The purpose of most eurocrats is to write long reports to other eurocrats justifying their time and expenses. It's normal to see people claim authority on things they have very little idea of. The recently-caught MEP who took bribes was apparently in charge of science and tech, AI & blockchain , and the things she would say in public were astounding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCxsN3qlkU?t=5m30s
Making cynical blanket statements about large groups of people doesn't do anything to address any kind of issue, and instead normalizes negative behaviors both within that group.
Within the group, the more people believe that it's the norm, the less social impetus there is to address individual bad actors.
Outside that group, people are less likely to treat people fairly if they are perceived to be part of a group of bad actors. How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors?
Finally, pointing to a single case of someone who was arrested for corruption among literal thousands of bureaucrats does not make a compelling case.
i m not within that group -- very few people are within that group and the vast majority are unelected and unaccountable to us. I m not the only one complaining about the brussels bubble. dont try to shift the blame on us
my experince with eurocracy is from projects i ve participated in
the EU is a political organization so , yes? having an opinion is allowed , but like i said there is no way to express it somehow. In fact i usually learn about EU regulations affecting my business from hacker news
The EU does public consultations, usually years in advance. If those regulations are affecting your business it might be worthwhile to check their site every once in a while.
Do you know by first-hand experience if these public consultations actually make any difference? I once attended one from the local gov, and everything was already predetermined and the debate was just a dance.
The proposed laws usually change before they are adopted. I can not ascertain how much of an impact the public consultation has. It is online though so the barrier of entry is pretty low. And even if it's completely useless it is still a good way to stay informed if the changes might impact someones business.
That's because the premise the EU Commission (and you, by extension) you are defending is so utterly ridiculous that it doesn't really need argumenting that it's bad.
The point the EU Commission is defending here is the need to spy on every word, every bit of interaction you have on the internet. You know, "to protect the children".
I mean, if you truly think like this, how about you give me a live dump of you traffic, desktop, cell phone, ... everything, along with all encryption keys, passwords, etc. You know "so I can check you're not a pedophile". Because that's what this is about.
I have observed multiple instances where someone had proposed that and been shorted down by the crowd e saying, we don't believe it trust you because you (work in govt, represent a company, are in $political party). Clearly that doesn't work.
That's because it's not the propositions that need to be transparent. Politicians are great at explaining their grandiose propositions. It's the actions taken and the results that need to be transparent.
your response contains some very valid points around the dynamics of groups with bad reputations. You point out real negative consequences.
But you misidentify the group being criticized. it's not euro bureaucrats.
it's literal morons who take ownership and responsibility over things they don't understand well enough to even surround themselves with advisors who know what they're talking about.
I've seen this attitude from many very wealthy people, a willingness, a bravado even, to be ignorant about what they do for a living, e.g. I met a dude who told me had a software business, but he didn't even know what programing language his own property was written in.
what really sets me off is their unwillingness to find out. (oh, and that this are the kind of people at the top of our society)
You'd be surprised by the large number of EU civil servants with fake/complacency PhDs. There is a cottage industry of PhD candidates writing theses for EU servants, for $$, to make ends meet.
I think the problem is that humans are going to be human. We hold our bureaucrats to a high standard, so if the group contains a few bad eggs it spoils the reputation of the whole group.
I wish I could believe that the individual is just a useful idiot. Part of that rhetoric mostly works in US too, where I kinda place the blame on the old guard for not understanding technology, where it is not exactly given that they do not.
edit: From where they sit ( position where they have to champion this effort ), it is just not part of the equation that is relevant to them so any means to get public on your side even with comments about sniffing is justified. HN will ridicule it, but a lot of people will swallow it wholesale.
That's indeed quite worrying, this plus the American Cloud Act means online privacy is at risk..
I wonder why Mullvad doesn't complain about the American Cloud Act, or did they already? Mullvad employees could be extradited to the US if they do not comply (opening up your servers for example), since it's a bilateral agreement with the EU
Its full name is the: Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse
I’m reminded of that recent embarrassing display of US government where the TikTok CEO was peppered with the kinds of questions that betray the fact that the congresscritter doesn’t comprehend the topic.
If they wanted real answers they’d say, “I yield my time to this SME I brought in.” But they’re just there to look tough on whatever.
You don't need to be a subject matter expert to understand how encryption works. E2E can be explained to an 8 year old. The problem is that the skills selected for in politicians is the same as the skills selected for in non-venomous snakes, ie, their resemblance to venomous snakes, without the metabolic overhead of actually producing venom.
Also, the main problem here isn't explaining the tech itself (although the quotations in the link indicate this is also a problem), but rather explaining why it's (a) actually good, and (b) impossible to prevent even if it wasn't good.
But even if it was the tech itself, most people don't have maths skills and fundamentally don't (care to?) think logically.
When I was a kid, I couldn't understand why the adults kept joking about why it was so hard to stop the VCR from flashing 12:00 when I found it trivial.
(I think we're getting to the point where you could run an image detection process on the display itself, totally circumventing any encryption. This will have a lot of consequences that are totally obvious and yet it may be done regardless).
Sure, I'd be as surprised as anyone else if it could straight up write good laws, but it can almost certainly talk in political jargon better than any of us software developers can manage.
We can also use it to TL;DR the laws and turn them into non-jargon, help us find and work against bad laws more easily.
I've lost track of which version passed which exams, but recent news suggests v4 scores highly on (at least one) bar exam (I don't know if bar exam is "noob lawyer" or "good lawyer", but either way, even v3.5 can do more than me).
In response to your second statement: Technical people have been able to explain their ideas well enough to get them funded and implemented in a business setting. So we must ask, what is the difference between getting something done in business vs. in the government.
Politicians, in order to get reelected, need soundbites that can be understood within the average attention span, which is not long enough to capture the more subtle details. Though tech people might provide them with these details, they are often lost in the execution or distorted by special interest lobbyists.
Ideally, leaders would listen to the tech experts, translate that information into plain english, compile it into a
detailed and concise plan, present that plan to voters within the average attention span, and execute the plan faithfully.
Unfortunately, most of our current congress people, to use a metaphor, are not willing to 'rock the boat'. We need our politicians to put logic and reason above obedience, have high standards for legislature, and make this legislature in service of the nation.
And to piggyback off this, to have an iPhone is often a status symbol for teens or some societies. So whether you know anything about iMessage or not, a teen with an Android phone may be heckled when their iPhone recipient sees a green bubble.
With iMessage you get read receipts (if turned on), high quality multi-media (instead of just MMS), end-to-end encryption, the ability to edit or unsend messages for a short time, multi-device messaging, no per-message fee, and probably more.
The green bubble is a signal that isn’t available in that conversation. It’s a little like the old padlock in the address bar but far more abstract.
No but it makes it an empty criticism. It's like the activists who say "abolish the police!" but either have no insight into or are deliberately ignoring why the police exist, and have no ideas regarding who would perform the equivalent function instead.
I think you must not have interacted with many people who advocate for police abolition. Even just googling "abolish the police" returns a page full of results of various proposals, with detailed breakdowns. It's quite simple: just how we don't call the police for house fires or heart attacks, there are a large variety of other societal problems which would be better served by more specialized (and less heavily armed) services.
Also, police exist to protect capital, not us. It evolved from slave catching forces, and does relatively little to prevent or solve most crime.
Here's a real problem. Let's call it X. Someone proposes a solution: "Let's do Y!". It is perfectly valid criticism to say that Y doesn't actually fix X.
I don't care if that counts as "empty criticism" by your definition. If someone proposes a solution, it's perfectly valid criticism to point out that the "solution" doesn't actually solve.
>It's like the activists who say "abolish the police!"...
I would also caution you to focus less on these kinds of catchphrases and more on the crux of their message[1] (and I should point out that this applies to any kind of movement), lest you not see the forest for the trees.
An empty criticism is: "this sucks, it should be improved".
A constructive criticism is: "this sucks because <reason>". It is constructive because it may not be trivial to explain why something sucks, yet it is mandatory if you expect to find a solution.
A solution is: "This sucks because <reason>. Doing <improvements> would make it better".
It is sufficient to demonstrate that the a proposal is worse than the status quo. A problem doesn't demand an immediate resolution just because somebody proposed a bad solution.
For all the faults that lobbying brings with it, there is something to be said for actually bringing in outside experts into the legislative process. You can seek intellectual purity all you want, but at the end of the day you are going to have to have some trust that farmers know where seeds go and tech companies know how encryption works.
Similar bills have died several times in the US, if only because there were actual experts available (aka, lobbyists) who could tell them why this idea was dumb and impossible.
It's hard not to see this following in the line of "right to be forgotten" or "tracking consent" where legitimate concerns about the language of the rules were completely dismissed as industry noise.
Lawmakers obviously need the assistance of outside expertise. The problem with lobbying is that most of the assistance comes from the people with most of the money. Lawmakers could (and in some jurisdictions do) seek out assistance rather than relying on moneyed interests to offer it.
The podcast episode in Svenska Dagbladet (which is otherwise a very good podcast) was infuriating because the opponent and the host did not catch on to her ridiculous statements about encryption. She really needs to meet a journalist that can cross-examine her statements about this. She got away too easy there.
I only read the blog summarizing the interviews, but I’m horrified that she can talk this much bs with such apparent confidence. I don’t know who she is and how she got to have this role, which she does not appear qualified to hold.
She is a Swedish politician from the Social Democratic party. One of the senior ones that served as minister in the cabinet for a number of years. Unfortunately, that does not mean she is competent
This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us (including other politicians) will never read them and instead have to rely on faith. It feels to me like they want to give you the illusion that it's all open/public but at the same time they don't want other people to read it. The fact that even the politicians signing on it can't understand it should raise a lot of red flags.
We should treat them the same way that an anti-virus treats "safe" code with payloads that are obfuscated using techniques also used by viruses (a big reason why you get false positives on cracks and keygens btw). We should assume that they are trying to hide something they don't want us to see when they make their bills extremely hard to read even for lawyers.
Legalese is like that thanks to a long history of people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes.
That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes.
Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.
I have no problem with the vocabulary itself and most of the Legalese. I try to use more of it in my documentation because, as you mentioned, it has less room to interpretation and loopholes compared to more commonly used phrasing.
My problem is when they take what should have been a simple table with a few columns and turn it into a 9-line long sentence with triple negations, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and abusing references to other sections to create these puzzles that are very hard to solve. If they need it for some reason, they should also provide the easy-to-read version alongside it. I would prefer that the easy version came from the same people who wrote the original bill instead of a college textbook or a journalist relying on second hand information because he also can't read it properly.
Mixing multiple unrelated subject into a single bill is also completely unnecessary from the pov preventing loopholes.
When it gets to the point that even the people voting on it can't understand/read it, something needs to change. How do you know they didn't slip in intentional loophole? Even with a well intentioned politicians, the intern typing it could sneak something in.
> That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes.
And yet they end up with unintended consequences all the time (some of which were predicted by outside observers), outdated laws are kept on the books, tax advisors keep finding loopholes, laws are regularly taken down by constitutional courts over concerns that opponents pointed out in advance etc. etc.
If that obtuse legalese is helping at all it's barely so.
I don't know what would help. Maybe laws should start with outcome specifications and a bunch of policies that are applicable conditional on achieving the stated outcomes? More adversarial testing in advance, involving some game theory?
Yet at the same time you always hear people repeat that law isn't code, and it isn't dumb, and the spirit of the law is more important than any loophole. That if you try exploiting a loophole, you will just get caught and shot down. So which is it?
And if the wording of the law is meant to prevent loopholes, then this could be accomplished in better ways than writing extremely convoluted sentences over and over again. There are patterns to the loopholes and to the disclaimers meant to prevent them, which means we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with shorter, well-defined qualifiers.
And that was with a strong committee actually interested in improving the language.
> we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need
> to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with
> shorter, well-defined qualifiers.
The side-effects of those qualifiers are untested and unknown, and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve. Some might even call the ambiguity and ability to argue semantics a feature.
> The side-effects of those qualifiers are untested and unknown,
If you define the qualifiers to be a literal shorthand for the current status quo litany, what side-effects do you envision, other than better readability?
> and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve.
Does it, though? With the long-winded expensive processes favouring those with capital and punishing those with none into unjust settlements for fear of debilitating costs? With practically requiring expensive lawyers in order to have any hope of navigating the byzantine mazes of modern law?
Rather than assuming bad faith, I think it makes more sense to treat these documents like the codebase for a large open source software project. Perhaps there are reasons, not apparent to someone who hasn’t spent months working on the code and the systems it integrates with, for what appears to be unnecessary complexity. And perhaps it’s reasonable for people to advocate for or against using the project without having read and understood every line of code themselves.
The way I see it, there is also good reason why keygens are encrypting their payload. But that doesn't change the fact that getting viruses from them was extremely common until we got reputable repack site (eg. fit-girl) that tests them for us.
You also have to keep in mind that it's not just the average people who can't understand them, even the people writing and voting on them can't understand the content. The journalist reporting on them also don't understand the content.
It's like downloading an installer from a hacker on 4chan who can't remember exactly what it does, why it's so big and why it has a big encrypted payload. Would you install it on your production environment? His package will probably solve whatever problem you wanted to fix... but who knows what else is in there or if a friend that collaborated with him put a virus in there. The reason why viruses spread so much with cracked content is that the crack were actually working.
> By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us
Of course it is by design, not necessarily for evil purposes though.
First of all, the fact that laws are written in a "natural language" doesn't imply they can be fully understood by everyone, they are more like a math formula, it's only less obvious that laws need to be crafted in a way that requires an extensive knowledge of the subject. They're readable, but not always intelligible.
Natural languages are ambiguous, laws try to avoid it as much as they can, changing a word can often change the law intentions completely.
Secondly, exactly like scientific papers, if they have some kind of impact in the community, experts are gonna look at them, you can bet on it (also don't forget the army of lawyers companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. have on their payroll).
And they will cover the entire spectrum from the most complacent to the biggest opponents and everything in between, so it's not actually like they will pass unnoticed. There's too much to gain in exposing your political opponents (and sometimes allies) to not take advantage from it. No professional politician would miss the opportunity.
It's no secret that many politicians have a training in law and the reason is obvious.
For example in the US of the 535 members who make up Congress, 40% had attended law school. For senators, nearly 54% have obtained a law degree. The House contains 37% law degree holders
> We should assume that they are trying to hide something
To assume this we should also assume that they - whoever they are, it's not clear to me - are all on board with the "evil plan" which is arguably very far from the facts we can prove.
In the game of assuming bad faith, we could equally assume that the opposition to this particular proposal is paid by the big tech corporations to avoid investing a lot of money to update their systems and losing the vendor lock in (WhatsApp messages are readable only by WhatsApp, Instagram messages only by Instagram, and so on...)
I think you are assuming too much competence. If lawmakers are anything like other employees, then 80% of them are there just for the paycheck. They’re not going to expend any extra effort to fully understand a complicated law that they’re not particularly invested in.
Chances are very few of them actually consider where this could lead, not because they’re malicious, but because they just cannot be bothered. They’re probably working on their own fancy laws that will be much more popular with their voters.
> then 80% of them are there just for the paycheck.
90/10 rule: 10% of the workers do 90% of the work.
> I think you are assuming too much competence
I'm not assuming any particular competence, competence on the subject is not required to be a lawmaker, if expertise is needed consultants gets hired (I have briefly been a consultant for EU on tech matters).
I am simply saying that in places like the EU commission the only thing that matters is to reach a good enough compromise such as it would pass the test of the vote.
That's the only thing that is required from a law proposal.
And to not break pre-existent laws or other regulations (the Constitution, international treaties, customs, etc.)
I worked for my government, in the EU, and participated in the creation of such laws.
The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text.
Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an agenda that may be hidden or dishonest relative to their initial aim.
I'll take an example: you write a law relaxing the legal definition of what “chocolate” is. It happens that the MP in charge of this law has a Cadbury plant in its constituency – by pure chance, of course! The law and the debate will follow talking points about letting chocolate makers innovate and try new recipes. In reality, Cadbury et al. want to cut costs by introducing cheaper ingredients and reducing quality.
Once automatic screening is in place, it's effortless for the government to start repressing political dissent, to spy on the citizen's economic activity, and so on. In many EU countries, such as France, for instance, an authoritarian government would need to vote very few laws to completely shut down dissent : all the legislative weapons have already been voted by well-meaning and deluded MPs.
The European commission is as hypocritical as it can be. Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. What is next?
except it would mean silencing millions of people, which is frankly more similar to the intro of a sci-fi novel than modern France. See what's happening in Israel, not even the omnipotent Netanyahu could go against the huge popular protests.
> Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss,
That's the same right everyone has in Europe.
Nobody can be forced to publicly show their private conversations.
Only the authorities can ask for them in the case of a trial, if a judge gives the authorization.
> but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications.
That's a non sequitur. The law is not about "surrender your private communications", first of all because E2E it's about secrecy, not privacy, privacy still exists without secrecy, and even if it was, Von der Leyen (that I dislike, to use an euphemism) would be subject to it too.
It can, but if the goal is to —in one fell swoop— remove both secrecy (encryption) and privacy (scanning of de—encrypted information) then clearly that isn’t true.
> What happens there is a secret, protected by medical secrecy
No, it isn't.
My father is (redaction: was) a doctor, there is no secret about it, medical records are not secret, they are public records kept forever in public medical archives.
They are private though, to access them you need an authorization and a reason (of course).
Unless it's dictated by the law that some medical records must be kept secret: one example is being HIV positive.
> And whatever you're assuming to happen might not necessarily happen there
You're actually on the right track, but still confuse the two terms.
So I'll make it easier for you: privacy is consensual secrecy is not.
That's the real difference.
You in fact have a “right to privacy” because other people must respect it, but not equivalent “right to secrecy”, you can be asked to reveal a secret by authorities, while they can't (shouldn't) violate your privacy.
I think you have a very interesting point I never thought about. And after thinking it for a while, I believe that in the case of digital communications and their nature, secrecy ensures privacy.
If there is a line of people, with you at one end and me in the other end, and I need to send a message to you in private, and the only way I have to do it is by communicating this message along the line of people... I would have to come with some encoding method so nobody but you and me can understand this message.
> I would have to come with some encoding method so nobody but you and me can understand this message.
That obviously strengthen the chances of the messages staying private, but we had privacy long before encryption.
Phone calls could not be listened to and letters could not be opened, without proper authorization.
Obviously someone did, but that someone was breaking the law.
You have the right to privacy in your own house, of course someone could look inside from a window, but if that's an habit, that someone is breaking the law.
Legal documents aren't complicated because some cabal of evil lawyers has decided to make the text hard to understand for you, they're complicated because legal concepts require precision and specificity that ordinary language isn't able to express.
It's like calling code "programmerlese" and claim that programmers invented it so ordinary people don't understand software. The average adult reads with the comprehension of an 8th grader, if deception was the goal they'd hardly need to try that hard.
EU documents are complicated because more than two-dozen national governments and thousands of people work on these texts because they can't ever agree on anything without throwing in 500 exceptions for each country, it's that simple, there's no tinfoil conspiracy.
It's interesting to think about how perhaps some ideas from software and programming language theory could be applied in legal settings.
The requirements are quite similar. Unambiguous interpretation of precisely defined concepts.
Particularly, it might allow much more efficient searching in legal texts. Imagine automatically searching for inconsistencies/loopholes or other "bugs" in the legal system.
I'm reminded of the "oops I wrote a compiler" meme reding your comment about legalese requiring "precision and specificity ordinary language is not able to express".
Someone commented something along the lines of 'but then how are we supposed to tackle organized crime'. As I typed the comment below the comment got flagged and I could no longer reply. Still, I think the bit below may contribute to the discussion. TL;DR; I think that as a society we should more often ask ourselves if something is actually worth fighting if it means sacrificing a lot of our human rights. That may not be a problem on HN, but it is one imho on a political level in many Western countries.
There is not always a solution to a problem.
Let's say you wanted to bring the number of car crashes to zero. Eventually there's nothing 'reasonable' left to be done, and the only remaining option would be to ban cars altogether. Instead, we accept a certain number of crashes because it's deemed more important to be able to drive a car than it is to bring the number of car crash fatalities to zero*.
For example, in a country like Germany there are 0.8 homicides per 100K inhabitants. You could put _everybody_ under surveillance, just to have an easier job of finding the perpetrators. In the process there would be many false positives, wrongful imprisonments, etc.
In order to preserve the rule of law, maybe it's sometimes best to accept that you cannot create the perfect society. At least not a society in which people who are innocent (the very vast majority) can also still enjoy their freedoms.
Besides, I feel like the police has become somewhat lazy in many Western countries for the past 20 years. Before the rise of the internet, it was simply accepted that you couldn't know what two spouses had said to each other and you had to rely on good-old detective work. However, since things like Facebook Messenger, the cops expect to be able to get a warrant for all this data. That era appears to be slowly ending with E2EE, and all of a sudden they're struggling because those detective skills have slowly deteriorated.
* To be clear, I think that in many countries there's still quite a lot of room for improvement to reduce the number of car crash fatalities. Not in the least in the USA.
This shouldn't even be a foreign concept to the HN audience. Not long ago these was a post about "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero".
Those interested in the legal system out there should also be familiar with the idea of how some criminals will get away in the attempt to prevent any innocent person from going to prison.
Sometimes it costs more to fight a problem than you get back from solving it.
Reminds me of the senator that asked Zuckerberg how do they make money [0], and Zuckerberg simply said they run ads. What a way to use your questioning time, with something that was a google search away.
Don't believe vendors' lies about "end-to-end" encryption.
If caught red handed, they will always say it depends on how you define where both "ends" begin.
Do not trust a cloud service that you have not developed and deployed yourself.
You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content, but only if you have given it your content pre-encrypted by yourself, not trusted a third party to encrypt it on your behalf. Obviously, this excludes mobile devices.
Do not trust a tree of certificates if you cannot trust the root certificate because it belongs to an organization that is in a jurisdiction where people may be interested in what you have written and said in your encrypted message.
Don't trust old-school typewriters and the postal system either. Letters are routinely opened and typewriters can be matched. For example, the Stasi (secret police of the former GDR - German "Democratic" Republic) had an archive of type samples of all sold models of typewriters for re-identification of political pamphlets.
You can trust a few things: You can trust your Linux box with your self-compiled kernel (no 3rd party drivers), at least as long as it is not on a network. To build a safe environment, you could start there, taking a defensive approach.
Remember, last time the paranoid turned out to be naive when Snowden revealed the real status quo in 2013 (ten years ago, when I couldn't buy a 1 TB USB stick).
Quantum computing is theoretically able to attack many of the public key encryption algorithms we use. Hardware encryption of HDs doesn't use those algorithms, it uses symmetric-key algorithms, that are not vulnerable to quantum attacks.
> Don't trust old-school typewriters and the postal system either. Letters are routinely opened and typewriters can be matched. For example, the Stasi (secret police of the former GDR - German "Democratic" Republic) had an archive of type samples of all sold models of typewriters for re-identification of political pamphlets.
That's theoretical. I highly doubt anyone extends that much effort to target typewriters anymore. The best they could probably do is match a series of messages to the same typewriter. Though they might not even be able to do that, because the law-enforcement skills to match typewriter documents to each other have also probably nearly completely atrophied.
You're probably more likely to be caught by being the weirdo still buying typewriter ribbons.
I mean, photocopiers have the exact same technology so the US Secret Service can see who’s trying to photocopy dollar bills. (Which is what they were originally created for, not as bodyguards)
I would agree, but then I also would have agreed with this sentiment about much of what Snowden revealed. If you want to be paranoid, may as well go all in.
> I would agree, but then I also would have agreed with this sentiment about much of what Snowden revealed. If you want to be paranoid, may as well go all in.
What Snowden revealed is way more believable than the government continuing to invest tons of effort into profiling typewriters. The whole thing with Snowden was that his leaks confirmed a lot of things reasonable people speculated.
While you are right, note that the typewriters and certificates were just off-the-cuff examples to show that you cannot trust a lot of things any more, certainly not the ¨end-to-end encryption¨ promises but also many other things.
I am not advocating for typewriters as such, but there was the story about India ordering thousands after Snowden's revelations, and I just wanted to say why that is silly. If I want to find out something really badly, I will, so there is no reason to believe that people who have more resources cannot do the same.
Do you trust your bios? Your usb stack? Your network card firmware?
I get the desire to control the entire chain, but nowadays you’re surrounded by cameras and microphones 24/7, every smart device is a surveillance sleeper agent waiting for the magic word. Certificate chains are the least of your worries.
Anything your monitor displays or sound system outputs is subject to ubiquitous surveillance. And, when there's a gap in the surveillance that's also is subject to interpretation.
Privacy already is (mostly) lost and the battle now simply is to reliably establish authenticity that can't be impersonated or doubted. That's where encryption remains helpful.
You don't even have to emit signals. Consumer WiFi equipment can already be used as active radar[0] to track individual movement, and ubiquitous deployment of dense high-frequency cellular networking equipment (5G, 6G) will basically render most house walls transparent (especially if you're living in a USAmerican stick-framed drywall house) potentially allowing for things like face tracking at a distance.
If your threat model is people who you already know are trying to monitor you, isn't it implied that they think you're suspicious with or without the paint?
I disagree. It is still quite trivial to reasonably exchange information without anyone being able to eavesdrop on it.
Authenticity isn't important if the message content can be verified. It can even pose a danger. People like to attack the messenger, especially if he has a point.
Don't know about your devices, but mine do not put me under surveillance. Smartphones are critical, but even those are controllable. If you are in public you won't know, but otherwise you can be reasonably safe.
"You need to be able to increase the costs of getting caught" -- Edward Snowden
Deliberately inserted malware, laying in plain sight in source code, is an existential risk for a company with a reputation like IBM's. Of course, there isn't a 100% guarantee of it being noticed, but a 1% chance of that happening is enough for them to tell the spooks to fuck off.
Special Access Programs only work because God-mode coprocessors like the Intel ME ensure zero risk of blowback for the manufacturer. Force them to have skin in the game and they aren't pushovers anymore.
And that comes when you self compile your kernel? Seems like an odd point to stop.
Like, the chances of someone sneaking something terrible into an open source kernel seem lower than of any of the hardware coming out of China to be poisoned.
> Like, the chances of someone sneaking something terrible into an open source kernel seem lower than of any of the hardware coming out of China to be poisoned.
what causes you to think that?
For example, how often has there been something terrible inside an OS kernel? How much poisoned Chinese hardware are you aware of?
I agree with your point of taking security measures into your own hands, but given how pompompurin was only caught through using a personal email address with his name on it, despite using Windows (!), I think you're a lot safer than you think. Most of the time at least. Problem is that it's impossible to know if now is "most of the time".
You need to think more about your model of trust. You will quickly discover that all security is built on trusting someone, even in the examples you mention above. You can compile your own kernel, but you trust kernel developers to not have put exploits in the source code. You can't audit the source code itself. You also trust your compiler to accurately compile the source code. You also trust compiler developers to not have put exploits into the compiler itself. You also trust the compiler they used to bootstrap their toolchain to compile the compiler.
Fundamentally, all security is based on trusting somebody, understanding their incentives and intentions and weighing risk and reward. An excellent book on the subject is Bruce Schneier's "Liars and Outliers" https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/.
Nothing changed. They'll continue using Signal for themselves, they just don't want you using it too. Or rather, they want you to use it just as long it has a manhole only they can access.
Secure comms for government, not for you. Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
Never mind that the large majority of child abuse is done by government. Either directly, as in the perpetrator is a government employee or by failure to actually pay attention to children entrusted to them. The top child abusers are schools "and school related" (50% or so staff, 50% failure to prevent children abusing each other).
"Far from a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence."
Even the very worst of child professional projections say that violence and abuse at home affects ~10% of children. Which is bad. How much children are affected by violence under the supervision of the state according to this report? 50%.
And the worst of that figure: it's obviously true. Is there anyone here that has not at least seen violence in school, but more likely experienced it firsthand?
Note that although the report focuses on third world countries in the press release, there is no such result in the actual report. "First world" schools are much less likely to be attacked by government or external forces directly, but most other violence and abuse problems are actually worse than in the third world.
She maybe don't understand technology, but I get the feeling that breaking or weakening p2p is not what she talking about. The scanning means scanning performed on the end devices, not of the communications. The idea is to force communication messengers providers to perform scan on end user's device.
That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.
Right, I don’t have a lot of love for EU bureaucrats (thanks cookie law!), but this criticism misses the mark in many places.
You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different.
Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct.
Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?
That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.
The informed ones anyway. They would be happy to get the uninformed ones as it still makes their numbers look better and justifies their position of weakening the internet.
Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible.
Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit.
You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is private and absolutely nobody else's business. It's a crime to open somebody's mail.
In the digital domain, we're fine with all of these illegal searches, either we don't even know they happen or we do know yet let it pass, as it feels "invisible" and not intrusive. Plus, you're a standup citizen so all is good.
And that's how one day you end up as a bankrupted outcast for having insulted the king.
Lots of places don't have strong constitutional protections, for anything.
Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?).
But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want more constitutional protections (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.
Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0].
Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic. More brain drain? Is it the intended goal?
Maybe people are voting with their feet for constitutional protections. Maybe it's because the USA is significantly richer and pays more, there's likely to be a whole range of reasons.
I work with several US nationals who have relocated to the EU.
Also, as a European living in the Bay, part of it is for the higher salaries. If I can take my Bay rate and bring it back to Europe I'm going to do that.
Okay to put it another way the constitution is uncodified and weak - parliament can change constitutional laws at a whim due to no separation of powers and no-one could sit down and write it out anyway. So it's a pretty weird constitution if you can call it that, and many legal scholars argue it isn't one.
UK operates on the notion of parliamentary supremacy, which makes any constitution, formal or informal, largely meaningless, since the Parliament can always override anything in it with simple majority vote:
"It is often said that it would be unconstitutional for the United Kingdom Parliament to do certain things, meaning that the moral, political and other reasons against doing them are so strong that most people would regard it as highly improper if Parliament did these things. But that does not mean that it is beyond the power of Parliament to do such things. If Parliament chose to do any of them, the courts would not hold the Act of Parliament invalid."
I remember the good old days when you could be pro-riots and still agree that the behavior was illegal, because "burning the system down" was a position taken with honesty.
When US "peacekeepers" invade a foreign country, that's illegal too.
Careful, if any HN folk reside in Ottawa they’ll be all over you implying that honking horns is psychological torture and that everything is the fault of the RCMP and Provincial government for not shutting down protests first.
Hey, post your street address online here. Me and some buddies will camp outside your house honking horns all night long for a month or two, all in completely harmless good fun as we all agree it’s simply free speech.
> Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.
Plenty of Americans do just that, a friend of mine got his USA certificate of un-citizenship last week
Canada has a clause in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms that literally allows the legislature of any province to pass laws in direct contradiction to most of the Charter - specifically, the sections on fundamental rights. They just have to explicitly point out which parts of the Charter they found inconvenient when invoking this clause. Quebec is notorious for abusing this power (mostly for its language laws), but other provinces have also found it useful on occasion.
I 'm actually shocked that people are OK with that. People in countries that have had dictatorships recently probably remember that. Snitches everywhere, the police raiding houses again and again for no reason, with no recourse and people were just accepting it.
As a Russian student studying in Paris, it was a terrifying realization that the mayor can, apparently, prohibit any and all mass protests by simply issuing a decree, no higher authority needed. (This was in 2018 IIRC.) This is apparently part of the anti-terrorist law or something? I dunno, and nobody seemed to care except for the participants of the protests that were happening at the time.
Compared to the constant, unceasing reminders by Russian activists that the de facto prohibition on protests in Russia is a legal sham and the actual thing would require the president declaring a state of emergency (that only happened in 2022 and then not fully), the silence in an established democractic society was deafening.
The tired “freeze peach” responses on HN evoke similar feelings, as do the “private businesses can deny anything to anyone”. (Never seen a less-than-loyal artist’s concert cancelled the day before because the venue received a suggestion—not a command, mind you, a suggestion—from a city official’s phone? Have I got news for you.)
It cannot. It can refuse an organized protest, and ask the prefect to deploy the police at particular location, but cannot prohibit protests.
Actually, Paris' mayor is the mayor with the less executive power, as they don't have a municipal police. Paris prefect, on the other hand, is the most powerful prefect in France.
But prefects in France have too much power. It would be fine if the legislative and judiciary branch acted as they should in a healthy democracy, but the legislative power is subordinate to the executive, and different presidents over tim choose to reduce the judiciary power. The fact that Macron and ex-Sarkozists claim Erdoğan is going too far with his judicial reform is a joke. A bad one.
The prefect was also involved at some point, I might well have mixed that up. The structure honestly seems quite convoluted from the outside, but the responsible party seemed to be a part of the executive. (I tried to check whether a tribunal of some sort belonged to the judiciary, because it looked like it didn’t, and gave up. No deep knowledge here, sorry.)
> [The mayor] can refuse an organized protest [...], but cannot prohibit protests.
What’s the practical difference? I’m not sure I see one, having seen years of “oh no you can’t have your rally here, there’s extremely unfortunately some other thing nobody’s heard about happening in your primary location and renovations at your alternate one and you’ll have to move to a place two hours from city centre and by the way we sat on your notification for a month and the deadline to resubmit was two days ago”.
(Legally, the Russian system is that of affirmative notifications, not of requests for permission, so you have to manufacture a conflict or a threat to public safety of some sort to really refuse, as well as offer an alternate location. The ECHR had a field day dismantling those excuses with about a decade’s latency, before Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering and activists were left to maybe possibly write to the OHCHR in the godsdamned UN and hope it works? I heard they’ve literally sent out more complaints now than the office has handled over the entirety of its pre-2022 history. I guess even the UN needs to have its joints greased from time to time.)
I would point out that Russian system failed entirely and totally when it comes to keeping it "free". Meanwhile, I see French having actual rather big protests all the time. Meanwhile, I see Russia actively exporting authoritarianism with full revert back to bad times.
I think that one big reason is that there is practical difference in the two systems ... and that practical difference is favoring the French system.
The issue is that with such huge loopholes, FUTURE one might exploit them on a bigger scale than what happens in Russia.
And being constantly vigilant and opposed to such laws, is what keeps the society sane and working.
The protest in France could be officially banned, but it wouldn't stop the protesters. Whereas current Russia would bring in the army to forcefully stop protests.
I did not said that current government is somehow better then other governments. I said that French system is superior regardless of government. Because it produces better outcome systematically over the years, even as this or that government don't want it to happen.
I am saying that looking toward Russia laws is bad place to take lessons from. The in book laws in Russian system mean literally nothing. Wagner is illegal in Russia too, actually. Post-socialist human right activists lost and failed.
> The protest in France could be officially banned, but it wouldn't stop the protesters. Whereas current Russia would bring in the army to forcefully stop protests.
First part yes. Latter part, actually, no. Russia don't bring army within Russia for that nor need to. They have cops and secret service for that and both have enough power. But the lack of democracy in Russia did not happened because the army would systematically suppress Russian protests. (It successfully suppressed Belarusian protests and made Chechnya into vasal state. But in Russia itself, it is not the threat of army that is preventing protests.)
The "affirmative notifications" is doing absolutely nothing for democracy in Russia.
It's not just future governments - think about Canada trying to debank the Convoy protesters, etc. People cheered, because stomping on people they don't like feels good.
Sorry, had other stuff to do hopefully you'll see this message.
In fact, I was wrong, I thought the mayor had some interdiction power, they have none. the mayor cannot 'not allow' a protest, the prefect can. When Paris' mayor is not on the same political side 1s the government, it can lead to weird stuff (like what's happening now).
It is absolutely authoritarian. I think France was ranked as one of the most authoritative democracy, on par with Russia, turkey,a bit less than Egypt.
Those interdiction weren't used offensively until Macron though. You have to limit the area of the interdiction (can't be the whole city) and pre-2017 were easely accessible 48h before they were effective, and could be challenged in court.
In 2018-2019 they tested putting the interdiction up at the last moment, it worked, so now it's even worse, they draft the interdiction as active immediately and put a copy on the prefecture doors, do not make them available on the internet then fine everyone.
The most egregious was one that took effect at 17h but wasn't put on the door until 17h30.
What's funny is that people voted macron 'against fascism' twice, not realizing that his way is a fascism too (in this case, I mean fascism as a catch-all for ideologies coming from Cesarism/Bonapartism, as defined by Krondstadt butcher himself, Trosky, terrible man but accurate critic of his time).
> As a Russian student studying in Paris, it was a terrifying realization that the mayor can, apparently, prohibit any and all mass protests by simply issuing a decree, no higher authority needed. (This was in 2018 IIRC.) This is apparently part of the anti-terrorist law or something? I dunno, and nobody seemed to care except for the participants of the protests that were happening at the time.
That's because the governments actively work to and encourage the fracturing of their population and cultures and the breakdown of trust in society. If you hate or fear your neighbor, you will be okay with the state trampling their rights.
It’s to easy to explain away this stuff as merely gov deception fooling people. But I’ve seen far too many well educated people on HN making arguments in favour of this stuff. They always have their pet emergencies that are unlike other times in history requiring compromise now and a naive trust in the good intentions of local politicians, who often do care about some real present issue, but lack the capacity to see the longer term consequences and wider picture.
The fact they are more often religiously promoted by people often from EU countries or wealthier cities in the US is a signal but that doesn’t mean they were merely fooled by bad actors in gov hiding stuff. They could just as often see a consistent positive stability in their own local community, then immediately rationalize/correlate that to the popular mantras of the well intentioned local politicians… regardless if such that positive state is a stagnated legacy of prior success, claiming issues in other regions that their country/community never really experienced is because x gov policy (ie, using the absence of negatives to rationalize some norm, regardless if it’s been tested IRL), or merely positives happening in spite of their own govs policies.
Gov policy making / promotion is far too complex and multilayered to dismiss it outright as intentioned manipulative and planned.
The "well educated people on HN" are some of the most meekly subservient to government authority and blind cheerleaders of its power I've ever encountered, and there is a strong scorn and open hatred for lesser "deplorable" classes of society with incorrect opinions who they need government protection from.
It has come to my attention as well that the more higher educated people in my circles are more blind to the power grab that is happening by government here. Topics around housing, energy, immigration, covid, EU policy, nitrogen ect are blindly followed by whatever the authority is saying and without any desire to think for themselves.
It has come to the point where debating any of above Topics is impossible and gets you stamped as "crazy, outlier".
And on a lot of these topics, the messages from government that have been sent were plain wrong, but no corrections have been made, thus the cycle continues.
Where the more 'poor' people around me seem to think more for themselves and with common sense. Those are the people that wonder why the riots in Paris are nowhere to be found in our mainstream media (Netherlands).
I wonder why this is the case and if this is unique to me. One explanation could be that the wealthier group has more to lose when going 'out of favor'. Thoughts?
There certainly seems to be class hatred and division behind it. I don't know if there are any rational elements to it like the higher classes having more to lose, or it is purely driven by propaganda from the ruling class to cement their power.
That people are irrational or willfully ignorant about things is not surprising. People can become irrational and blind to truth through their own self-delusions or through propaganda. Being "educated" or having more money doesn't change that.
No, I’m not. What I’m saying is that as long as laws on protests are being followed in full (which in the case of Russia means we’re... somewhere in the late 90s, probably? early 00s at most), the authorities in Paris seem to have much wider latitude to stop people from protesting than would be allowed by the Russian constitution, and that latitude was exercised as recently as 2018.
That doesn’t mean the French system doesn’t work right now (certainly there’s a lot of protesting in Paris), but from my paranoid viewpoint it seems extremely exploitable, and it’s chilling to see people shrug at government actions that would have every post-Soviet human rights activist up in arms. I don’t know how else to put this; it just seems fundamental that the government must not (have the ability to) start to prohibit protests, because sooner or later it won’t stop.
Maybe I’m just too unwilling to believe in a reasonable government, I don’t know.
The core of the issue is that the law itself matters less than how the people with big guns behave -- they can choose not to enforce the law or they can break the law with impunity, so what matters is what the government / police actually do, and what they actually prevent people from doing.
Despite the "bans" on mass protests, the French still protest plenty.
> "Maybe I’m just too unwilling to believe in a reasonable government, I don’t know."
Even if somehow there were a genuinely benevolent socially minded government willing to put society above all of their personal interests (including, even getting elected) - it would be unwise to support potentially oppressive powers. Because sooner or later, that government will be replaced by one that will be happy to exploit those powers for wrongful purpose.
> people shrug at government actions that would have every post-Soviet human rights activist up in arms
Post-Soviet activists did accepted quite a lot ... and post soviet societies are quickest to fall into authoritarian. There are not that many activists in the first place and activists are looked down upon by too many people.
My point here is that generally, people on the west are massively better at keeping things democracy.
Democracy is one bad week away from turning into a dictatorship. We've gotten complacent and forgot that fact. Democracy is not the natural state of society.
Chinese traffic laws come to mind, were reporting somebody overtaking on the right got you a small monetary reward. So folks were creeping on the left side, forcing others to overtake on the right, photos were made, the incident reported, rewards were rept.
Similar things can happen fast on the internet.
Bait somebody into breaking the law and report it for a reward.
Can even automate it.
Piracy and porn comes to mind.
> Private communication is private and absolutely nobody else's business. It's a crime to open somebody's mail.
I thought we were talking in the context of the EU? It's not a crime for them if the government is doing it (or asking for it). They don't have rights like that.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. The EU law will need to be implemented by national laws and at least in Germany, there is Art 10 GG (the 10th paragraph of the constitution) which protects one’s rights to private communication (specifically also against the government; this is the whole point of constitutions!).
Granted, the paragraph also contains a provision for lawful exceptions, but in general, our highest court has ruled that such exceptions need to be reasonable in scope. I have some hope (but less than I’d like) that this will happen here, as well.
It's definitely illegal to open letters not addressed to you in Sweden. I'm not sure what makes you think we don't have rights like that. I think an issue here might be that a lot of jurisdictions have privacy laws specific to post, and the law system hasn't been able to keep up with the technological development.
It's almost like there is a shadow government [1,2,3] which uses these people as puppets for the citizenry. Of course the puppets are clueless. They just need to approve everything the shadow government has on its agenda.
In the Western world there is enough bureaucracy that shadow government operatives can operate from within government institutions freely and unlike the Taliban which projected its power in occupied territories through the overt threat of violence.
Are you saying that sending and scanning are the same? I think we need to define "scan" (or "sniff" or whatever other metaphors are used here) as more than just receiving a copy that's still encrypted. What definition is there, which is distinct from "decrypt"?
You can often determine the source, the destination, the amount of data over time, etc. but those are hardly sufficient to suspect wrongdoing unless there's also other overwhelming evidence already.
I simply can't believe she's as ignorant as she comes across; even if she doesn't know that you can't "scan" an encrypted file, she's a damned EU Commissioner; she has a large staff of educated people to advise her.
I think she simply doesn't care about the reality, she wants to bang a "protect the children" drum for political reasons.
It's odd; she seems to be a pedagogy graduate, who was once (1988) elected to the Swedish parliament as a communist, then worked as a teacher, and was later (1994?) appointed a social-democrat minister. So since her first parliamentary term, she has not been an elected representative, but an appointed functionary. So I guess her "political reasons" amount to pleasing her boss.
Former commies who repent don't lose their contempt for ordinary people. They continue to think they are "the vanguard". I reckon she just thinks ordinary people are too dim to notice that her sayings are nonsense.
I’m not sure what you mean by her not being an elected representative. She was a Swedish member of parliament for a long time, not just one term. The tradition in Sweden is that ministers are taken from among the ranks of the ruling party’s MPs, even though exceptions sometimes are made.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadWithin the group, the more people believe that it's the norm, the less social impetus there is to address individual bad actors.
Outside that group, people are less likely to treat people fairly if they are perceived to be part of a group of bad actors. How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors?
Finally, pointing to a single case of someone who was arrested for corruption among literal thousands of bureaucrats does not make a compelling case.
my experince with eurocracy is from projects i ve participated in
The point the EU Commission is defending here is the need to spy on every word, every bit of interaction you have on the internet. You know, "to protect the children".
I mean, if you truly think like this, how about you give me a live dump of you traffic, desktop, cell phone, ... everything, along with all encryption keys, passwords, etc. You know "so I can check you're not a pedophile". Because that's what this is about.
Elected ones are so accountable - lets see
1. Iraq war - Tony Blair mislwd parliament, as cobcluded in official report, not held to account
2. 2008 - noone held to account
3. Brexit campaign broke electoral law - noone held to account
4 - Covid responce in UK involved handing out billions to political donors for PPE that did not meet legal requirements and so was burned.
5 - Trump...
In fact I striggle to think of a recent disaster that was caused by a civil cervant or eurocrat
By increasing transparency and accountability.
But you misidentify the group being criticized. it's not euro bureaucrats.
it's literal morons who take ownership and responsibility over things they don't understand well enough to even surround themselves with advisors who know what they're talking about.
I've seen this attitude from many very wealthy people, a willingness, a bravado even, to be ignorant about what they do for a living, e.g. I met a dude who told me had a software business, but he didn't even know what programing language his own property was written in.
what really sets me off is their unwillingness to find out. (oh, and that this are the kind of people at the top of our society)
edit: From where they sit ( position where they have to champion this effort ), it is just not part of the equation that is relevant to them so any means to get public on your side even with comments about sniffing is justified. HN will ridicule it, but a lot of people will swallow it wholesale.
I wonder why Mullvad doesn't complain about the American Cloud Act, or did they already? Mullvad employees could be extradited to the US if they do not comply (opening up your servers for example), since it's a bilateral agreement with the EU
It's a pretty dark era ahead of us: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-oia/cloud-act-resources
Never go full American politics.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
Its full name is the: Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse
I’m reminded of that recent embarrassing display of US government where the TikTok CEO was peppered with the kinds of questions that betray the fact that the congresscritter doesn’t comprehend the topic.
If they wanted real answers they’d say, “I yield my time to this SME I brought in.” But they’re just there to look tough on whatever.
> E2E can be explained to an 8 year old.
Can.
Also, the main problem here isn't explaining the tech itself (although the quotations in the link indicate this is also a problem), but rather explaining why it's (a) actually good, and (b) impossible to prevent even if it wasn't good.
But even if it was the tech itself, most people don't have maths skills and fundamentally don't (care to?) think logically.
When I was a kid, I couldn't understand why the adults kept joking about why it was so hard to stop the VCR from flashing 12:00 when I found it trivial.
(I think we're getting to the point where you could run an image detection process on the display itself, totally circumventing any encryption. This will have a lot of consequences that are totally obvious and yet it may be done regardless).
And to be even more honest, technical people have a very hard time getting their point across non-technical people and engaging in politics
Sure, I'd be as surprised as anyone else if it could straight up write good laws, but it can almost certainly talk in political jargon better than any of us software developers can manage.
You lunatic!! You have damned us all! The genie, it is released, the bottle broken, forever unstopped.
PoliticianGPT, oh the humanity!
I've lost track of which version passed which exams, but recent news suggests v4 scores highly on (at least one) bar exam (I don't know if bar exam is "noob lawyer" or "good lawyer", but either way, even v3.5 can do more than me).
Politicians, in order to get reelected, need soundbites that can be understood within the average attention span, which is not long enough to capture the more subtle details. Though tech people might provide them with these details, they are often lost in the execution or distorted by special interest lobbyists.
Ideally, leaders would listen to the tech experts, translate that information into plain english, compile it into a detailed and concise plan, present that plan to voters within the average attention span, and execute the plan faithfully.
Unfortunately, most of our current congress people, to use a metaphor, are not willing to 'rock the boat'. We need our politicians to put logic and reason above obedience, have high standards for legislature, and make this legislature in service of the nation.
Including a lot of vapid or just bad ideas that had no way of working, and they convinced investors of giving them money
At the same time good ideas might not have gotten financing due to lack of a good presentation
I'm an Android user with no knowledge of iMessage.
With iMessage you get read receipts (if turned on), high quality multi-media (instead of just MMS), end-to-end encryption, the ability to edit or unsend messages for a short time, multi-device messaging, no per-message fee, and probably more.
The green bubble is a signal that isn’t available in that conversation. It’s a little like the old padlock in the address bar but far more abstract.
Also, police exist to protect capital, not us. It evolved from slave catching forces, and does relatively little to prevent or solve most crime.
I don't care if that counts as "empty criticism" by your definition. If someone proposes a solution, it's perfectly valid criticism to point out that the "solution" doesn't actually solve.
I would also caution you to focus less on these kinds of catchphrases and more on the crux of their message[1] (and I should point out that this applies to any kind of movement), lest you not see the forest for the trees.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35346925
A constructive criticism is: "this sucks because <reason>". It is constructive because it may not be trivial to explain why something sucks, yet it is mandatory if you expect to find a solution.
A solution is: "This sucks because <reason>. Doing <improvements> would make it better".
Similar bills have died several times in the US, if only because there were actual experts available (aka, lobbyists) who could tell them why this idea was dumb and impossible.
It's hard not to see this following in the line of "right to be forgotten" or "tracking consent" where legitimate concerns about the language of the rules were completely dismissed as industry noise.
We should treat them the same way that an anti-virus treats "safe" code with payloads that are obfuscated using techniques also used by viruses (a big reason why you get false positives on cracks and keygens btw). We should assume that they are trying to hide something they don't want us to see when they make their bills extremely hard to read even for lawyers.
That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes.
Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.
My problem is when they take what should have been a simple table with a few columns and turn it into a 9-line long sentence with triple negations, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and abusing references to other sections to create these puzzles that are very hard to solve. If they need it for some reason, they should also provide the easy-to-read version alongside it. I would prefer that the easy version came from the same people who wrote the original bill instead of a college textbook or a journalist relying on second hand information because he also can't read it properly.
Mixing multiple unrelated subject into a single bill is also completely unnecessary from the pov preventing loopholes.
When it gets to the point that even the people voting on it can't understand/read it, something needs to change. How do you know they didn't slip in intentional loophole? Even with a well intentioned politicians, the intern typing it could sneak something in.
And yet they end up with unintended consequences all the time (some of which were predicted by outside observers), outdated laws are kept on the books, tax advisors keep finding loopholes, laws are regularly taken down by constitutional courts over concerns that opponents pointed out in advance etc. etc. If that obtuse legalese is helping at all it's barely so.
I don't know what would help. Maybe laws should start with outcome specifications and a bunch of policies that are applicable conditional on achieving the stated outcomes? More adversarial testing in advance, involving some game theory?
And if the wording of the law is meant to prevent loopholes, then this could be accomplished in better ways than writing extremely convoluted sentences over and over again. There are patterns to the loopholes and to the disclaimers meant to prevent them, which means we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with shorter, well-defined qualifiers.
If you define the qualifiers to be a literal shorthand for the current status quo litany, what side-effects do you envision, other than better readability?
> and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve.
Does it, though? With the long-winded expensive processes favouring those with capital and punishing those with none into unjust settlements for fear of debilitating costs? With practically requiring expensive lawyers in order to have any hope of navigating the byzantine mazes of modern law?
You also have to keep in mind that it's not just the average people who can't understand them, even the people writing and voting on them can't understand the content. The journalist reporting on them also don't understand the content.
It's like downloading an installer from a hacker on 4chan who can't remember exactly what it does, why it's so big and why it has a big encrypted payload. Would you install it on your production environment? His package will probably solve whatever problem you wanted to fix... but who knows what else is in there or if a friend that collaborated with him put a virus in there. The reason why viruses spread so much with cracked content is that the crack were actually working.
Of course it is by design, not necessarily for evil purposes though.
First of all, the fact that laws are written in a "natural language" doesn't imply they can be fully understood by everyone, they are more like a math formula, it's only less obvious that laws need to be crafted in a way that requires an extensive knowledge of the subject. They're readable, but not always intelligible.
Natural languages are ambiguous, laws try to avoid it as much as they can, changing a word can often change the law intentions completely.
Secondly, exactly like scientific papers, if they have some kind of impact in the community, experts are gonna look at them, you can bet on it (also don't forget the army of lawyers companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. have on their payroll).
And they will cover the entire spectrum from the most complacent to the biggest opponents and everything in between, so it's not actually like they will pass unnoticed. There's too much to gain in exposing your political opponents (and sometimes allies) to not take advantage from it. No professional politician would miss the opportunity.
It's no secret that many politicians have a training in law and the reason is obvious.
For example in the US of the 535 members who make up Congress, 40% had attended law school. For senators, nearly 54% have obtained a law degree. The House contains 37% law degree holders
> We should assume that they are trying to hide something
To assume this we should also assume that they - whoever they are, it's not clear to me - are all on board with the "evil plan" which is arguably very far from the facts we can prove.
In the game of assuming bad faith, we could equally assume that the opposition to this particular proposal is paid by the big tech corporations to avoid investing a lot of money to update their systems and losing the vendor lock in (WhatsApp messages are readable only by WhatsApp, Instagram messages only by Instagram, and so on...)
Chances are very few of them actually consider where this could lead, not because they’re malicious, but because they just cannot be bothered. They’re probably working on their own fancy laws that will be much more popular with their voters.
90/10 rule: 10% of the workers do 90% of the work.
> I think you are assuming too much competence
I'm not assuming any particular competence, competence on the subject is not required to be a lawmaker, if expertise is needed consultants gets hired (I have briefly been a consultant for EU on tech matters).
I am simply saying that in places like the EU commission the only thing that matters is to reach a good enough compromise such as it would pass the test of the vote.
That's the only thing that is required from a law proposal.
And to not break pre-existent laws or other regulations (the Constitution, international treaties, customs, etc.)
The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text.
Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an agenda that may be hidden or dishonest relative to their initial aim.
I'll take an example: you write a law relaxing the legal definition of what “chocolate” is. It happens that the MP in charge of this law has a Cadbury plant in its constituency – by pure chance, of course! The law and the debate will follow talking points about letting chocolate makers innovate and try new recipes. In reality, Cadbury et al. want to cut costs by introducing cheaper ingredients and reducing quality.
Once automatic screening is in place, it's effortless for the government to start repressing political dissent, to spy on the citizen's economic activity, and so on. In many EU countries, such as France, for instance, an authoritarian government would need to vote very few laws to completely shut down dissent : all the legislative weapons have already been voted by well-meaning and deluded MPs.
The European commission is as hypocritical as it can be. Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. What is next?
except it would mean silencing millions of people, which is frankly more similar to the intro of a sci-fi novel than modern France. See what's happening in Israel, not even the omnipotent Netanyahu could go against the huge popular protests.
> Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss,
That's the same right everyone has in Europe.
Nobody can be forced to publicly show their private conversations.
Only the authorities can ask for them in the case of a trial, if a judge gives the authorization.
> but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications.
That's a non sequitur. The law is not about "surrender your private communications", first of all because E2E it's about secrecy, not privacy, privacy still exists without secrecy, and even if it was, Von der Leyen (that I dislike, to use an euphemism) would be subject to it too.
The real World does not work like Gotham City.
It can, but if the goal is to —in one fell swoop— remove both secrecy (encryption) and privacy (scanning of de—encrypted information) then clearly that isn’t true.
I think not even the people in EC in favour of this have such a bad argument as this one
Privacy requires secrecy
No, it doesn't.
When I go to the urologist there is no secret about what's going to happen, but the doctor closes the door to respect my privacy.
When a woman gives birth, unauthorized people are not allowed to enter the room. Because "privacy".
When I take money from the ATM I do it in private, not in secrecy. Everyone knows I am taking money, but are required to not get too close.
Conflating the two arguments is either out of confusion or bad faith.
Yes there is.
What happens there is a secret, protected by medical secrecy. There are assumptions on what can happen, but it is still protected
And whatever you're assuming to happen might not necessarily happen there
Having exceptions where the information gets out "by itself" (in the case of pregnancy) do not make the acts that happen there any less secret.
No, it isn't.
My father is (redaction: was) a doctor, there is no secret about it, medical records are not secret, they are public records kept forever in public medical archives.
They are private though, to access them you need an authorization and a reason (of course).
Unless it's dictated by the law that some medical records must be kept secret: one example is being HIV positive.
> And whatever you're assuming to happen might not necessarily happen there
You're actually on the right track, but still confuse the two terms.
So I'll make it easier for you: privacy is consensual secrecy is not.
That's the real difference.
You in fact have a “right to privacy” because other people must respect it, but not equivalent “right to secrecy”, you can be asked to reveal a secret by authorities, while they can't (shouldn't) violate your privacy.
If there is a line of people, with you at one end and me in the other end, and I need to send a message to you in private, and the only way I have to do it is by communicating this message along the line of people... I would have to come with some encoding method so nobody but you and me can understand this message.
That obviously strengthen the chances of the messages staying private, but we had privacy long before encryption.
Phone calls could not be listened to and letters could not be opened, without proper authorization.
Obviously someone did, but that someone was breaking the law.
You have the right to privacy in your own house, of course someone could look inside from a window, but if that's an habit, that someone is breaking the law.
etc. etc.
It's like calling code "programmerlese" and claim that programmers invented it so ordinary people don't understand software. The average adult reads with the comprehension of an 8th grader, if deception was the goal they'd hardly need to try that hard.
EU documents are complicated because more than two-dozen national governments and thousands of people work on these texts because they can't ever agree on anything without throwing in 500 exceptions for each country, it's that simple, there's no tinfoil conspiracy.
The requirements are quite similar. Unambiguous interpretation of precisely defined concepts.
Particularly, it might allow much more efficient searching in legal texts. Imagine automatically searching for inconsistencies/loopholes or other "bugs" in the legal system.
I'm reminded of the "oops I wrote a compiler" meme reding your comment about legalese requiring "precision and specificity ordinary language is not able to express".
There is not always a solution to a problem.
Let's say you wanted to bring the number of car crashes to zero. Eventually there's nothing 'reasonable' left to be done, and the only remaining option would be to ban cars altogether. Instead, we accept a certain number of crashes because it's deemed more important to be able to drive a car than it is to bring the number of car crash fatalities to zero*.
For example, in a country like Germany there are 0.8 homicides per 100K inhabitants. You could put _everybody_ under surveillance, just to have an easier job of finding the perpetrators. In the process there would be many false positives, wrongful imprisonments, etc.
In order to preserve the rule of law, maybe it's sometimes best to accept that you cannot create the perfect society. At least not a society in which people who are innocent (the very vast majority) can also still enjoy their freedoms.
Besides, I feel like the police has become somewhat lazy in many Western countries for the past 20 years. Before the rise of the internet, it was simply accepted that you couldn't know what two spouses had said to each other and you had to rely on good-old detective work. However, since things like Facebook Messenger, the cops expect to be able to get a warrant for all this data. That era appears to be slowly ending with E2EE, and all of a sudden they're struggling because those detective skills have slowly deteriorated.
* To be clear, I think that in many countries there's still quite a lot of room for improvement to reduce the number of car crash fatalities. Not in the least in the USA.
Those interested in the legal system out there should also be familiar with the idea of how some criminals will get away in the attempt to prevent any innocent person from going to prison.
Sometimes it costs more to fight a problem than you get back from solving it.
Maybe a bit of Argument from incredulity and appeal to emotion? "i can't see any other solution, so this is the only way."
[0] https://youtu.be/n2H8wx1aBiQ
It seems more likely to me that the Senator was out of his depth.
But "ads" is pretty euphemistic -- to the point of dishonesty -- when the ads are targeted political campaign messages, for example.
Cambridge Analytica was at least enabled by Facebook.
I'd say that their operations could be summed up more reasonably by "Facebook track people".
If caught red handed, they will always say it depends on how you define where both "ends" begin.
Do not trust a cloud service that you have not developed and deployed yourself.
You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content, but only if you have given it your content pre-encrypted by yourself, not trusted a third party to encrypt it on your behalf. Obviously, this excludes mobile devices.
Do not trust a tree of certificates if you cannot trust the root certificate because it belongs to an organization that is in a jurisdiction where people may be interested in what you have written and said in your encrypted message.
Don't trust old-school typewriters and the postal system either. Letters are routinely opened and typewriters can be matched. For example, the Stasi (secret police of the former GDR - German "Democratic" Republic) had an archive of type samples of all sold models of typewriters for re-identification of political pamphlets.
You can trust a few things: You can trust your Linux box with your self-compiled kernel (no 3rd party drivers), at least as long as it is not on a network. To build a safe environment, you could start there, taking a defensive approach. Remember, last time the paranoid turned out to be naive when Snowden revealed the real status quo in 2013 (ten years ago, when I couldn't buy a 1 TB USB stick).
Couldn't someone still capture them from the untrusted hardware, wait until quantum computer technology is available, then decrypt them?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
That's theoretical. I highly doubt anyone extends that much effort to target typewriters anymore. The best they could probably do is match a series of messages to the same typewriter. Though they might not even be able to do that, because the law-enforcement skills to match typewriter documents to each other have also probably nearly completely atrophied.
You're probably more likely to be caught by being the weirdo still buying typewriter ribbons.
https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2005/10/16
> I mean, photocopiers have the exact same technology
They absolutely do not have the "exact same technology. That's totally, 100% wrong.
I would agree, but then I also would have agreed with this sentiment about much of what Snowden revealed. If you want to be paranoid, may as well go all in.
What Snowden revealed is way more believable than the government continuing to invest tons of effort into profiling typewriters. The whole thing with Snowden was that his leaks confirmed a lot of things reasonable people speculated.
Might be hard to read or remember but it sure does stand out.
I am not advocating for typewriters as such, but there was the story about India ordering thousands after Snowden's revelations, and I just wanted to say why that is silly. If I want to find out something really badly, I will, so there is no reason to believe that people who have more resources cannot do the same.
I get the desire to control the entire chain, but nowadays you’re surrounded by cameras and microphones 24/7, every smart device is a surveillance sleeper agent waiting for the magic word. Certificate chains are the least of your worries.
Privacy already is (mostly) lost and the battle now simply is to reliably establish authenticity that can't be impersonated or doubted. That's where encryption remains helpful.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgDdaMy8KNE
Authenticity isn't important if the message content can be verified. It can even pose a danger. People like to attack the messenger, especially if he has a point.
Don't know about your devices, but mine do not put me under surveillance. Smartphones are critical, but even those are controllable. If you are in public you won't know, but otherwise you can be reasonably safe.
Yes, it's Coreboot with disabled and neutralized Intel ME.
> Your usb stack?
No, it's isolated in a dedicated, hardware-virtualized VM on Qubes OS.
> Your network card firmware?
Same as above. And it's FLOSS.
> surrounded by cameras and microphones
For those, I have hardware kill switches. On the phone, too.
Pinky swear.
I'm using https://github.com/qubesos/qubes-video-companion
Sure, because I have the complete source code for all three of those things:
https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
Deliberately inserted malware, laying in plain sight in source code, is an existential risk for a company with a reputation like IBM's. Of course, there isn't a 100% guarantee of it being noticed, but a 1% chance of that happening is enough for them to tell the spooks to fuck off.
Special Access Programs only work because God-mode coprocessors like the Intel ME ensure zero risk of blowback for the manufacturer. Force them to have skin in the game and they aren't pushovers anymore.
Can you? If we're going this far, you can't trust the compiler either.
Like, the chances of someone sneaking something terrible into an open source kernel seem lower than of any of the hardware coming out of China to be poisoned.
what causes you to think that?
For example, how often has there been something terrible inside an OS kernel? How much poisoned Chinese hardware are you aware of?
Fundamentally, all security is based on trusting somebody, understanding their incentives and intentions and weighing risk and reward. An excellent book on the subject is Bruce Schneier's "Liars and Outliers" https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc...
I wonder what changed.
Never mind that the large majority of child abuse is done by government. Either directly, as in the perpetrator is a government employee or by failure to actually pay attention to children entrusted to them. The top child abusers are schools "and school related" (50% or so staff, 50% failure to prevent children abusing each other).
https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-...
"Far from a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence."
Even the very worst of child professional projections say that violence and abuse at home affects ~10% of children. Which is bad. How much children are affected by violence under the supervision of the state according to this report? 50%.
And the worst of that figure: it's obviously true. Is there anyone here that has not at least seen violence in school, but more likely experienced it firsthand?
Note that although the report focuses on third world countries in the press release, there is no such result in the actual report. "First world" schools are much less likely to be attacked by government or external forces directly, but most other violence and abuse problems are actually worse than in the third world.
That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.
You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different.
Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct.
Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?
The informed ones anyway. They would be happy to get the uninformed ones as it still makes their numbers look better and justifies their position of weakening the internet.
Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit.
You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is private and absolutely nobody else's business. It's a crime to open somebody's mail.
In the digital domain, we're fine with all of these illegal searches, either we don't even know they happen or we do know yet let it pass, as it feels "invisible" and not intrusive. Plus, you're a standup citizen so all is good.
And that's how one day you end up as a bankrupted outcast for having insulted the king.
Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?).
But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want more constitutional protections (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.
Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0].
Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic. More brain drain? Is it the intended goal?
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
I work with several US nationals who have relocated to the EU.
Also, as a European living in the Bay, part of it is for the higher salaries. If I can take my Bay rate and bring it back to Europe I'm going to do that.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/764688
"It is often said that it would be unconstitutional for the United Kingdom Parliament to do certain things, meaning that the moral, political and other reasons against doing them are so strong that most people would regard it as highly improper if Parliament did these things. But that does not mean that it is beyond the power of Parliament to do such things. If Parliament chose to do any of them, the courts would not hold the Act of Parliament invalid."
It doesn't have a single written document titled “the Constitution”; but it has a constitution.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-BLM. I’m not a racist or anything.
When US "peacekeepers" invade a foreign country, that's illegal too.
When you go beyond defending behavior, to go out of your way to avoid saying what you are talking about, you discredit yourself.
Plenty of Americans do just that, a friend of mine got his USA certificate of un-citizenship last week
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_Cha...
Compared to the constant, unceasing reminders by Russian activists that the de facto prohibition on protests in Russia is a legal sham and the actual thing would require the president declaring a state of emergency (that only happened in 2022 and then not fully), the silence in an established democractic society was deafening.
The tired “freeze peach” responses on HN evoke similar feelings, as do the “private businesses can deny anything to anyone”. (Never seen a less-than-loyal artist’s concert cancelled the day before because the venue received a suggestion—not a command, mind you, a suggestion—from a city official’s phone? Have I got news for you.)
Actually, Paris' mayor is the mayor with the less executive power, as they don't have a municipal police. Paris prefect, on the other hand, is the most powerful prefect in France.
But prefects in France have too much power. It would be fine if the legislative and judiciary branch acted as they should in a healthy democracy, but the legislative power is subordinate to the executive, and different presidents over tim choose to reduce the judiciary power. The fact that Macron and ex-Sarkozists claim Erdoğan is going too far with his judicial reform is a joke. A bad one.
> [The mayor] can refuse an organized protest [...], but cannot prohibit protests.
What’s the practical difference? I’m not sure I see one, having seen years of “oh no you can’t have your rally here, there’s extremely unfortunately some other thing nobody’s heard about happening in your primary location and renovations at your alternate one and you’ll have to move to a place two hours from city centre and by the way we sat on your notification for a month and the deadline to resubmit was two days ago”.
(Legally, the Russian system is that of affirmative notifications, not of requests for permission, so you have to manufacture a conflict or a threat to public safety of some sort to really refuse, as well as offer an alternate location. The ECHR had a field day dismantling those excuses with about a decade’s latency, before Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering and activists were left to maybe possibly write to the OHCHR in the godsdamned UN and hope it works? I heard they’ve literally sent out more complaints now than the office has handled over the entirety of its pre-2022 history. I guess even the UN needs to have its joints greased from time to time.)
I think that one big reason is that there is practical difference in the two systems ... and that practical difference is favoring the French system.
The issue is that with such huge loopholes, FUTURE one might exploit them on a bigger scale than what happens in Russia.
And being constantly vigilant and opposed to such laws, is what keeps the society sane and working.
The protest in France could be officially banned, but it wouldn't stop the protesters. Whereas current Russia would bring in the army to forcefully stop protests.
I am saying that looking toward Russia laws is bad place to take lessons from. The in book laws in Russian system mean literally nothing. Wagner is illegal in Russia too, actually. Post-socialist human right activists lost and failed.
> The protest in France could be officially banned, but it wouldn't stop the protesters. Whereas current Russia would bring in the army to forcefully stop protests.
First part yes. Latter part, actually, no. Russia don't bring army within Russia for that nor need to. They have cops and secret service for that and both have enough power. But the lack of democracy in Russia did not happened because the army would systematically suppress Russian protests. (It successfully suppressed Belarusian protests and made Chechnya into vasal state. But in Russia itself, it is not the threat of army that is preventing protests.)
The "affirmative notifications" is doing absolutely nothing for democracy in Russia.
In fact, I was wrong, I thought the mayor had some interdiction power, they have none. the mayor cannot 'not allow' a protest, the prefect can. When Paris' mayor is not on the same political side 1s the government, it can lead to weird stuff (like what's happening now).
It is absolutely authoritarian. I think France was ranked as one of the most authoritative democracy, on par with Russia, turkey,a bit less than Egypt.
Those interdiction weren't used offensively until Macron though. You have to limit the area of the interdiction (can't be the whole city) and pre-2017 were easely accessible 48h before they were effective, and could be challenged in court.
In 2018-2019 they tested putting the interdiction up at the last moment, it worked, so now it's even worse, they draft the interdiction as active immediately and put a copy on the prefecture doors, do not make them available on the internet then fine everyone.
The most egregious was one that took effect at 17h but wasn't put on the door until 17h30.
What's funny is that people voted macron 'against fascism' twice, not realizing that his way is a fascism too (in this case, I mean fascism as a catch-all for ideologies coming from Cesarism/Bonapartism, as defined by Krondstadt butcher himself, Trosky, terrible man but accurate critic of his time).
Is that permit to "stage a protest" or a permit to block traffic and do otherwise illegal actions?
https://www.nswccl.org.au/right_to_protest
"Civil disobedience" has always entailed paying the consequences of lawvreaking to send a message.
Hell, I had to apply for a same permit to organize a very small LAN party in one of the college's classrooms.
That's because the governments actively work to and encourage the fracturing of their population and cultures and the breakdown of trust in society. If you hate or fear your neighbor, you will be okay with the state trampling their rights.
The fact they are more often religiously promoted by people often from EU countries or wealthier cities in the US is a signal but that doesn’t mean they were merely fooled by bad actors in gov hiding stuff. They could just as often see a consistent positive stability in their own local community, then immediately rationalize/correlate that to the popular mantras of the well intentioned local politicians… regardless if such that positive state is a stagnated legacy of prior success, claiming issues in other regions that their country/community never really experienced is because x gov policy (ie, using the absence of negatives to rationalize some norm, regardless if it’s been tested IRL), or merely positives happening in spite of their own govs policies.
Gov policy making / promotion is far too complex and multilayered to dismiss it outright as intentioned manipulative and planned.
It has come to the point where debating any of above Topics is impossible and gets you stamped as "crazy, outlier".
And on a lot of these topics, the messages from government that have been sent were plain wrong, but no corrections have been made, thus the cycle continues.
Where the more 'poor' people around me seem to think more for themselves and with common sense. Those are the people that wonder why the riots in Paris are nowhere to be found in our mainstream media (Netherlands).
I wonder why this is the case and if this is unique to me. One explanation could be that the wealthier group has more to lose when going 'out of favor'. Thoughts?
That people are irrational or willfully ignorant about things is not surprising. People can become irrational and blind to truth through their own self-delusions or through propaganda. Being "educated" or having more money doesn't change that.
That doesn’t mean the French system doesn’t work right now (certainly there’s a lot of protesting in Paris), but from my paranoid viewpoint it seems extremely exploitable, and it’s chilling to see people shrug at government actions that would have every post-Soviet human rights activist up in arms. I don’t know how else to put this; it just seems fundamental that the government must not (have the ability to) start to prohibit protests, because sooner or later it won’t stop.
Maybe I’m just too unwilling to believe in a reasonable government, I don’t know.
Despite the "bans" on mass protests, the French still protest plenty.
Even if somehow there were a genuinely benevolent socially minded government willing to put society above all of their personal interests (including, even getting elected) - it would be unwise to support potentially oppressive powers. Because sooner or later, that government will be replaced by one that will be happy to exploit those powers for wrongful purpose.
there don't seem to many RUSSIANS of this description around at the moment (not that i would blame them).
Post-Soviet activists did accepted quite a lot ... and post soviet societies are quickest to fall into authoritarian. There are not that many activists in the first place and activists are looked down upon by too many people.
My point here is that generally, people on the west are massively better at keeping things democracy.
Democracy is one bad week away from turning into a dictatorship. We've gotten complacent and forgot that fact. Democracy is not the natural state of society.
If you don't want people voting for extremist parties then get the more mainstream ones to stop ignoring concerns about the current policies.
Yeah, but also, people in countries that have had dictatorships recently are waaay more likely to support dictatorships.
Chinese traffic laws come to mind, were reporting somebody overtaking on the right got you a small monetary reward. So folks were creeping on the left side, forcing others to overtake on the right, photos were made, the incident reported, rewards were rept.
Similar things can happen fast on the internet. Bait somebody into breaking the law and report it for a reward. Can even automate it. Piracy and porn comes to mind.
I thought we were talking in the context of the EU? It's not a crime for them if the government is doing it (or asking for it). They don't have rights like that.
Granted, the paragraph also contains a provision for lawful exceptions, but in general, our highest court has ruled that such exceptions need to be reasonable in scope. I have some hope (but less than I’d like) that this will happen here, as well.
In the Western world there is enough bureaucracy that shadow government operatives can operate from within government institutions freely and unlike the Taliban which projected its power in occupied territories through the overt threat of violence.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/live-afghanistan-taliban-ne...
[2] https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/21...
This is trivially possible.
1. send an end to end encrypted message to the recipient
2. also send an end to end encrypted copy of the message to the government.
I’m not agreeing with it. But you can clearly send end to end encrypted messages to multiple parties without fundamentally breaking the encryption…
You can often determine the source, the destination, the amount of data over time, etc. but those are hardly sufficient to suspect wrongdoing unless there's also other overwhelming evidence already.
Why do you say that e2ee is broken if the plain text is encrypted more than once?
Isn't that what happens in group chats?
And if not, they could just make all chats group chats. You, your recipient and the government.
Also, assuming message 1 and 2 contents are identical, if anyone steals the governments' private key the encryption of message 1 is moot.
I think she simply doesn't care about the reality, she wants to bang a "protect the children" drum for political reasons.
It's odd; she seems to be a pedagogy graduate, who was once (1988) elected to the Swedish parliament as a communist, then worked as a teacher, and was later (1994?) appointed a social-democrat minister. So since her first parliamentary term, she has not been an elected representative, but an appointed functionary. So I guess her "political reasons" amount to pleasing her boss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson
Former commies who repent don't lose their contempt for ordinary people. They continue to think they are "the vanguard". I reckon she just thinks ordinary people are too dim to notice that her sayings are nonsense.