probably) be more issues in non-domestic funding markets, the whole EU economy isn't just depending on the swap line between the ECB and the Fed.
HN is on the small government side only insofar as it relates to tech legislation and adjacent regulations. It's pretty typically left-leaning California-esque politics otherwise.
Well it's look how Americans are big on freedom for themselves, but view people in other countries as something like movie extras. The most extreme example of this is the emerging nationalist caucus which has elevated hypocrisy to an art form and has every intention of leveraging similar tactics against its domestic population.
> (1) find how many European military bases there are on US soil
To do what? Counter the Canadian threat to US American territorial integrity? Prevent war between California and ethnic Nevadans? Monitor unmanaged flows of migrants from unstable regions? Hmm, well maybe that one.
But really, one of the great blessings of the US is a lack of any home-front excitement, which makes this comparison pretty silly. Not that that disagrees with the hypotheses that the US is a world empire and the EU's present existence is predicated on US military size and operations.
Right, so what for are the US military bases on European soil then? (Please spare me the part about protecting Europe from outside threats story). Would they leave if we asked nicely enough? Like Pretty please? Would it really take just that?
They probably would, and a lot of US forces left after the end of the old cold war. Right now, not sure a majority/the median voter in Europe actually wants the US to leave, though.
I want to believe you they would, but I wasn't born yesterday. I'm within less than 2-hours drive from two such US military bases that have nuclear weapons deployed there. US military bases are considered US soil de-facto, they don't need to ask permission to do anything. They can launch an attack on anyone without consulting first with the host country. Yet, on paper, we're sovereign.
They've been plenty of protests in Europe over this matter this year, but they won't show them on CNN, that's for sure.
In some cases, raising the rent will do it [0]. This one looks like political brinksmanship gone wrong for all sides, and the article suggests that it's being undone right now.
Random citizen asking obviously does nothing, but foreign base COs are always desperately trying to keep their forces on best behavior to minimize frustration. That's not easy when you import a bunch of guys in the age range that most often causes trouble, give them significant spending money, and remove them from past anchoring influences. It's worse when the receiving society is more orderly; I have Japan in mind.
Fighting against those problems is that all political leadership generally benefits from the arrangements. The foreign host nation gets economic activity and some amount of bargaining power, and the US gets a location that obviously is helpful for some strategic objective.
>Right, so what for are the US military bases on European soil then? (Please spare me the part about protecting Europe from outside threats story).
An anomalous, peaceful Europe is the water that you're swimming in, and I'm trying to point out that it's wet. I recognize the limited prospects of the endeavor. Though, if it's the outside part you're rejecting, I'll acknowledge my imprecise wording. Russia is the outside threat, being outside the Western European culture that is defended, but threats come from within Europe too.
> Not that that disagrees with the hypotheses that the US is a world empire and the EU's present existence is predicated on US military size and operations.
The USA is rapidly losing that status, though. Its European bases were a holdover from the Second World War, extended by the Cold War - their presence should not be seen as any indication of its current political status.
In the last 20 years the USA has involved its allies into multiple pointless unwinnable wars. Human rights in the USA have been significantly eroded, and many values essential to modern society are currently being undermined. Additionally, Trump's presidency has done significant damage to a large number of diplomatic relations and resulted not only in widespread doubt about its democratic process, but a genuine coup attempt.
Meanwhile, during the same 20 years the European Union and China have risen in power significantly - and both are making significant effort to curtail the power the USA has over them. Those military bases exist because the USA is still somewhat of an ally and the EU has real threats right on its border - as long as the USA is not actively hostile towards the EU, having direct access to the firepower of a gun-drunk nation is quite convenient.
Europeans want to vacation in the US. The US demands biometric authentication upon crossing the border. So you either give them that data or the US stops letting Europeans in.
And I doubt Europe is going to be any better at not demanding biometric data than the US is, because Europe has the same underlying incentives to do so (i.e. a restrictive immigration system, a large portion of the population who want to NIMBY entire races of people, and a large body of laws to enforce).
The US needs relationship with EU citizens just as much as the other way around. Or even more, like in the case of people like me (I rather avoid the US after being there several times and experienced the mentality). The vacations are especially weak argument for sharing highly personal data with an entity that is prone to repeatedly and shamelessly abusing it, misusing it.
Will the relationship being more difficult if not yielding to the demands? Ok then. We are not made of cotton candy to melt in a drop of rain that easily when some difficulty comes along, especially if it is a bureaucracy thingy. The vacations will be a bit more difficult - for those attracted by the US instead of beautiful spots elsewhere. Business relations too, of course, but that one has double edge actually.
We already have biometric passports in the EU. Why the need to collect biometric data when I have it on me and in my passport as well? This is worse than PII, it should be covered by data protection laws like the GDPR.
I don’t think the EU minds the US having access to EU biometric data as long as citizens choose to give it to the US directly. To have them lift it out of our databases without any manual actions seems ridiculous.
EU doesn't enforce fingerprints scan on the border most of the time. It's very strange, as all the infrastructure is there, passports and alien ids have fingerprints included in them, there are fingerprint-scanning machines on border crossing points, yet I'm yet to see it being used ever.
The European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS) will be in force by November 2023. 'The completely electronic system will keep track of visitors who do not require a full visa to enter Schengen Zone countries for the purposes of travel for up to 90 days'.
Sounds like we can either have nice things and demand better of leadership, or not have nice things and let leadership go fallow. Losing faith in leadership means the whole thing falls apart anyways. I for one think the former is the way to go.
This is very correct. However, I would amend your solution: the solution is modern encryption and open source. These two in conjunction allow you to verify trust.
ToS is like HR: they both exist to protect only the company.
That could go to the supreme court, maybe violates the 4th amendment?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
If nothing else, it definitely violates the spirit of the second amendment. My digital self should be as secure and protected as my physical brain under the eyes of law.
That's true about rights inside the US border, but in context, this thread was talking about non-US citizens in their home countries when said countries are being pressured by the US government.
I could have been clearer there. I can see why you replied as such.
Great, but this news item is about the government of the USA demanding rights over the personal data of people in other countries. Not being citizens, the US govt considers them lesser people with no Constitutional protection.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the Supreme Court routinely flouts long-held interpretations of statute for nakedly ideological reasons. Rights don't mean anything if the government isn't willing to grant them, unfortunately. I would not bet on this court preserving a right to encryption as you describe it.
- If you host your own servers you can still verify.
- if you are using well-designed, human-centric software, untrusted servers (read: all servers you do not have control of / cannot audit) would not have any access to private data due to encryption, and clients can be verified to make sure decryption only occurs on the client side
The trouble is, this kind of software is a poison pill to advertising. It will be a long time before it takes over.
You say "human-centric", but you really mean "what I want". Many more humans would be upset at being unable to recover their data if they forget their password than would be pleased by this.
I said human-centric and I most certainly mean it. Humans cannot be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to mass scale, nameless faces. We need to be kept in check, and we have the mathematics to do it.
Custodial services can always still exist for those among us that are incompetent.
> would not have any access to private data due to encryption
It's pretty difficult to fully scrub yourself of the metadata involved in making a connection to a server. For sure it can be minimized, like Signal does. But this has inherent UX tradeoffs that most people are not willing to make, like requiring you share your phone number to use the service, and not having server-based backup (yet, at least).
> These two in conjunction allow you to verify trust.
No, they don't. They only allow you to verify that some entity that possessed some private key made some claim about some set of bits. It tells you absolutely nothing about whether any of those claims are actually true, including whether the possessor of the private key is who they claim to be.
I said encryption. You can do encryption all kinds of ways. In this case, I am talking about encrypting your own data on a client and not allowing a server to see it. This would just require a secret key derived from a password ran through a password hashing algo.
You only need asynchronous crypto when you involve another party, so it would play a role in a trustless architecture, but I am unsure what your point is.
When I say “verify trust” of a system, I am referring to a product making a claim, such as “your data is private and we don’t sell it” — then backing up the claim by building the product in such a way such that it is impossible to sell it. Encryption + open source is just about all the way to proving that claim, and it can be verified that way.
No, you didn't. You said "modern encryption" which is generally understood to mean public-key encryption.
But even so, your claim is still false because you can't trust your encryption software even if it is open source unless you build (and audit!) your entire tool chain yourself (and nowadays you have to roll your own silicon too if you really want to be sure).
Let's say hypothetically, Facebook buys Signal. They get all the code and signing keys, then use those to push a new update to the Signal app. This update decrypts your messages using the key on your device, then sends those decrypted messages to Facebook.
What are you going to do about it? Call your senators, who are now in love with Facebook for giving the federal government access to these previously private communications?
That's great if you stay on top of the news, see it coming and get your data out of the way before the compromised app is pushed to your phone. Maybe habitual HN users are safe, but I think most Signal users would be compromised like this.
What’s wrong with the existing signal? This is not a sarcastic question. I’m actually curious what the privacy concern over signal is and what is meant by “the facebookified version” and what the privacy concern therein is. The new “stories” functionality I’m guessing? I haven’t used it so I’m interested what observations there are there…
> ToS is like HR: they both exist to protect only the company.
This is, of course, not true about HR and yet another thing people just say to sound cool.
HR’s job is to hire people and run your payroll and benefits. If you have a health insurance question are you going to avoid them because they’re going to fire you as soon as you look at them? No.
If you’re a first level manager molesting a distinguished engineer are you totally safe from HR because you’re “the company”? No.
To show you how useful they are. It’s very much a matter of misaligned incentives I think. Of course HR has all day to execute their own policies, so they don’t see them as an overt burden.
I sense that many people consider organizations and groups of people as a definite thing. A country, the Google, the Facebook, etc, talk about these like if they were a reliably formed predictable object or entity. While those are an ever changing blob composed of ever chaning composition of people with ever changing views, intentions and agenda in an ever changing environment. Any relationships with those are momentarily only. Relying on promises from those? Like building a house on a solid cloud. No such thing. The saying is especially true in case of big entities formed of humans: a promise is like a fart, you hold it while you can.
Exactly, and the same is true of the laws themselves. "I'm not breaking the law, so I have nothing to hide," is wrong in so many ways that it's hard to enumerate them all.
Google and Facebook are both very good at protecting your personal info. Their business value is based on nobody else having it. Their security teams are much better at their job of protecting it than, say, you are.
> Or you give lots of your personal data to a software company that promises privacy in their TOS. Great.. until that company gets bought out by the likes of Google or Facebook, then those promises evaporate and good luck doing anything about it.
Sounds like the contract binds me, but does not protect me. It protects the company, but does not bind it.
> Conservatism Consists of Exactly One Proposition, to Wit: There Must Be In-Groups Whom the Law Protects but Does Not Bind, Alongside Out-Groups Whom the Law Binds but Does Not Protect.
> I recommend that Europeans petition their governments to delete such databases now, so that compliance with American demands simply won't be possible. Delete the databases now so your governments can't fold to pressure later.
LOL dude the EU is one of the driving forcing on making sure there is a complete history of ever person.
> It doesn't matter what promises are given, because all promises can be broken with enough leverage.
This has always been the case. Before, it was the threat of imprisonment for speaking out against your government, and having higher taxes levied. Now, it's simply privacy, since that is the key to the countries/companies gaining without literally stealing from you.
For once, I would expect at least reciprocity. If the US suspends its visa free programme with Shenghen area countries (assuming ESTA isn't a visa, which it really is), I'd expect US travellers to cease to have visa-free access to Schenghen too.
I wonder if this will be in the french, german, italian newspapers and where.
And if it gets tv time.
In Bruxelles, this will be discussed and qhile they arent elected directly, they cannot pass any crap whatsoever there, there is always oposition on everything there.
EU is implementing their own version of ESTA in 2023. US citizens will have to register online and pay a fee to enter Europe starting sometime next year, and their biometrics will be collected.
Saddest is that in order to fight tax avoidance, when an European creates an account in an European bank you need to sign a separate statement that you are not an american citizen. I am not sure if they share data only of US citizens (or those with two citizenships), or all... but I also doubt that americans have to sign a document where they admit if they have a second citizenship in one of EU states. It feels very one sided.
That's solely down to the US and things like the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
Not sure what you're arguing for? To make EU or EU state tax law as insane as the US tax law? The US is effectively able to bully other nations because of the US dollar and access to the banking system...
I am arguing that this law should be apllied to both sides. Now it is one sided.
If every EU citizen (when opening a bank account) has to sign a document that they are or arent an US citizen...
then all americans should also sign a similar document where they confirm if they are or arent EU citizens.
Now USA has a tool to track avoidance but EU doesnt.
EU could just stop sharing this data with USA and demand reciprocation.
Also I dont claim that this helps much, but it feels like EU citizens are second grade citizens in EU.
I somehow doubt that americans have to sign a document that they arent an EU citizen when they open their bank account.
Also lets dont act like EU doesnt have own ammunition. For starters it can stop sharing this information with US.
Both blocks are friends, but come on. EU as a block is second on third in the world per GDP (why wikipedia doesnt show EU as whole block btw).
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadTalk is streaming right now https://streaming.media.ccc.de/jev22/hip1
https://digit.so36.net
https://pretalx.c3voc.de/hip-berlin-2022/talk/JYX7JA/
In fact, just yesterday, the related conversation resulted in and I am paraphrasing 'you need to let go of some control and trust the system.'
I will never understand this level of trust in your own government institutions.
Let’s say I’m a boring white midwestern HVAC contractor with a mortgage and 2.5 kids. Big Bad China acquires a picture of my face and my fingerprints. Also my DNA, why not, just for argument’s sake! I never plan to visit China. How does this biometric sharing affect me, my rights, my safety, monetarily or otherwise? Connect the dots for me because it’s hard for me to argue the privacy angle if I can’t even explain the danger of a simple scenario like this.
Another way of putting it: all personal information should by default be kept private, until there’s a specific need from you for that information to be processed by known people.
- Your data could be sold by China to your insurer.
- Or they could buy your insurer and use the information they have on you.
- They could use it for some corporate espionage.
- Perhaps you or your boss need to be convinced that you should sell Chinese HVAC equipment instead of Korean.
- Maybe one of your kids will get married to someone from China and you have been critical of their government online. They may visit China and be punished for that.
> Let’s say I’m a boring white midwestern HVAC contractor with a mortgage and 2.5 kids. Big Bad China acquires a picture of my face and my fingerprints.
1) If you cannot imagine the potential problems, then why do you believe the contents of your disclaimer?
2) Let's say you are not "a boring white midwestern HVAC contractor"
That is: even if you never plan to visit the remote country in question, the data can come back to your country (or a third country you might want to visit). And it might not even get there intact: what happens if your fingerprints get mislabeled as someone else's?
It's a constant struggle with a lot to sacrifice for your principles. See Richard Stallman for an example of someone who no doubt endures many inconveniences in his life in his ardent avoidance of nonfree software.
It’s definitely a concern for me too, but like you, convenience trumps principle sometimes and travel is already unpleasant enough that “taking a stand” and making travel more unpleasant (including being an “Opt Out” at checkpoints and making the TSA do a pat down) isn’t something I’ve been willing to do.
Likewise, this will become a mandatory integration for states to participate in VWP starting in 2027, and there is a LOT of additional burden for those states citizens in having to apply for and be granted a U.S. visa over and above just using ESTA - paperwork, >= 10x filing fees, an Embassy or Consulate visit, then getting your passport (collection) after the visa has been inserted. Plus at the end of the day the U.S. is getting all the same information via the slower process.
I would guess most European states will integrate and this will be short-lived indignation (a “storm in a teacup”) followed by it being the new normal.
There it is. We make our choices and our children live with the consequences.
I have always opted out of TSA body scans and have been a 100k flier. Frequent fliers know which cattle lanes to use for no scans. Arrive a few minutes early and they even wipe your hands with a cloth and let you know if your hands are dirty.
I am thankful that I do not have a job that requires me to travel much and I can allow myself to do a roadtrip ( and it helps that I actually enjoy stopping by biggest corn castle ).
I absolutely understand the parent. It is not impossible that I would react similarly if I had to fly more often.
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/airport_scan.htm
I believe they have obsoleted all the backscatter scanners at this point.
Or, maybe closer to home, that several European states were complicit in helping the US to kidnap, torture and imprison their innocent citizens (the euphemism for accidentally kidnapping and torturing some completely random person is "erroneous rendition" https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10618427).
Both the US and European allies went through great pains and costs to provide the Taliban with detail biometric data for kill lists https://theconversation.com/the-taliban-reportedly-have-cont....
For just $68 you can even get the collector's edition on ebay, which includes not just lots of biometric and personal data but also comes with the original capture device (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/technology/for-sale-on-eb...).
But that's not how government works, is it?
One topic is around the dependability and practicality of such metrics as authenticators. The other topic is around surveillance and anonymity. The overlap is in the question of whether we have control over whether we are being authenticated or not. When used in a transactional system, we need to couple our authenticated identity with some positive action to give consent, i.e. that we want the transaction to occur and we accept the responsibilities of being one party to the transaction. In a surveillance system, we are being identified and our movements or actions attributed to us whether we want to or not.
Both topics have a potential for false positives and false negatives. Can someone "steal" my identity by impersonating me and causing transactions or other activities to be attributed to me without my knowledge? Or can someone through violence or coercion cause me to participate in these transactions or other activities against my will? Does the introduction of the authentication system reduce the risks or make them worse?
To what degree can we live our lives without displaying our identity to the public at large and/or while being able to assume some of our movements or activities can be kept confidential? We can choose whether to have our names or ID numbers emblazoned on our clothes. We can choose how often to present other non-biological identifiers like payment cards or mobile phones. It is much less practical to conceal our externally visible biometrics. The databases combining our biometrics and other identifiers continually shift the balance here, as it becomes ever easier to tie different observations together without our consent.
To be honest, I am not even sure whether I should care about the biometrics access being discussed in the original post. Generally, international travelers are already exposing their identities and movements not just at border controls but also via commercial bookings and interactions throughout their travel. I think I am more disgusted by the commercial brokers trying to create total information awareness of consumers than I am of governments monitoring border travel. The commercial brokers are trying to create a much finer-grained record of activities for everybody.
Just think of how much you leave around all the time. If that's all on records with facial images, your face is certainly an identifiable metric of your biology.
its amazing what you can find with HPLC and a gas chromatograph.
Those databases already exists (just look at the MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, 23andMe etc companies). Furthermore, DNA has the advantage, that you can find someone via relatives. The person to be identified doesn't have to be in the database. It's sufficient if his brother or father is in that db. Afaik this is not the case for fingerprints.
Generally correct, but it's interesting that identical twins have similar but distinct fingerprints. The exact prints are different, but they tend to have the same broader patterns of print.
I think that's where the threat actually lies. I'm equally worried about traces I leave with my Visa/MasterCard than those I leave with my uncovered face or fingerprints.
The main difference being that I can easily control the traces I leave with my cards, less so the traces I leave with my ohone, and it takes a significant effort to lkit traces from my face or fingers.
I would hope so. It appears that you are conflating 'biometric' and 'biological'.
The US needs the world far, far more than the world needs the US, and it's time the world realizes this. Forcing this nation of war-criminals and foreign policy bullies in line is long overdue.
P.S. Being originally from USSR freedom of movement was one of the things I've admired greatly about the west. After 30 years it is being vaporized in front of my eyes. This is insanity and is very sad. And we are doing this crap to ourselves. Osamas and Putins of the world must be having time of their lives.
For me it seems that most of EU works with interests of other actors, especially US, from Ursula downwards, so they might give the US access and ignore their own people... again.
How she even became the head of the EU council can only be explained with corruption.
And that's also the main reason why the right is on the rise on the EU, because they don't want an undemocratic overlord. The irony is real.
Considering the history, sooner or later another failed artist will represent a real "alternative", and considering i'm a slav in the first line of slavic countries the the south, I'd prefer some EU-wide changes before that happens.
You're going to have to provide a source here. All the polls I've seen have indicated that the vast majority of EU citizens support thr actions of the EU with regards to Ukraine (helping them with financial, humanitarian and military aid, and hosting their refugees) and Covid (the relief funds).
von der Leyen is a terribly incompetent person, and shouldn't be allowed anywhere close to a place with power. Nonetheless the current EU actions are in line with what the EU wants. The only exceptions are annoying fringe groups, and Hungary which is ruled by such a fringe group.
> Ukraine, which isn't even an EU member
So fuck 'em and let them die at the hands of a brutal invader or do you mean something else? Appeasement doesn't work, and the countries that have the most to lose if Ukraine falls, like Poland and Romania, are very much in the EU.
Unfortunately for your plan, Yellowstone will still be Yellowstone, and New York will still be New York.
I agree with your attitude, but this "well, let them hang themselves" attitude just means the US ends up with the money and the data (via a slower path). A lack of visa waiver won't significantly negate tourism; there are a lot of attractions in the US.
There are a lot of attractions everywhere.
However, freedom of movement within the EU works flawlessly, its just that once youre in a new place and want to settle down, the old habits prevail, opening a bank account and such should be easy, but good luck with that.
They already know it from cell phone location data.
From the presentation:
For all travellers (and asylum seekers) before entry into USA
Hit/ No hit query of the foreign databases
On hit: retrieval of existing data record in pull procedure
A part of visa issuance by a U.S. Embassy is a background check against both US databases and those of the local country. I believe all visa appointments perform digital capture of fingerprints, face, along with anything on an e-Passport.
So this gets the U.S. nearer to equivalence in VWP with what they can already do with the visa processes?
If you don’t want the U.S. to hold your biometric information it sounds like you just won’t be traveling to that country any longer.
So the change is the “watch list” lookup / handover of records for hits. Hate to be in the camp saying that “if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” but I honestly assumed that those checks were already done.
You need to travel to the U.S. with these changes? You still use ESTA and VWP, and the U.S. pulls what they need via an IT integration.
You need to travel to the U.S. and these changes get a “No” from EU states? You go through the visa process for tourism or business, they get your biometrics and background checks through that process. It takes longer. It costs more money. It is more onerous to you as an applicant.
Every time you cross the border as an alien you are fingerprinted and photos are taken (exceptions are given for diplomats).
In short, it’s the same outcome for U.S. travel and your only way to stop the U.S. having this information is to not travel there…
$350 and a minimum six month wait for an appointment at an EU consulate if a congressperson wants to vacation in Italy.
No idea where you live but:
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-...
This also gives you TSA Pre. It’s cut my average time spent queuing in U.S. airports and at the border by an order of magnitude. Worth the effort.
On airports, there are a set of U.S. airports like Los Angeles which always seem to have long queues, and a few where CBP is more prone to asking 20 questions of everyone.
On times of year, visiting cities when a big convention is happening can be much slower, as can traveling near a holiday like Thanksgiving.
I’ve witnessed and stood in a 3 hour queue at San Francisco and that was my #1 motivator to go get Global Entry sorted.
I simply went there to visit a friend which had moved there, that is all.
So just before the transit area after coming off the plane, a ginger and a brown haired fellow stopped me and started asking questions, without showing a badge or identifying themselves. They were plain clothed officers, guessing they are police was rather easy, they had very bad choice of çlothing style. So they ask where are you going and why. Purpose of stay and lenght, how will you get there and blabla, many follow up questions. Do you have a return ticket, whats her name.
I told them, thats your job to find out and I intend to travel by cab, am I good to go now.
They let me go on my way.
This is the kinda people who will be dealing with our data, hell no.
I will fill out whatever if I ever wanna go to the us, but I prefer to not hand over any data upfront.
That said, I think it is a shitty deal for these leaky, insecure, bad faith entities to be able to negotiate off to the side with our sensitive personal data like this.
Nothing, it's a hostage situation.
Is there any proof of that?
What lead you to believe this?
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/21/...) https://archive.vn/UpsuY
Nothing, because that didn’t happen. (Most likely, Russia blew up the not-being-used pipe as a capacity demonstration aimed at Baltic Pipe, to raise the perceived cost by government decisionmakers of continuing support for Ukraine; they probably also juice the propaganda about the US being behind it, to promote internal strife in the West between the people that can be influenced by that propaganda and their governments.)
> Besides 10x energy prices and its industrial economic base set back 10 years.
Since NS2 wasn’t being used, that didn’t happen as a result of it being destroyed, either.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/21/... (https://archive.vn/UpsuY)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence after all.
Theres no conclusive proof that any particular party was behind it, but given that a single pipe was left (something America wouldn't do if it was looking to take out Germanys capacity to use Russian gas) the only obvious conclusion was that it was Russia.
You think because one pipeline survived that it was intentional? After all of the US disasters in the Middle East you somehow still believe in its omnipotence?
And one pipeline surviving means little when the new pipelines that were destroyed had much better economics for Russia (and Germany, for that matter).
But if you want to believe what you want to believe that is fine.
But you should know that Russia is capable of sending autonomous robots down the pipelines.
Sounds like a good way to blow a hole in them.
The truth is that we have no evidence one way or the other but you are absolutely certain in your conviction.
correct.
> But an honest assessment of the motives, benefits, costs, not to mention blatant declarations of Biden and State Department flunkies make it 99% clear who was responsible.
They were clearly not talking about physical attacks when they talked about that, but I guess Russian propaganda is going to hook onto whatever it can.
> Whether the British pulled the trigger or some other errand boy is of little consequence.
But it could easy be the Russians who pulled the trigger, they easily had the most to gain and the easiest way to pull it off too. Russia gains a lot by destroying the pipelines.
- they threaten a number of NATO countries energy infrastructure indirectly
- they attempt to force Germany into certifying the new pipeline which would be a big win for Russia
- they get out of any contractual clauses they had about non supply of gas.
"they attempt to force Germany into certifying the new pipeline which would be a big win for Russia" So Russia blew up its own pipelines to force Germany into certifying those pipelines?
"they get out of any contractual clauses they had about non supply of gas" No one at the Kremlin cares about contracts that are easily invalidated by acts of war and illegal sanctions.
"they threaten a number of NATO countries energy infrastructure indirectly" -So Russia blew up its own energy infrastructure delivery to Europe (that it spent 10 billion to build and would have earned lots from) to threaten energy infrastructure indirectly?
What planet do you live on?
Russian propaganda is getting really pathetic these days you realise you guys convince no one right?.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/21/...
It's Russian propaganda that America did it, something you are very insistent on with literally zero evidence.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I suspect, without proof but read next paragraphs for some evidence, that the US offer their surveillance net. If EU police is searching for someone, even in our own territory, it's easier for US intelligence agencies to locate and eavesdrop on the suspect with the tech that we know.
El Pollo Carvajal [0] was arrested in Madrid, September 2021. Although it was our police that made the arrest, it was the US that provided his exact location. Some say that local authorities had no desire to catch the man, actually he had already been arrested in 2019 and "disappeared" apparently due to some bureaucratic error. If I'm not mistaken, he's awaiting extradition.
The end of terrorist band ETA [1] (that Wikipedia charmingly defines as "separatist group") happened after a continuous string of high-profile arrests in France. Again, our neighbours haven't been always very collaborative, but had no option when alerted of exact location of people in the Interpol watchlist.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Carvajal
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA_(separatist_group)
I would feel sorry if american tourists would need a visa for europe, as the americans which do travel and get aroynd are the nicest people, first timers get to see the world from another perspective.
I prefer if americans travel for holidays rather than....forgive me...in military uniforms.
Note that it's not at all unprecedented for US/Europe/etc travelers to be offered visa-free access without reciprocity for exactly this reason. The whole concept of "passport power" implies there are a lot of countries that give US citizens access without a visa without the US and other countries giving them the same.
Its due to badly designed Miami airport compared to literally anywhere else in the world I've been, that you can't connect within 'safe' restricted zone after security checkin. No, you basically need to exit airport with all security involved (walk around checkins, go outside if you want) to get to your next flight, and walk throught all security again. At least luggage was transferred automatically, but most airports in undeveloped countries can manage that too.
Well, not our biometric data, certainly. You could get that on eBay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/technology/for-sale-on-eb...
People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it. (There’s actual discrimination issues on this one of course, not to mention family drama…)
Mostly the value in tracking you comes from profiling you, i.e. building relationships between facts, mostly metadata about what you do over time. But biometrics aren't metadata and aren't what you do.
I did mention "discrimination" but redacting data in case future governments are racist isn't all that useful; they're the government, you can't hide from them, and since discrimination isn't based on real objective categories then you can't predict what it will be based on. There's no biometric for being a Cagot.
> People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it.
That's not why people are sensitive about their DNA. It's more to do with the fact that health insurance companies could know if they are particularly susceptible to a myriad of mendelian (gene-linked) diseases and disorders "just by looking at it". Another reason to be sensitive about DNA- if my brother's DNA was found at a crime scene and my DNA was in a database like 23andMe, police could start going after my family members as suspects. This has happened.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/a-father-took-an-at-ho...
On the US’ side yes, but it’s not more reliable tracking because the US doesn’t have exit customs and so doesn’t actually verify if people have left the country again.
Though nobody’s against biometrics because of this surely? I don’t think anyone campaigns for the right to enter on fake passports. Spies maybe.
As for health insurance, there’s no country where they’re allowed to act on opinions like that, aside for asking if you’re a smoker. They’re specifically banned from genetic testing on top of that, but they wouldn’t be secretly collecting that info anyway.
…Not that they even exist in most countries.
Conversely, what would the EU do if that same request came from another nation instead of the USA? What about Brazil, Japan, China?
The answer to all these questions would be hard "No.", possibly followed by sanctions for even daring to ask them.
It's rarely talked about, but you gotta imagine, the fact the US controls most of the land and sea is a big factor in how diplomatic issues are resolved.
I don't think this is a great thing, btw.
They do so with the help of allies which they seem to forget.
In the 80s USA sent troops in italy to kidnap a terrorist that had surrendered himself to italy. They had to call up all the available carabinieri on the island to counter the USA troops.
Not one has in mind with "allied nation".
https://www.icij.org/investigations/collateraldamage/clerics...
That's been declining: 430,000 US troops in Europe in the '50s, and about 60,000 at the beginning of this year.
https://www.boisestate.edu/bluereview/troops-in-europe/
That’s been increasing, up to over 100,000 in June of this year.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/307805...
We are talking about a sub-set of security instruments and preventions, one of the many available, are we sure that an armed conflict - or just threat - would worth the trouble?
[1] - https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/frenc...
The decision not to re-visit was made somewhere between the point where my shoes were confiscated because they might be used as weapons and the time when I spent 6 hours on a bridge trying to get into Canada because they could not imagine a person carrying a Dutch passport had a legitimate interest in crossing the border into Canada.
At one point I had a company in the US, spent a ton of money there annually and was seriously considering immigration, go figure.
What alternative reading do you have?
The problem with the approach outlined in the document is that it tries to break open the EU by approaching member states individually, possibly even to access data from other member states, something that I have a serious problem with.
The US doesn’t operate Canadian border control?
Whoever said I wanted to visit the US?
Not just "no", but "hell no".
This is the introduction to draconian policies/laws in which you have no rights to opt out of this, representation caring to uphold your rights, or courts that are principled. Wanna get out, but still have family.. oh wait better give up more rights/risk going to jail to see them in the us. (Or they'll be interrogated back at home).
The point in this post is not to criticize you, but to criticize the lack of caring that a 6 month waiting for a visa is a systematic failure in need or ability.
The way it looks to me (sorry, not trying to offend) is that while the EU may be an OK construct for the peacetime prosperity it is not functioning well during the times of conflict. As of today, it does not have military strength, energy security or economic strength from which it can deliver such an answer. And when you have to depend on someone else for the protection you have few options for saying "no". My 2c.
Here, everyone left to right were saying, this will never happen.
The people who said that are all retired wealthy, their parties still exist, let us hold them accountable.
They always say they will get something in exchange, but it is all lies, the moment you are bargaining for something in exchange, youve already lost.
Keep in mind, never give anything to the EU either, they cannot be trusted blindly either, theyre just somewhat more accountable. If they would be the worlds superpower, I am not sure how benevolent they would be.
Everywhere on earth, the regular citizens have the same domestic nuissance, snoopi governments, all parties somehow collecting big data as if it were their business model.
Anyone who knows a lawyer, a govt tax agency worker and such will know, the data tue govt has will never be used for good, it will even be twisted in their favor.
Left or right does not matter, probably never did, if we had democracies, theycall such things bipartisan, the total left or right wing goverments had leaders like franco, pinochet, mao, stalin and such.
Anarchists keep saying the biggest atrocities were always from governments, not sure what to say about that, governmnents are always humans as well.
There is some issue at hand with power. Even in Switzerland, with its "direct democracy", the police state is quite invasive, discretly in the background.
Maybe human civilization is simply still in its infancy regarding governing the population.
100 years ago we had ww1, bit more back, feudalism etc.
I hope not normally the EU just complies behind the scenes. I understand why that's unprintable but I wish they wouldn't lie to the population about how they handle this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chine...
[1] https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2022/afghanistan-biometrie
The demand is for travellers only according the pdf, not for all EU citizens.
This does not seem too onerous - people working in the US from EU already have to submit to much fingerprinting, AIDS tests and what not, and you don't hear much complaining about it.
It's worth noting that almost all of this is still the output of the 9/11, where US and Saudi systems did not communicate and resulted in known terrorists in Saudi Arabia being able to travel at will into the USA.
I don't like biometrics, but the hyperbole needs to be tuned down a bit here.
They don’t spy on their own citizens but they exchange info with the other spy agencies, so…
They sure do; whatever gave you the impression they don’t?
https://www.aclu.org/other/nsa-spying-americans-illegal
PS I see that you have edited your comment to add a link, https://www.aclu.org/other/nsa-spying-americans-illegal. That link shows that the government illegally spys on citizens, which is the opposite of what you meant to show.
In other words, the NSA can only spy where it is explicitly granted permission to do so by statute. Citizens concerned about surveillance do not have to answer the question, "what law restricts the NSA's spying?" Rather, the government is required to supply an answer to the question "what law permits the NSA to spy?"
In the off chance that you’re not, remember that Gitmo exists so they can do things that their mandates wouldn’t allow.
No, Gitmo exists so they can do things openly and shamelessly that their mandates wouldn't allow.
Otherwise they can use black sites, or just lie about it.
Let me tell you about this new crypto investment I have...
Because the EU is not part of either?
Note for those in the thread who haven't heard of ECHELON until now (just like me) - it is the exact same list of countries as for the Five Eyes.
> [...] Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes. [0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Correct, that would be illegal.
When NSA need to spy on an american, they ask GCHQ to do it for them and buy the data. Or buy it off a private company.
-----
edit: How would you code "terrorism through public demonstrations of driving while female" or "terrorism through being Yemen?"
"Terrorism though applying for a marriage license after being mildly critical in the WaPo."
I’m sorry what? Is this the predominant/common belief among other atheists? Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken with is more likely to think you just turn off, everything goes black, back to the void of unlife.
Where does the speed go when the car stops?
All these PEP, sanction lists, ofac monitoring, financial sanction lists already exist and every company with a worthwile monetary turnover ever facing an audit runs these background checks.
The laws are there, they are called the aml directives, the lists are there.
And most of the entries there are provided by eitjer uk or us entities, youll usually find foreign military personells data there, dob, rank, id number, name but not much else.
It is bit of a joke as many muslim people have similar names and joe shmoes get flagged for nothing very often.
Meanwhile, the people on these lists are very high up within their own government hierarchy, they probably have 5 differe t passports.
Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication.
Yea, monitor peps, fugitives and terrorists, but find a way without combing through the whole worlds innocent citizens.
And surely this critically sensitive data is not left on a shared location with loose permissions, or sent around as an email attachment, right? ...right?
I'm worried about the ability of this data to enable authoritarianism and I'm also worried about it being handled by those with the competence of the average government official.
"Never blame on malice what you can blame on stupidity", however the problem is government has both of those in spades.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctio...
Just from my own research on surveillance, I got back a bunch of records in a FOIA lawsuit that included the the query results of a bunch of license plate scans. Large XML blobs. For whatever reason, they didn't redact a few thousand pages of those query results.
A lot more info was in those query responses than you'd imagine. For example, SSNs of people whose license plates matched the first three digits of a "person of interest"'s car.
Mind you, this was after them arguing for months, with affidavits, that they don't have audit logs. So, yeah.
It’s worse for Arabs because until modern times they didn’t have “conventional” surnames. Their name was a composition of a given name plus that of their forefathers’, often appended with “Abu” (meaning father in Arabic), and sometimes the addition of a clan name. In my ancestral home of Egypt, the government often standardized everyone about 100-150 years ago with whatever names they were carrying at the time.
So you could be completely unrelated to someone and have a partially matching last name.
Combine that with America’s gleefully racist views of Arabs - particularly after 9/11 - and you have a recipe for disaster with no-fly lists.
There is nothing scientific about anti-money laundering. It is one of the ways modern nations hang themselves with self-inflictes inefficiencies for very little gains. Because it's run by police organisations, you cannot criticise it as you would be labelled as a friend of terrorists.
Do you think Saudi Arabia is the Taliban or what? Even when it was banned, it wasn't the big of an offense.
And yes its no longer banned, and there are a lot of women drivers now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Ar...
"In September 2011, a Sudanese migrant worker was beheaded for sorcery"
Was this a rhetorical question?
Or does anybody really think things get formulated those ways "by chance" or "by incompetence"?
Never blame on stupidity what you can be blamed on malice, in case of institutions…
This doesn't seem true unless the US citizen is resident in a Schengen area country or (as a technicality) is also an EU/Schengen area citizen, as the EU seems slightly more in favor of government collection of biometric data for automated immigration purposes. I'm not sure about the reverse, as even the CBP seems to be moving towards facial recognition in place of fingerprint data, but it seems like most non-US/Canadian visitors are required to provide fingerprints.
I'm not even sure how to classify this sentence...
Edit: what’s with the downvotes?
I am thankful that the EU is standing up against this threat.
You're pushing a baseless conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that Saudi authorities were involved in 9/11.
Welcome to reality.
The intelligence community missed a lot of clues right at their finger tips that could have prevented 9/11. Do you think biometric tracking would have prevented 9/11? Because it sure sounds like it.
These tools will be abused and must be rolled backed to save freedom and democracy. Authoritarian states working together on a techno-based total control vision is a very bad development.
Thinking about it, I do not understand how any neutral person would take your position - it reads like astroturfing propaganda work.
The "but we just do what the others do" claim (which is afaik false) also made this seem fishy to me.
Especially as every hacker knows: When there is data, this data will be abused, sooner or later. There hasn't been any recorded exception to this rule. Anywhere. Ever. It's like a law of nature.
That's why the zeroes rule of data protection reads: Do not produce data. Only not existing data can't be abused.
The EU does? That's news.
Can someone bake this claim by some source?
Such legislation would basically allow syphoning off all the data of everyone from the EU databases. They could (and would) just go through all possible name combination an see if it's a hit (I'm sure there will be no safeguards in place for that; oh, whoops, the British did this already when Brexit happened).
The precious data will then be stored in a "commercial cloud" service. What could possibly go wrong here?...
> I don't like biometrics, but the hyperbole needs to be tuned down a bit here.
The entire official response to 9/11 is the hyperbole, not the criticism of those measures.
So your government collects biometric data but passes laws promising not to misuse it... you may very well find that those promises are worth less than dirt when a country with leverage over your own starts making demands that your government feels obliged or coerced to obey.
Or you give lots of your personal data to a software company that promises privacy in their TOS. Great.. until that company gets bought out by the likes of Google or Facebook, then those promises evaporate and good luck doing anything about it.
The solution is to never trust any promises of privacy, and don't hand over personal data to anybody unless it's taken from you at gunpoint. It doesn't matter what promises are given, because all promises can be broken with enough leverage.
I recommend that Europeans petition their governments to delete such databases now, so that compliance with American demands simply won't be possible. Delete the databases now so your governments can't fold to pressure later.
Such private data should never be collected in the first place. You may as well stack up gold bars in your home, in plain view of street-level windows. Such concentrations of data/wealth are asking for trouble. Get rid of it now and you won't have to worry about keeping it secure in the future, no matter what world events may unfold.
Things usually don't change that fast, but nobody can truly predict the geopolitical landscape even half a year into the future.
I am inside the US and have been inside and lived in many countries. As an immigrant from Asia, I am happy most in the US and so are millions of permanent immigrants including tens of thousands from Europe every year :)
I spent some time traveling in various parts of the world and EU works best for me.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/991680.The_Anglo_America...
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-A7-BNmZpG-RLOXZZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
-- preface snippet (1981) ---
The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. And what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society was created by Rhodes and his principal trustee, Lord Milner, and continues to exist to this day. To be sure, this secret society is not a childish thing like the Ku Klux Klan, and it does not have any secret robes, secret handclasps, or secret passwords. It does not need any of these, since its members know each other intimately. It probably has no oaths of secrecy nor any formal procedure of initiation. It does, however, exist and holds secret meetings, over which the senior member present presides. At various times since 1891, these meetings have been presided over by Rhodes, Lord Milner, Lord Selborne, Sir Patrick Duncan, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Lord Lothian, and Lord Brand. They have been held in all the British Dominions, starting in South Africa about 1903; in various places in London, chiefly 175 Piccadilly; at various colleges at Oxford, chiefly All Souls; and at many English country houses such as Tring Park, Blickling Hall, Cliveden, and others.
This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. All of these terms are unsatisfactory, for one reason or another, and I have chosen to call it the Milner Group. Those persons who have used the other terms, or heard them used, have not generally been aware that all these various terms referred to the same Group.
It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Group is of such significance that evidence of its existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look. This evidence I have sought to point out without overly burdening this volume with footnotes and bibliographical references. While such evidences of scholarship are kept at a minimum, I believe I have given the source of every fact which I mention. Some of these facts came to me from sources which I am not permitted to name, and I have mentioned them only where I can produce documentary evidence available to everyone. Nevertheless, it would have been very difficult to write this book if I had not received a certain amount of assistance of a personal nature from persons close to the Group. For obvious reasons, I cannot reveal the names of such persons, so I have not made reference to any information derived from them unless it was information readily available from other sources.
...
I should say a few words about my general attitude toward this subject. I approached the subject as a historian. This attitude I have kept. I have tried to describe or to analyze, not to praise or to condemn. I hope that in the book itself this attitude is maintained. Of course I have an attitude, and it would be only fair to state it here. In general, I agree with the goals and aims of the Milner Group. I feel that the British way of ...
William Engdahl's book Gods of Money [ch. 18 - Theft of a Nation] addresses the period you mention and what was happening. There was also an ideological shift in this period, since after the end of Cold War, Neo-Conservatives have been (and remain) in ideological charge. The Wolfowitz Doctrine always struck me as decidedly un-Anglo given its willfully provocative stance, lacking any nuance or subtlety. In fact the behavior of US post Cold War remains somewhat perplexing, even in terms of purely American national interests. There may have been a regime change.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-ca...
The 20th century saw the rise of American military, economic, and cultural imperialism, which carried Anglo-American culture further as the British Empire declined relatively.
Sure, I'll concede that there are shady people in government trying to do things that are broadly objectionable and sometimes illegal, but to think this means certain individuals or secret societies have a "stranglehold" on global politics or economics goes much too far. There are far too many factors at play for a small group of people to wield the level of outsize power necessary to guide these processes. It's really a very large and ever-changing group of people who "control everything", and this happens in a highly uncoordinated manner.
This might be true on military/nato matters, but economically, Europe and the EU can quite take care of themselves.
As for america, who has a stranglehold there?
If we leave conspiracy theories out of the equation, it is always the 2 parties un power and their corporate or institutional buddies.
I do not think anyone is thelling Trump or Bidens team who to invade or bombard next.
The US is the remaining superpower and thats all there really is.
Look at Musk, richest guy in the world, Trump was making fun of him.
It is not the people with money who have the power, money is a pre requisite to even be allowed near power.
The people with power un the us are simply the people with....power.
USA, with all its flaws, is nobodys vassal state.
What group of people are controlling everything? Please don't let it be Jews...
Even the current moral panic and conspiracy complex around transgendered people leads to anti-semitism if you follow the strings and thumbtacks.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/liquidity_lines/htm...
Without a swap line banks couldn't just treat EUR as USD whenever an entity needs to keep USD for import/export purposes.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...
I would have thought HN is more on the small government political spectrum, it appears this does not count for foreign policy?
tldr: USA is the current world empire; EU are their vassals
Homework: (1) find how many European military bases there are on US soil; (2) find how many US military bases there are on European soil;
To do what? Counter the Canadian threat to US American territorial integrity? Prevent war between California and ethnic Nevadans? Monitor unmanaged flows of migrants from unstable regions? Hmm, well maybe that one.
But really, one of the great blessings of the US is a lack of any home-front excitement, which makes this comparison pretty silly. Not that that disagrees with the hypotheses that the US is a world empire and the EU's present existence is predicated on US military size and operations.
They've been plenty of protests in Europe over this matter this year, but they won't show them on CNN, that's for sure.
Random citizen asking obviously does nothing, but foreign base COs are always desperately trying to keep their forces on best behavior to minimize frustration. That's not easy when you import a bunch of guys in the age range that most often causes trouble, give them significant spending money, and remove them from past anchoring influences. It's worse when the receiving society is more orderly; I have Japan in mind.
Fighting against those problems is that all political leadership generally benefits from the arrangements. The foreign host nation gets economic activity and some amount of bargaining power, and the US gets a location that obviously is helpful for some strategic objective.
>Right, so what for are the US military bases on European soil then? (Please spare me the part about protecting Europe from outside threats story).
An anomalous, peaceful Europe is the water that you're swimming in, and I'm trying to point out that it's wet. I recognize the limited prospects of the endeavor. Though, if it's the outside part you're rejecting, I'll acknowledge my imprecise wording. Russia is the outside threat, being outside the Western European culture that is defended, but threats come from within Europe too.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Naval_Base_Subic_Bay
oh, so why are you replying?
In the last 20 years the USA has involved its allies into multiple pointless unwinnable wars. Human rights in the USA have been significantly eroded, and many values essential to modern society are currently being undermined. Additionally, Trump's presidency has done significant damage to a large number of diplomatic relations and resulted not only in widespread doubt about its democratic process, but a genuine coup attempt.
Meanwhile, during the same 20 years the European Union and China have risen in power significantly - and both are making significant effort to curtail the power the USA has over them. Those military bases exist because the USA is still somewhat of an ally and the EU has real threats right on its border - as long as the USA is not actively hostile towards the EU, having direct access to the firepower of a gun-drunk nation is quite convenient.
You're ridiculous and watch Fox news too much.
History contradicts you. I'm an European myself if that wasn't clear enough, so this wasn't an American telling you, an European, you are our vassals.
> EU has no realistic military opponents on its borders
Fully agree on this.
> You're ridiculous and watch Fox news too much.
I might be ridiculous to your eyes, but I certainly don't watch FoxNews.
Europeans want to vacation in the US. The US demands biometric authentication upon crossing the border. So you either give them that data or the US stops letting Europeans in.
And I doubt Europe is going to be any better at not demanding biometric data than the US is, because Europe has the same underlying incentives to do so (i.e. a restrictive immigration system, a large portion of the population who want to NIMBY entire races of people, and a large body of laws to enforce).
Will the relationship being more difficult if not yielding to the demands? Ok then. We are not made of cotton candy to melt in a drop of rain that easily when some difficulty comes along, especially if it is a bureaucracy thingy. The vacations will be a bit more difficult - for those attracted by the US instead of beautiful spots elsewhere. Business relations too, of course, but that one has double edge actually.
Have no plans to visit the US still expect my government would fold like napkin if US county police faxed over a request.
The US tapped even NATO ally governments if they want fingerprints they'll get them.
At any rate don't you have to sign, fingerprint and stand infront of a camera to pass most countries passport control?
If people want to share with a third party, it's their business.
But for US to just access some database and lift them is ridiculous
https://etias.com/
ToS is like HR: they both exist to protect only the company.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
meaning, I got the right to secure my sh*t.
I could have been clearer there. I can see why you replied as such.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the Supreme Court routinely flouts long-held interpretations of statute for nakedly ideological reasons. Rights don't mean anything if the government isn't willing to grant them, unfortunately. I would not bet on this court preserving a right to encryption as you describe it.
Not when it comes to server-based software.
- If you host your own servers you can still verify.
- if you are using well-designed, human-centric software, untrusted servers (read: all servers you do not have control of / cannot audit) would not have any access to private data due to encryption, and clients can be verified to make sure decryption only occurs on the client side
The trouble is, this kind of software is a poison pill to advertising. It will be a long time before it takes over.
Custodial services can always still exist for those among us that are incompetent.
It's pretty difficult to fully scrub yourself of the metadata involved in making a connection to a server. For sure it can be minimized, like Signal does. But this has inherent UX tradeoffs that most people are not willing to make, like requiring you share your phone number to use the service, and not having server-based backup (yet, at least).
It was once difficult for me to communicate with you, me being a stranger to you and you being the same, having never met in person. But here we are.
We are all experts at solving difficult problems & giving access to those solutions to everyone.
No, they don't. They only allow you to verify that some entity that possessed some private key made some claim about some set of bits. It tells you absolutely nothing about whether any of those claims are actually true, including whether the possessor of the private key is who they claim to be.
I said encryption. You can do encryption all kinds of ways. In this case, I am talking about encrypting your own data on a client and not allowing a server to see it. This would just require a secret key derived from a password ran through a password hashing algo.
You only need asynchronous crypto when you involve another party, so it would play a role in a trustless architecture, but I am unsure what your point is.
When I say “verify trust” of a system, I am referring to a product making a claim, such as “your data is private and we don’t sell it” — then backing up the claim by building the product in such a way such that it is impossible to sell it. Encryption + open source is just about all the way to proving that claim, and it can be verified that way.
No, you didn't. You said "modern encryption" which is generally understood to mean public-key encryption.
But even so, your claim is still false because you can't trust your encryption software even if it is open source unless you build (and audit!) your entire tool chain yourself (and nowadays you have to roll your own silicon too if you really want to be sure).
What are you going to do about it? Call your senators, who are now in love with Facebook for giving the federal government access to these previously private communications?
As for the real world... nothing. I quite like signal.
This is, of course, not true about HR and yet another thing people just say to sound cool.
HR’s job is to hire people and run your payroll and benefits. If you have a health insurance question are you going to avoid them because they’re going to fire you as soon as you look at them? No.
If you’re a first level manager molesting a distinguished engineer are you totally safe from HR because you’re “the company”? No.
They will sack anyone if they see it necessary to protect the status quo.
But more importantly, HR will create mindless policies to show you how powerful they are. As border force forcing your sneakers of.
To show you how useful they are. It’s very much a matter of misaligned incentives I think. Of course HR has all day to execute their own policies, so they don’t see them as an overt burden.
Sounds like the contract binds me, but does not protect me. It protects the company, but does not bind it.
> Conservatism Consists of Exactly One Proposition, to Wit: There Must Be In-Groups Whom the Law Protects but Does Not Bind, Alongside Out-Groups Whom the Law Binds but Does Not Protect.
All the laws, promises, good intentions etc are not worth the paper they are written on. If there is data to be stolen, it will be stolen.
LOL dude the EU is one of the driving forcing on making sure there is a complete history of ever person.
This has always been the case. Before, it was the threat of imprisonment for speaking out against your government, and having higher taxes levied. Now, it's simply privacy, since that is the key to the countries/companies gaining without literally stealing from you.
In Bruxelles, this will be discussed and qhile they arent elected directly, they cannot pass any crap whatsoever there, there is always oposition on everything there.
And they are applying it to everyone, not just US citizens.
Not sure what you're arguing for? To make EU or EU state tax law as insane as the US tax law? The US is effectively able to bully other nations because of the US dollar and access to the banking system...
If every EU citizen (when opening a bank account) has to sign a document that they are or arent an US citizen...
then all americans should also sign a similar document where they confirm if they are or arent EU citizens.
Now USA has a tool to track avoidance but EU doesnt.
EU could just stop sharing this data with USA and demand reciprocation.
Also I dont claim that this helps much, but it feels like EU citizens are second grade citizens in EU.
I somehow doubt that americans have to sign a document that they arent an EU citizen when they open their bank account.
Also lets dont act like EU doesnt have own ammunition. For starters it can stop sharing this information with US. Both blocks are friends, but come on. EU as a block is second on third in the world per GDP (why wikipedia doesnt show EU as whole block btw).