Same issue but different topic. Earlier was about bad behavior by individual officials. This is discussing bad behavior by the agencies. It includes stuff that wasn't touched on in the earlier article.
That's the funny thing about tribalism, it's just a different flavour of the same base human corruptibility (or, to use less aggressive wording: opinion, bias, or subjectivity).
The US is no better or worse than Europe, it's just a different alignment of values.
The "better or worse" argument is based entirely on each individual's alignment being closer or further away from one alignment or the other. This will come from personal experience, highly affected by the boundary the individual grew up within - which can affect can ones biases in both directions.
Neither did it not happen, it is only postponed and not shut down. These things will keep coming back until there are real consequences for tin-pot dictators pushing despotic legislation (and no, I'm not advocating for violence, I want them to be forced to publicly resign their post).
Saying "the EU" is wildly oversimplific. A more accurate interpretation (in my opinion) is one particularly stupid EU comissioner (Ylva Johansson, Commissioner for Home Affairs) who is pushing things way beyond her remit.
The EU has mechanisms which can deal with this sort of nonsense, however. The comissioners can't pass laws themselves, only propose them. The EU parliament has to actually vote the law proposed by the commission into law and it seems unlikely for this one to pass.
The EU parliament is directly elected by normal people, and is generally rather more in touch with reality than the commissioners are.
And who was almost successful in doing so. She still may be successful a year or two from now.
It is as if the EC was a big carousel of special interests where every commissioner takes his/her turn and others help them pass things, on order to be able to pass their own things later.
A classical oligarchy, the ancient Greeks would immediately recognize the problem.
I wish we citizens of countries in the EU would stop bending over backward to apologize and explain away these undemocratic institutions. "Oh but don't worry those unelected officials can't pass laws, just propose them." "Oh but actually this other body is directly elected unlike these other folks." "Oh it's actually democratic because we voted those other folks in who elected them in."
Like c'mon folks. It sucks. It's really bad. We should do something about it and stop falling all over ourselves to explain how it's not that bad. You don't think the actual lawmakers are listening to their advice? Of course they are. They elected those proposers.
This weird defense we keep rallying to is tiresome. It's ok to criticize the EU. It's really not a paradise in any sense of the word and many, many of its constituent countries look far less democratic than the US.
The european commission is elected, just indirectly. It is proposed by the european council, and the european parliement says yes or no.
Saying that indirect elections are undemocratic is like saying Switzerland is not a "liberal democracy" because its federal council is elected by the federal assembly instead by direct popular vote.
That's a terrible argument and one that gets trotted out every time. We can do better than this. We should.
The CPC governing bodies are indirectly elected too, by members of the Party, of which most anyone can join. That doesn't make it democratic.
Let's not play fast and loose with democracy here. We deserve, and should agitate for, more representative democracies else we slide slowly toward the very tyrannies we oppose.
My point is that the EU commission is bad, its a shitty system that doesn't work well and needs to be reformed. Pointing at the EU as a whole and saying things like "The EU was caught..." lets the commission (and this commissioner) off the hook.
If we clearly say that the EU parliament works pretty well, and the commission doesn't then its obvious what needs reforming. If you just point at the EU as a whole then the problem looks impossible.
By the way I am no longer a citizen of a country in the EU, I'm from the UK (although I happen to live in the EU currently).
> The comissioners can't pass laws themselves, only propose them.
Then what's the point of them?
They are indirectly elected so that they can submit proposals that would normally be political suicide.
> who is pushing things way beyond her remit
I completely disagree. She is working exactly how the system is designed.
Europe needs to replace the commission with a democratically elected body. One that is elected in a different way to the parliament to get a different cross section of the population.
However as someone in the UK we have the exact same situation with the House of Lords.
Yeah. Politicians using children as arguments for total global surveillance is the epitome of bad faith. Leveraging children as political weapons should be considered a form of child abuse.
Finding the words "child", "terror", "drug" and "money launder" in any argument is evidence of bad faith. It's almost certain they're trying to manipulate people into giving up freedom for false security by appealing to the eternal bogeymen of society. Playing on people's fear to expand their own power.
We should separate anti-abuse laws that don't compromise e2e (like Apple's hash matching) and laws that ban e2e. Once we do it we should fight for one against the other.
If abuse is real and e2e is key to it, taking measures against abuse while keeping e2e is important. Fighting against any measure altogether is immoral
What are actual laws you're thinking of that aren't attacks on end to end encryption? All of this is already highly illegal the difficulties are finding and prosecuting the criminals.
What made people do it before is mental illness. What makes people do it now more and more is additionally profit. The e2e apps and crypto is what drives their profit.
But critically there are ways of keeping e2e without being complicit in crime. Things like Apple's hash matching or requiring all messaging apps to do on device scan are that.
Pretending these compromises are unacceptable because they affect your privacy is a nonce move. You routinely compromise your privacy in much bigger ways in order to live in society, every time you are searched at security or present ID for verification etc, but when it comes to doing anything to help victims who unlike you can't even stand up for themselves you are suddenly the unyielding freedom fighter.
> Things like Apple's hash matching or requiring all messaging apps to do on device scan are that.
No thanks. It's bad enough that our devices often play fast and loose with our privacy as it is, but don't want my devices to be violating my privacy in ways where errors can have legal consequences for me.
Beyond that, these sorts of systems will always be increased in scope by people who want to abuse them for their own purposes.
There's no way to have E2E encryption that's strong against government overreach that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop. It's a moral conundrum that anyone interested in preserving privacy is going to have to grapple with in the end, your tools are going to be used by criminals to evade justice no matter how many exceptions or tools you try to include to differentiate between "good guys" and "bad guys".
Even things in the neighborhood of Apple's hash and device scans can only detect existing minimally altered images and also fall down to context if they try to detect more general issues like "nude children". We don't even have to get hypothetical about false positives of anti-CSAM measures [0] they're already out there happening. The devices are blind to context and the occurrence of actual CSAM are rare (blessedly) but there's a whole genre of "my kid did something cute in the tub" that look a lot like it without the context to a machine.
> There's no way to have E2E encryption that's strong against government overreach that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop
> There's no way to have cash that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop
Life is not black and white. You can have freedom enabling technologies like cash but you acquiesce to cash controls, maximum transaction amounts, personal searches if there is reasonable suspicion and so on. Same applies to e2e encryption or anything else. To think otherwise just in this case is a nonce move, you have not refuted my points in the slightest.
To do all of those you have to go to the person and perform the search, the law can also go to a person and perform a search of their E2E encrypted files by getting a warrant and requiring them to unlock the devices. Providing a back door in E2E for law enforcement gives them the weakness to search anyone's traffic with or without a warrant, it's also an ambivalent weakness anyone can potentially exploit. Compromises in digital systems for communications are infinitely more abusable than any physical search because they can be performed automatically and at a massive scale, pretending they won't or can be trusted to follow the law is ignoring the 2 decades of evidence we've been given since the Patriot Act allowed mass wiretapping. Do you remember parallel construction? Room 641A? The rubber stamp of the FISA courts?
> To do all of those you have to go to the person and perform the search, the law can also go to a person and perform a search of their E2E encrypted files by getting a warrant and requiring them to unlock the devices.
Violation of privacy in person is still bad. They can know your hidden illnesses or anything else people generally keep private. Something that you can't find out from texts.
There are plenty of examples where you don't need to be in person. Like financial transactions. You submit to your income to be disclosed to the government, and that the government will not freeze your money for no reason. The capability to freeze is key in order to combat profit from crime, kidnappings, blackmail etc. If you forgo that you get anarchy.
If you don't trust your government's checks and balances to take measures in public benefit, you should elect a different one. But the ability to take measures is important, more technical solutions will not solve a human problem as time always shows.
They are perfectly acceptable. In fact if you live in a civilized society I can guarantee you that you accept equivalent compromises in all areas of your life at all times. If it's only in this case that you're up in arms about, that's telling.
Even when "civilized" society forces such laws on me, I accept nothing. I go out of my way to avoid this stuff. You can guarantee absolutely nothing, you don't know a single thing about me. Take your pedophilia accusations somewhere else, they don't work on me. I'm wise to your strategy.
"e2e & crypto does not hurt children" is techbro's equivalent of "guns do not kill people". The lower bounds of morality in this industry will never cease to amaze...
Any tool that is useful, is useful for both good and bad purposes.
Any tool that is rendered not useful for bad purposes, has also been rendered not useful for good purposes.
There is no such thing as a compromise. It requires pretending (or ignorance) to imagine that there is even any sort of compromise logically or physically possible.
> Any tool that is useful, is useful for both good and bad purposes.
Exactly. Which means tradeoffs. Like cash enables freedom, it also means that there are measures to reduce its use for bad purposes (including maximum transaction limits, how much you can carry in/out of country, etc) that we all agree to. Like using public transport enables mass killings, it also means there are measures to reduce that (security inspections, etc). Like advances in science and tech enable cool gadgets, they also enable deadly weapons and that's why their export is regulated (sanctions, etc).
If you want to have absolute freedom, please go start with those things instead of child abuse. It's top of double standard to agree to compromise when it concerns your personal adult freedom, but not when it concerns innocent and powerless victims.
> There is no such thing as a compromise. It requires pretending (or ignorance) to imagine that there is even any sort of compromise logically or physically possible.
Dude, it literally does not follow from what you write before this sentence. Any tool that can be used for good can also be used for bad, and there are always compromises in order to restrict its uses for bad.
"Anti-abuse laws that don't compromise e2e" don't exist, the entire concept is impossible ipso facto. Apple's hash matching still requires scanning your plaintext (or plain image, or whatever), which means
1. the "fingerprint" can still be silently updated to look for other things like [the current Power's that Be's definition of] "misinformation",
2. false positives can completely fuck over your life
3. it doesn't even work to prevent CSAM, because there will always be an arms race to improve the anti-fingerprinting measures. The "perceptual hashing" algorithms you've heard about don't actually work at all, they're a lie being pushed by commercial interests.
Those three points mean that even message fingerprinting is unacceptable, full stop.
Or maybe we just accept that some people in the world do bad things, and unfortunately we can't actually catch all of them. Continually eroding more and more security and privacy in our personal effects in return for less crime is not a trade off that any rational person who wants to live in a free society should make. Certainly there can be disagreement as to where the line should be drawn, but even schemes like Apple's hash matching is going too far.
> Or maybe we just accept that some people in the world do bad things, and unfortunately we can't actually catch all of them.
If we don't try, we are complicit in their crime by developing technology they use to fulfil their messed up purposes. Hope you sleep well at night!
> Continually eroding more and more security and privacy in our personal effects in return for less crime
How about you fight for your privacy and security in other aspects of life that concern yourself first (security checks, cash controls, etc) and then go after victims who cannot stand up for themselves.
The platonic ideal of end-2-end encryption is that it is encrypted from my brain until it is received in my correspondent's brain. This is obviously not currently feasible.
The closest approximation, is having a trusted client. This hashing scheme ruins the "trusted client" and I would no longer consider it e2e.
Not to mention that a database of hashes is trivially to expand with content that isn't CSAM. Next thing we know the European equivalent of the Tankman picture is included in the hash to more effectively pursue political opposition or activists.
This would destroy all ability to protest and singlehandedly eliminate democracy in Europe. I'm not exagerating. Climate activists in Germany are already put in "präventivhaft"[1] (preventive detention) before a civil disobedience / crime occurs. A scheme such as this would make it trivial to do at massive scales.
Then go ahead and suggest any credible way to combat the modern epidemic of child abuse instead of being like the rest of the thread making excuses for it. Your vocal sheltered armchair maximalism on this topic is not a moral option if you agree to equivalent compromises in all other areas of your life. Either suggest an alternative measure in this case, or show an example and fight against those other compromises (that limit your freedom and privacy) first. After all, many of them only concern yourself and your family rather than countless innocent victims who cannot stand up for themselves.
If techies don't suggest any good alternative measure to prevent abuse then someone else will do it in a worse way and then welcome to panopticon. There's no black and white where tech touches human factor so learn to compromise.
Bad example. 14 years is age of consent in some countries, it was acceptable age to marry in some US states until 2019 (still seems possible in Washington) and in many countries arranged marriage is not considered abuse today.
The modern epidemic of abuse is a different beast. Never in the history it was possible to abuse a child, record the process or live broadcast it, and sell access to that to hundreds of people around the world. Technologies that enable this are only recently available (internet, e2e messaging and cryptocurrency).
But even if we pretended it was the same in absolute numbers, that is irrelevant. Yes, things were bad 500 years ago. If people were getting massacred today, you can say that it's all the same as back then, we should not be concerned, it's simply shedding more light on the same old murder. (It's especially easy to dismiss it if you were in the industry that makes tools for it). Or you could call it out as violence, even if it is happening less than in the dark ages, and try to do something about it.
The fact that you comment this emotionally loaded drivel illustrates perfectly why politicians and policy makers keep abusing "the children" to push through anti-democratic policies. It works great to convince short-sighted fools.
If Democracy falls (which this would result in), everyone will be abused, including children. You can't solve a problem by making a worse problem.
You may want to open a history book and look at what happens to a society when it becomes a panopticon of total surveillance.
You haven't addressed the facts. A significant problem exists, measures will be taken, compromises will happen. You can choose what they will be or you can refuse and someone will choose it for you.
None of the other compromises of freedom (gun controls, cash controls, security checks) have led to a fall of democracy. In fact, they are requisite for democracies to thrive. You are blowing a minor inconvenience for yourself out of proportion, covering your ears, closing your eyes and shouting.
We won't compromise. The alternative is cops get the fuck out there and do real police work instead of co-opting our computers into their total surveillance network. I literally don't care that it makes their job harder. It should be as hard as possible.
> Fighting against any measure altogether is immoral
Not at all. I want end-to-end encryption and I want complete control over my computer. I couldn't care less how hard it makes the life of police either.
The "measure" is they get the hell out there and do actual real police work instead of pushing a button and having your entire life revealed to them. There's a limit to how many cops they can spare to tail some suspect. There's no limit at all when computers are involved.
I am sure they would never exempt themselves from such monitoring, correct? Given the Dutroux scandal, which revealed some rather shady behavior on the part of multiple people in positions of power, seems likely there would be rules for the little people but not others.
Just after they open to public inspection all the deliberation, discussion and industry lobbying behind weakening encryption on the basis that people who have nothing to hide shouldn't care.
I'm simply astonished to find that a body which condemns the use of microtargeted Facebook ads to influence elections would do this. I'm equally shocked to find out that they would commission a fake survey to provide pseudoscientific cover to their self-serving positions. It's almost enough to shatter my faith that people in government are working on my behalf, and make me think they're all just hypocrites. Next, I might start to question the validity of surveys on political topics, but fortunately I'm still pretty naive and credulous.
There need be no corruption, for bad outcomes to occur. True that it never helps, and perhaps even true that when there is corruption, there tend to be slightly more bad outcomes.
But the bad outcomes are just decisions, most of which are neither illegal nor plainly unethical, made so quickly and relentlessly that real people get chewed up by them.
All currently existing electoral democracies are corrupt by design, you cannot elect people and expect them to not be lobbied. Only lottery based sortition with short terms and decades long cooldown periods solves that issue. It hasn't been tried since ancient Athens though, afaik.
Seems to me the problem is very much the LACK of "working on your behalf". I don't feel that many people go into public service "unselfishly". People go into public service by ambition (and then quickly enough there is no point in anything except to build the network); or to further their own adolescent ideals (and then fuck everything else in the service of that obsession); or for the benefits; or because it's the ideal stable job; etc. Who in there does it "to do the right thing for the overall good of the overall population"? Who actually does it "to defend the constitution" (I mean not just when it's convenient?).
>Who in there does it "to do the right thing for the overall good of the overall population"?
You are implying that these reasonable and good willing people dont exist. All i have to do here is show you one exception (which there are plenty of) and also point to the filtering characteristics of a democracy.
I dont like the conclusion that "evil politicians just exist". To me, its the same populism ala "migrants are just criminals". Followed by "thought process finished successfully."
The problem we are taking about here is the accumulated failure of voters, that enables the sociopathes their careers.
The lack of understanding of the problem also shows in opposite scenarions, be it either anarchy or authoritarian. The same demagogues would eventually rise to the top harden their position and so eventually working against your interests too.
IMO this is a lesson that libertarians need to learn too. A free market will eventually be corrupted too and the only way to prevent or overcome it is a side channel, like a democracy. A democracy is the only form of goverment that enables peacefully revolutions by design.
> You are implying that these reasonable and good willing people dont exist.
More subtly I am not arguing that many people get into public service twirling their mustache and going "MuuuuAHAHAHA!". I am arguing that many people go in with their adolescent ideals and are convinced that they are doing good by doing the evil that they do. That is "banal corruption". They are not corrupt because going after money. They are not corrupt because going after fame and power. They are corrupt by letting their own ideals / philosophy / religion get in front of more provable, cold realities of what the polis actually needs done now.
Let's take a very banal example: Traffic engineers in one of the cities I live in (there might be only one traffic engineer). Their duty is to make traffic work ever better - that's required for the city to work well for its inhabitants. Other people have other missions. For that office, that's cars and bikes mostly - I don't know if public transit is this particular office's duty - and to keep pedestrians safe from that traffic and vice et versa. However in practice they work much more specifically to make it ever harder to drive cars. Based on the evidence of living in that city, they are actively working against car traffic. They are now NOT working to "honorably discharge" their duty. They are instead working on "what THEY think is good". That is NOT the same thing. It has a name. That name is "corruption".
Fine, another example at a different scale: You might remember the quote [The piece of paper is not a suicide pact] - as justification for one high office politician to ignore his sworn duty and do whatever he wanted. To which much of the country then cheered. Now that one is Corruption with a capital C.
Does the EU commissioner think they are doing the right thing? Probably yes. Would they acknowledge privately that they are stretching the limits to breaking point? Quite likely - they didn't get there by being stupid. Would they (privately) argue that it was worth doing "for the cause"? Yep. Corruption.
> the accumulated failure of voters, that enables the sociopathes their careers
Well, sure. I believe that in democracies, the buck does not stop with the president but with the voters. But I think this is at a deep level. That is, our current institutions are very vulnerable to this kind of takeover. And many voters cheer on that corruption (because it furthers THEIR ideals, and fuck the constitution.) Which is why I feel that "How we run institutions" is one of the current Big Challenges on humanity. How we do that currently really doesn't cut it. We have to find ways to do better.
> [libertarians vs democracy]
Facts not in evidence! Democracy as we run it currently is a fantastic breeding ground for this kind of corruption.
Authoritarian regimes are a different thing: They are completely dependent on whether the leading person or group is enlightened. It's a "luck of the draw" kind of thing. But yeah, they are "by design" there to pursue the obsessions of the leaders - whether good or bad.
I think you are mixing "corruption" with "mistake" in some parts. Everyone has ideals and everyone can make mistakes, this does not make you corrupt. When a bad outcome or disadvantage comes to light and wether the guy in charge reacted _reasonably_ or not to it, is where corruprion begins.
To repeat: simply beeing convinced that bicycles are the future of urban transit is not corruption.
The other examples you give are clearly corruption, because there is more involved in the decision making than plain reasoning or ideology (which again, is ok).
> in democracies, [it begins and ends with] the voters.
> "How we run institutions" is one of the current Big Challenges on humanity. How we do that currently really doesn't cut it. We have to find ways to do better.
You are agreeing with me here but you are still not concluding like me, that humans are the ultimate root of all our human made problems. So when you say
> Facts not in evidence! Democracy as we run it currently is a fantastic breeding ground for this kind of corruption.
You have to extend your criticism to any other governmental form and not singling out democracies!
Do you agree with my previous statement too?
> A democracy is the only form of government that enables peacefully revolutions by design.
If so, you also have to conclude, that education and critical/constructive discourse is the only basis for lasting solutions. This is my reasoning, im discussing on HN with you.
imo, no governmental form will be perfect but only educated citizens in a democracy will get a chnce to fix it.
Mistake is overbought, at some degree of habit it's malice.
So, in the example of "beeing convinced that bicycles", yes it's corruption. The traffic engineer could discharge their office faithfully WHILE advocating and showing up at city councils. At a council, (1) in one intervention - as a citizen - promote bicycling while (2) in another intervention - as traffic engineer - promote a balanced response which serves all constituents (who mostly drive and have an equal right to have their time not wasted). You can be convinced of a proper long term course while serving your office diligently - that much is demanded by this thing called "honesty". It's not okay to ignore the facts on the ground when you are supposed to do your job. That's not mistake, it's willing blindness. Which currently makes a great defense when all else fails: "I was carried away by my enthusiasm; I apologize" - and gets a pass far too easily. Discharging one's office, doing one's job, demands a little more - at least when it's a job of responsibility.
> no governmental form will be perfect
We should still strive to do better because our current pace of progress is shameful. As for democracy, humanity runs many different forms of claimed democracy. The bar is not very high. The choice is not between democracy and autocracy - it's more subtle than that. And I'll agree that autocracies that succeed do it through blind luck - which is not good. Not good either, that is.
You throw in education: Yes! And here again we (humanity) don't do very well. For example in not giving much weight to civics, practical life skills, logic, ethics.
When you lump all legislation, government initiatives, reforms, taxes, etc together and say "this is a cohesive, person-like entity I can reason about" you will definitely find contradictions everywhere.
Just within a business or bar or family, dissenting opinions are everywhere. Unlike a business, every little opinion and workgroup and project are a matter of public record and are aimed at affecting public policy. So yeah, it sure seems like "They" are a bunch of hypocrites.
And if you want to go further and lump _all pollsters_ into the group of like-minded, coherent entities that never dissent from eachother ... well, why stop there? Why not the "other party" as well? Or reptile people?
> When you lump all legislation, government initiatives, reforms, taxes, etc together and say "this is a cohesive, person-like entity I can reason about"
But it is actually a person-like entity. It is a weak hivemind composed of humans who have (for the most part) had their own individualistic tendencies suppressed or even eliminated.
It's the most human-like non-human you'll ever see.
It's not unfair to think of it as person-like. It's not unreasonable to think of it as person-like. It is, in many cases, dangerous to think of it in any other way.
But, there are people out there who find it inconvenient to their political ambitions if you think this way (or, really, there are politics-entities out there for whom it is inconvenient and who dangle their semi-individual chelicerae out to belittle and chastise you for it).
> Or reptile people?
Reptile people would be a relief. They just want to eat babies and impersonate the queen or something.
> Just within a business or bar or family, dissenting opinions are everywhere. Unlike a business, every little opinion and workgroup and project are a matter of public record and are aimed at affecting public policy. So yeah, it sure seems like "They" are a bunch of hypocrites.
This is the damn minutes from the commission meetings, which are being censored, not every little workgroup. And furthermore, this is not common knowledge. Most people are lead to think that the commission publishes full minutes from their meetings.
I can assure you that the censoring goes much deeper than this. EU and especially the commission are not being open, while working hard to create the impression that they are.
Don't be so cynical. All these problems are 100% the fault of the political party you don't like. We definitely don't need to question the system, just blame the bad guys and keep paying your taxes!
If Europeans are going to voluntarily allow their government to continuously scan all of their private data 24/7, can the rest of the world stop wasting time caring about GDPR please?
Moving every cloud service to be EU-hosted is going to look really stupid once it means you’ve just centralized all worlds data under a 24/7 foreign surveillance & espionage dragnet.
If I had to guess, I’d say the amount of money spent globally on lawyers re: GDPR must exceed the gross national product of Greece. For it to all backfire in this way would be quite humorous.
Unfortunately, it's not the first time the EU had tried something like this either.
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
Thorn seems to be related to US tech companies. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Palantir, are all mentioned on the wayback machine version of their website as "tech taskforce" mebers. My interpretation would be that US tech is pushing this law because they know there is money to be made here (providing the scanning systems and collecting as much data as they can).
People are so enamored by the idea of EU, and cooperation across European borders, that they fail to see what kind of entity it really is, and what people control it.
If this monster is not controlled it will grow to become another USSR, completely stifling all innovation in Europe, 24/7 censoring what is appropriate for citizens to read and see, while continuously spying on everyone, everywhere.
European Parliament mostly works and has mostly curbed the EC's incompetence, ill-intent, overreach.
The issue is the European Comission and the Council of Ministers that appoints them.
The EC seems to progressively be filled by increasingly incompetent and unqualified comissioners. But more worrying for me is their increasing affinity with lobbying.
Many legal systems across the EU explicitly prohibit lobbying not sure why we even allow it in the EU.
The main problem with the EU is that it is an entity with a construction aborted half-way.
The EU parlement is a example of what the EU should be.
The EU commission is not.
The EU commission was literally intended as a temporary fix for the executive power on the road of a broader European federation.
The federarion never happened. And is very unlikely to happen with the PPE (main European conservative party) and the extreme right dominating the political landscape.
European federalism is very popular in Brussels, much less so elsewhere. Regardless of the fact that their politicians once signed treaties proclaiming a vague "ever closer Union", the nations themselves don't want to integrate to the same level as the US did. Any federalization proposal that would be subject to referenda would be shot down in a supermajority of member countries.
The current state of things, "aborted half-way", is a consequence of social engineering that failed to take into account the possibility that its preferred endgame may not be attractive and that in democracies, going behind the back of the voters can only get you so far.
The integration of the EU basically stopped once it became impossible to hide preparation of new treaties and legislation from the voters by distracting people by something else in the media. This is also case of the legislation we are talking about now. Of course the authors of Chat Control 2.0 would prefer to agree to the entire thing in darkness, but the Internet makes it very hard to conceal the plan.
> European federalism is very popular in Brussels, much less so elsewhere.
Having more democratic EU institution is currently not related to federalism.
You can currently even have fully democratic institutions in a confederation system with limited power. Switzerland was an example of that.
> the current state of things, "aborted half-way", is a consequence of social engineering that failed to take into account
That is the pretty common eurosceptic speech and fortunately does not match the reality.
Most poll in Western Europe confirms an overwhelming majority of pro-EU position[^1]. It is currently even stronger in the younger generation.
The integration of the EU stopped because there is a political interest to keep it in its current state. An half baked monster is much easier to corrupt and control through lobbying and diplomatic negotiation than a democratic institution.
If you want to convince yourself of that, simply have a look on the last 2023 European Energy market reform.
It is a shit show of hidden national interests not even half covered up.
hm well, that goes a bit out of topic here. As much as I truly hate to see what the commission is doing, it's naive to think that individual countries are just wishing something better for their people. In fact, this legislation may have been promoted by some EU countries. The chance of the EU is that it's big enough that 500m people care about it, and that's how such things come to light. If it were a random small EU country going full speed to 1984, the chance is much higher that such a legislation would be approved. And then the next country.. all slowly falling like domino
It seems like it’d be better if one country could go down that path alone, just so the rest of us could point to it as a reminder of why we shouldn’t do the things that it did. The EU makes it so it has to happen to everyone at once.
You mean like the UK? The US? India? There are plenty of things that can be pointed out. And few people who will believe it's relevant (that's not just a US thing) and many people who find it a justification for their own obsession ("they are doing it, and so should we.")
Yes, many not-really in sync countries are a great protection there. And still not effective enough probably.
In part there is a lot of group-think overall - which even separate countries have a hard time fighting, when they even notice it or have a will to fight it. For another problem, there are two countries with disproportionate population and economics weight - they cannot outright dictate with impunity but they are in a position to make everyone else negotiate and mostly agree with them.
To me, the internet should have destroyed the idea of a large centralized federal bureaucracy. The two ideas are almost entirely incompatible. The citizens now have access to each other, their local government, and to world news in a way they never had before. I have a feeling that getting rid of all the large centralized power structures would allow the gift the internet to truly flourish for humanity.
There's a tension in tech between client control and server control. Big Tech have largely been removing the knobs of client control within their apps while using the power of defaults to slow people switching.
Yeah. Which is why we should treat it as the smoke and mirrors it is. Just completely ignore their justification and avoid repeating those words on every news report.
These politicians couldn't give less of a fuck about children. Politics and children do not belong in the same body of text. Finding the words "child", "terror", "drug" and "money launder" in any political text is evidence of bad faith and a perfectly valid reason to completely dismiss whatever's being said. It's almost certain they're trying to manipulate people into giving up freedom for false security by appealing to the eternal bogeymen of society. Communists were that bogeyman once.
Yep, in 2010,the Australian communications minister Steven Conroy literally said this to a journalist who question his child abuse internet filter.
This is after a leaked draft of this black list came out with sites like wikilealks on it...
Said something like "I don't support opting in to pedophilia"
People who trade in images of abuse should be punished on some level; however, they are the smallest part of the problem, the people who actually abuse children for the purposes of taking pictures are the real problem and I highly doubt you're going to catch them by scanning text messages.
It's completely wasted effort and does nothing to stop pedophiles or to protect children.
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that this is a whataboutism argument.
Why not use the phone to detect physical and verbal abuse? The microphone is always on for most users, we have algos that can detect the sound of an adult yelling, a child crying, and the percussive sound of a human hitting another human. If 2/3 of those sounds are detected, why not forward that to NCMEC for further review? It doesn't have to be "1 yell, 1 cry, break down the door", it could be a pattern detector that logs the times, the severity, and the mode. If it hears objects being thrown, people yelling, kids crying, why isn't that sufficient to call authorities? How come "think of the children" suddenly doesn't work anymore?
I'm being 50% facetious here because obviously that's a huge privacy issue. But the same logic for CSAM scanning still applies nonetheless. Why only address 1/3 of abuse and ignore verbal/emotional, and physical? Those kids need justice too.
> Why not use the phone to detect physical and verbal abuse?
And adultery! Require married couples to register their handsets in the national register and detect when people have sex! And if the phones are too far apart, send morality police with a whip. Ffs.
Actually it would be easier and more effective to register every handset and run a check any time two are close
together but otherwise isolated. That way we get adultery but as an added bonus, also any extramarital sex, gay sex, kinky sex, or just generally any behavior between two people that we don’t approve of. /s
I often wonder if we’re emerging as a society that must agree on free speech but must also agree on ethical compromises. Extreme left and right wing views are both problematic and there is some validity to LE being unable to track electronic crime due to encryption.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust any proposed laws in their current state, but as a society we trust judges to sentence people for crimes, and referees to call foul in sport - I just wish there was the formation of a legitimate ethics committee which would act in good faith on society, because inevitably rights will erode and without one we will be left with less.
Edit: I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I’m interested to hear contrasting thoughts, please vocialize disagreements
There is no objective morality, so any such ethics committee must have to make some trade-offs that are a matter of opinion. We can already mostly agree as a society that protecting civil liberties is more important than having zero crime: otherwise we wouldn't have freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and other things which make it easier to commit crimes.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadEU Commissioner as double agent of foreign interference (patrick-breyer.de)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
Smells really bad, but I'm too cynical to believe that anyone responsible will face consequences.
Probably a bonus will happen to them.
The US is no better or worse than Europe, it's just a different alignment of values.
The "better or worse" argument is based entirely on each individual's alignment being closer or further away from one alignment or the other. This will come from personal experience, highly affected by the boundary the individual grew up within - which can affect can ones biases in both directions.
Obviously the EU is not without fault, but to be honest, I see more negatives around it, especially on HN than warranted.
The EU has mechanisms which can deal with this sort of nonsense, however. The comissioners can't pass laws themselves, only propose them. The EU parliament has to actually vote the law proposed by the commission into law and it seems unlikely for this one to pass.
The EU parliament is directly elected by normal people, and is generally rather more in touch with reality than the commissioners are.
And who was almost successful in doing so. She still may be successful a year or two from now.
It is as if the EC was a big carousel of special interests where every commissioner takes his/her turn and others help them pass things, on order to be able to pass their own things later.
A classical oligarchy, the ancient Greeks would immediately recognize the problem.
Like c'mon folks. It sucks. It's really bad. We should do something about it and stop falling all over ourselves to explain how it's not that bad. You don't think the actual lawmakers are listening to their advice? Of course they are. They elected those proposers.
This weird defense we keep rallying to is tiresome. It's ok to criticize the EU. It's really not a paradise in any sense of the word and many, many of its constituent countries look far less democratic than the US.
Saying that indirect elections are undemocratic is like saying Switzerland is not a "liberal democracy" because its federal council is elected by the federal assembly instead by direct popular vote.
The CPC governing bodies are indirectly elected too, by members of the Party, of which most anyone can join. That doesn't make it democratic.
Let's not play fast and loose with democracy here. We deserve, and should agitate for, more representative democracies else we slide slowly toward the very tyrannies we oppose.
My point is that the EU commission is bad, its a shitty system that doesn't work well and needs to be reformed. Pointing at the EU as a whole and saying things like "The EU was caught..." lets the commission (and this commissioner) off the hook.
If we clearly say that the EU parliament works pretty well, and the commission doesn't then its obvious what needs reforming. If you just point at the EU as a whole then the problem looks impossible.
By the way I am no longer a citizen of a country in the EU, I'm from the UK (although I happen to live in the EU currently).
Then what's the point of them?
They are indirectly elected so that they can submit proposals that would normally be political suicide.
> who is pushing things way beyond her remit
I completely disagree. She is working exactly how the system is designed.
Europe needs to replace the commission with a democratically elected body. One that is elected in a different way to the parliament to get a different cross section of the population.
However as someone in the UK we have the exact same situation with the House of Lords.
Big red flag.
I mean, terrorist are now laughing that they nicely annoyed 99.99% of the population that want to travel by air.
We saw the rise of low cost terror, with a knife in a crowded space.
I predict the "free2play" terror with simply wrongly alerting authorities to evacuate mass touristic areas.
We live in a sad era were everyone is just either too afraid or too envious of his neightbors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Just summarily dismiss any argument containing those words. Don't even engage, just expose this charade for everyone to see.
If abuse is real and e2e is key to it, taking measures against abuse while keeping e2e is important. Fighting against any measure altogether is immoral
What made people do it before is mental illness. What makes people do it now more and more is additionally profit. The e2e apps and crypto is what drives their profit.
But critically there are ways of keeping e2e without being complicit in crime. Things like Apple's hash matching or requiring all messaging apps to do on device scan are that.
Pretending these compromises are unacceptable because they affect your privacy is a nonce move. You routinely compromise your privacy in much bigger ways in order to live in society, every time you are searched at security or present ID for verification etc, but when it comes to doing anything to help victims who unlike you can't even stand up for themselves you are suddenly the unyielding freedom fighter.
No thanks. It's bad enough that our devices often play fast and loose with our privacy as it is, but don't want my devices to be violating my privacy in ways where errors can have legal consequences for me.
Beyond that, these sorts of systems will always be increased in scope by people who want to abuse them for their own purposes.
I was not making a suggestion, I was stating facts.
Even things in the neighborhood of Apple's hash and device scans can only detect existing minimally altered images and also fall down to context if they try to detect more general issues like "nude children". We don't even have to get hypothetical about false positives of anti-CSAM measures [0] they're already out there happening. The devices are blind to context and the occurrence of actual CSAM are rare (blessedly) but there's a whole genre of "my kid did something cute in the tub" that look a lot like it without the context to a machine.
[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medi...
> There's no way to have cash that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop
Life is not black and white. You can have freedom enabling technologies like cash but you acquiesce to cash controls, maximum transaction amounts, personal searches if there is reasonable suspicion and so on. Same applies to e2e encryption or anything else. To think otherwise just in this case is a nonce move, you have not refuted my points in the slightest.
Violation of privacy in person is still bad. They can know your hidden illnesses or anything else people generally keep private. Something that you can't find out from texts.
There are plenty of examples where you don't need to be in person. Like financial transactions. You submit to your income to be disclosed to the government, and that the government will not freeze your money for no reason. The capability to freeze is key in order to combat profit from crime, kidnappings, blackmail etc. If you forgo that you get anarchy.
If you don't trust your government's checks and balances to take measures in public benefit, you should elect a different one. But the ability to take measures is important, more technical solutions will not solve a human problem as time always shows.
Any tool that is rendered not useful for bad purposes, has also been rendered not useful for good purposes.
There is no such thing as a compromise. It requires pretending (or ignorance) to imagine that there is even any sort of compromise logically or physically possible.
Exactly. Which means tradeoffs. Like cash enables freedom, it also means that there are measures to reduce its use for bad purposes (including maximum transaction limits, how much you can carry in/out of country, etc) that we all agree to. Like using public transport enables mass killings, it also means there are measures to reduce that (security inspections, etc). Like advances in science and tech enable cool gadgets, they also enable deadly weapons and that's why their export is regulated (sanctions, etc).
If you want to have absolute freedom, please go start with those things instead of child abuse. It's top of double standard to agree to compromise when it concerns your personal adult freedom, but not when it concerns innocent and powerless victims.
> There is no such thing as a compromise. It requires pretending (or ignorance) to imagine that there is even any sort of compromise logically or physically possible.
Dude, it literally does not follow from what you write before this sentence. Any tool that can be used for good can also be used for bad, and there are always compromises in order to restrict its uses for bad.
1. the "fingerprint" can still be silently updated to look for other things like [the current Power's that Be's definition of] "misinformation",
2. false positives can completely fuck over your life
3. it doesn't even work to prevent CSAM, because there will always be an arms race to improve the anti-fingerprinting measures. The "perceptual hashing" algorithms you've heard about don't actually work at all, they're a lie being pushed by commercial interests.
Those three points mean that even message fingerprinting is unacceptable, full stop.
If we don't try, we are complicit in their crime by developing technology they use to fulfil their messed up purposes. Hope you sleep well at night!
> Continually eroding more and more security and privacy in our personal effects in return for less crime
How about you fight for your privacy and security in other aspects of life that concern yourself first (security checks, cash controls, etc) and then go after victims who cannot stand up for themselves.
The closest approximation, is having a trusted client. This hashing scheme ruins the "trusted client" and I would no longer consider it e2e.
Not to mention that a database of hashes is trivially to expand with content that isn't CSAM. Next thing we know the European equivalent of the Tankman picture is included in the hash to more effectively pursue political opposition or activists.
This would destroy all ability to protest and singlehandedly eliminate democracy in Europe. I'm not exagerating. Climate activists in Germany are already put in "präventivhaft"[1] (preventive detention) before a civil disobedience / crime occurs. A scheme such as this would make it trivial to do at massive scales.
[1]: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/staatsregierung-verteid...
If techies don't suggest any good alternative measure to prevent abuse then someone else will do it in a worse way and then welcome to panopticon. There's no black and white where tech touches human factor so learn to compromise.
How is there a modern epidemic of child abuse?
It's always lurked in the shadows alongside, for example, marriages in 1655 to 14 year old brides ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Pepys ).
If anything the modern age can be characterised by shining a stronmger light on the subject rather than sweeping it under the carpet.
The modern epidemic of abuse is a different beast. Never in the history it was possible to abuse a child, record the process or live broadcast it, and sell access to that to hundreds of people around the world. Technologies that enable this are only recently available (internet, e2e messaging and cryptocurrency).
But even if we pretended it was the same in absolute numbers, that is irrelevant. Yes, things were bad 500 years ago. If people were getting massacred today, you can say that it's all the same as back then, we should not be concerned, it's simply shedding more light on the same old murder. (It's especially easy to dismiss it if you were in the industry that makes tools for it). Or you could call it out as violence, even if it is happening less than in the dark ages, and try to do something about it.
If Democracy falls (which this would result in), everyone will be abused, including children. You can't solve a problem by making a worse problem.
You may want to open a history book and look at what happens to a society when it becomes a panopticon of total surveillance.
None of the other compromises of freedom (gun controls, cash controls, security checks) have led to a fall of democracy. In fact, they are requisite for democracies to thrive. You are blowing a minor inconvenience for yourself out of proportion, covering your ears, closing your eyes and shouting.
Not at all. I want end-to-end encryption and I want complete control over my computer. I couldn't care less how hard it makes the life of police either.
The "measure" is they get the hell out there and do actual real police work instead of pushing a button and having your entire life revealed to them. There's a limit to how many cops they can spare to tail some suspect. There's no limit at all when computers are involved.
What corrupts people in any position and how would we keep our institutions as clean as possible?
(Hint: It might have something to do with democracy and "working on your behalf".)
Edit: Where does the notion, that an EU body is behind the campagne come from?
Incentives rule the world. The question to ask is what the incentive structure of a politician's world looks like.
But the bad outcomes are just decisions, most of which are neither illegal nor plainly unethical, made so quickly and relentlessly that real people get chewed up by them.
It's literally what the linked article is about.
You are implying that these reasonable and good willing people dont exist. All i have to do here is show you one exception (which there are plenty of) and also point to the filtering characteristics of a democracy.
I dont like the conclusion that "evil politicians just exist". To me, its the same populism ala "migrants are just criminals". Followed by "thought process finished successfully."
The problem we are taking about here is the accumulated failure of voters, that enables the sociopathes their careers.
The lack of understanding of the problem also shows in opposite scenarions, be it either anarchy or authoritarian. The same demagogues would eventually rise to the top harden their position and so eventually working against your interests too. IMO this is a lesson that libertarians need to learn too. A free market will eventually be corrupted too and the only way to prevent or overcome it is a side channel, like a democracy. A democracy is the only form of goverment that enables peacefully revolutions by design.
More subtly I am not arguing that many people get into public service twirling their mustache and going "MuuuuAHAHAHA!". I am arguing that many people go in with their adolescent ideals and are convinced that they are doing good by doing the evil that they do. That is "banal corruption". They are not corrupt because going after money. They are not corrupt because going after fame and power. They are corrupt by letting their own ideals / philosophy / religion get in front of more provable, cold realities of what the polis actually needs done now.
Let's take a very banal example: Traffic engineers in one of the cities I live in (there might be only one traffic engineer). Their duty is to make traffic work ever better - that's required for the city to work well for its inhabitants. Other people have other missions. For that office, that's cars and bikes mostly - I don't know if public transit is this particular office's duty - and to keep pedestrians safe from that traffic and vice et versa. However in practice they work much more specifically to make it ever harder to drive cars. Based on the evidence of living in that city, they are actively working against car traffic. They are now NOT working to "honorably discharge" their duty. They are instead working on "what THEY think is good". That is NOT the same thing. It has a name. That name is "corruption".
Fine, another example at a different scale: You might remember the quote [The piece of paper is not a suicide pact] - as justification for one high office politician to ignore his sworn duty and do whatever he wanted. To which much of the country then cheered. Now that one is Corruption with a capital C.
Does the EU commissioner think they are doing the right thing? Probably yes. Would they acknowledge privately that they are stretching the limits to breaking point? Quite likely - they didn't get there by being stupid. Would they (privately) argue that it was worth doing "for the cause"? Yep. Corruption.
> the accumulated failure of voters, that enables the sociopathes their careers
Well, sure. I believe that in democracies, the buck does not stop with the president but with the voters. But I think this is at a deep level. That is, our current institutions are very vulnerable to this kind of takeover. And many voters cheer on that corruption (because it furthers THEIR ideals, and fuck the constitution.) Which is why I feel that "How we run institutions" is one of the current Big Challenges on humanity. How we do that currently really doesn't cut it. We have to find ways to do better.
> [libertarians vs democracy]
Facts not in evidence! Democracy as we run it currently is a fantastic breeding ground for this kind of corruption.
Authoritarian regimes are a different thing: They are completely dependent on whether the leading person or group is enlightened. It's a "luck of the draw" kind of thing. But yeah, they are "by design" there to pursue the obsessions of the leaders - whether good or bad.
To repeat: simply beeing convinced that bicycles are the future of urban transit is not corruption.
The other examples you give are clearly corruption, because there is more involved in the decision making than plain reasoning or ideology (which again, is ok).
> in democracies, [it begins and ends with] the voters.
> "How we run institutions" is one of the current Big Challenges on humanity. How we do that currently really doesn't cut it. We have to find ways to do better.
You are agreeing with me here but you are still not concluding like me, that humans are the ultimate root of all our human made problems. So when you say
> Facts not in evidence! Democracy as we run it currently is a fantastic breeding ground for this kind of corruption.
You have to extend your criticism to any other governmental form and not singling out democracies!
Do you agree with my previous statement too?
> A democracy is the only form of government that enables peacefully revolutions by design.
If so, you also have to conclude, that education and critical/constructive discourse is the only basis for lasting solutions. This is my reasoning, im discussing on HN with you.
imo, no governmental form will be perfect but only educated citizens in a democracy will get a chnce to fix it.
So, in the example of "beeing convinced that bicycles", yes it's corruption. The traffic engineer could discharge their office faithfully WHILE advocating and showing up at city councils. At a council, (1) in one intervention - as a citizen - promote bicycling while (2) in another intervention - as traffic engineer - promote a balanced response which serves all constituents (who mostly drive and have an equal right to have their time not wasted). You can be convinced of a proper long term course while serving your office diligently - that much is demanded by this thing called "honesty". It's not okay to ignore the facts on the ground when you are supposed to do your job. That's not mistake, it's willing blindness. Which currently makes a great defense when all else fails: "I was carried away by my enthusiasm; I apologize" - and gets a pass far too easily. Discharging one's office, doing one's job, demands a little more - at least when it's a job of responsibility.
> no governmental form will be perfect
We should still strive to do better because our current pace of progress is shameful. As for democracy, humanity runs many different forms of claimed democracy. The bar is not very high. The choice is not between democracy and autocracy - it's more subtle than that. And I'll agree that autocracies that succeed do it through blind luck - which is not good. Not good either, that is.
You throw in education: Yes! And here again we (humanity) don't do very well. For example in not giving much weight to civics, practical life skills, logic, ethics.
Just within a business or bar or family, dissenting opinions are everywhere. Unlike a business, every little opinion and workgroup and project are a matter of public record and are aimed at affecting public policy. So yeah, it sure seems like "They" are a bunch of hypocrites.
And if you want to go further and lump _all pollsters_ into the group of like-minded, coherent entities that never dissent from eachother ... well, why stop there? Why not the "other party" as well? Or reptile people?
But it is actually a person-like entity. It is a weak hivemind composed of humans who have (for the most part) had their own individualistic tendencies suppressed or even eliminated.
It's the most human-like non-human you'll ever see.
It's not unfair to think of it as person-like. It's not unreasonable to think of it as person-like. It is, in many cases, dangerous to think of it in any other way.
But, there are people out there who find it inconvenient to their political ambitions if you think this way (or, really, there are politics-entities out there for whom it is inconvenient and who dangle their semi-individual chelicerae out to belittle and chastise you for it).
> Or reptile people?
Reptile people would be a relief. They just want to eat babies and impersonate the queen or something.
This is simply not true. See e.g. here, how the commission does not publish dissenting internal comments in the official meeting minutes: https://www.ftm.eu/articles/controversy-between-european-com...
> matter of public record
referring to
> every little opinion and workgroup?
I think we're discounting inches. Perhaps not public record always in all countries, but my broad strokes comment stands.
I can assure you that the censoring goes much deeper than this. EU and especially the commission are not being open, while working hard to create the impression that they are.
Moving every cloud service to be EU-hosted is going to look really stupid once it means you’ve just centralized all worlds data under a 24/7 foreign surveillance & espionage dragnet.
If I had to guess, I’d say the amount of money spent globally on lawyers re: GDPR must exceed the gross national product of Greece. For it to all backfire in this way would be quite humorous.
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37958473
This is largely being pushed by people related to an organisation called "Thorn".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37958473#37962743
Thorn seems to be related to US tech companies. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Palantir, are all mentioned on the wayback machine version of their website as "tech taskforce" mebers. My interpretation would be that US tech is pushing this law because they know there is money to be made here (providing the scanning systems and collecting as much data as they can).
If this monster is not controlled it will grow to become another USSR, completely stifling all innovation in Europe, 24/7 censoring what is appropriate for citizens to read and see, while continuously spying on everyone, everywhere.
It can't be allowed to continue.
The issue is the European Comission and the Council of Ministers that appoints them.
The EC seems to progressively be filled by increasingly incompetent and unqualified comissioners. But more worrying for me is their increasing affinity with lobbying.
Many legal systems across the EU explicitly prohibit lobbying not sure why we even allow it in the EU.
The main problem with the EU is that it is an entity with a construction aborted half-way.
The EU parlement is a example of what the EU should be. The EU commission is not.
The EU commission was literally intended as a temporary fix for the executive power on the road of a broader European federation.
The federarion never happened. And is very unlikely to happen with the PPE (main European conservative party) and the extreme right dominating the political landscape.
The current state of things, "aborted half-way", is a consequence of social engineering that failed to take into account the possibility that its preferred endgame may not be attractive and that in democracies, going behind the back of the voters can only get you so far.
The integration of the EU basically stopped once it became impossible to hide preparation of new treaties and legislation from the voters by distracting people by something else in the media. This is also case of the legislation we are talking about now. Of course the authors of Chat Control 2.0 would prefer to agree to the entire thing in darkness, but the Internet makes it very hard to conceal the plan.
Having more democratic EU institution is currently not related to federalism.
You can currently even have fully democratic institutions in a confederation system with limited power. Switzerland was an example of that.
> the current state of things, "aborted half-way", is a consequence of social engineering that failed to take into account
That is the pretty common eurosceptic speech and fortunately does not match the reality.
Most poll in Western Europe confirms an overwhelming majority of pro-EU position[^1]. It is currently even stronger in the younger generation.
The integration of the EU stopped because there is a political interest to keep it in its current state. An half baked monster is much easier to corrupt and control through lobbying and diplomatic negotiation than a democratic institution.
If you want to convince yourself of that, simply have a look on the last 2023 European Energy market reform.
It is a shit show of hidden national interests not even half covered up.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/24/people-br...
In part there is a lot of group-think overall - which even separate countries have a hard time fighting, when they even notice it or have a will to fight it. For another problem, there are two countries with disproportionate population and economics weight - they cannot outright dictate with impunity but they are in a position to make everyone else negotiate and mostly agree with them.
And I think that "it can't be allowed to continue" is a dumb idea
These politicians couldn't give less of a fuck about children. Politics and children do not belong in the same body of text. Finding the words "child", "terror", "drug" and "money launder" in any political text is evidence of bad faith and a perfectly valid reason to completely dismiss whatever's being said. It's almost certain they're trying to manipulate people into giving up freedom for false security by appealing to the eternal bogeymen of society. Communists were that bogeyman once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Said something like "I don't support opting in to pedophilia"
It's completely wasted effort and does nothing to stop pedophiles or to protect children.
Why not use the phone to detect physical and verbal abuse? The microphone is always on for most users, we have algos that can detect the sound of an adult yelling, a child crying, and the percussive sound of a human hitting another human. If 2/3 of those sounds are detected, why not forward that to NCMEC for further review? It doesn't have to be "1 yell, 1 cry, break down the door", it could be a pattern detector that logs the times, the severity, and the mode. If it hears objects being thrown, people yelling, kids crying, why isn't that sufficient to call authorities? How come "think of the children" suddenly doesn't work anymore?
I'm being 50% facetious here because obviously that's a huge privacy issue. But the same logic for CSAM scanning still applies nonetheless. Why only address 1/3 of abuse and ignore verbal/emotional, and physical? Those kids need justice too.
And adultery! Require married couples to register their handsets in the national register and detect when people have sex! And if the phones are too far apart, send morality police with a whip. Ffs.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust any proposed laws in their current state, but as a society we trust judges to sentence people for crimes, and referees to call foul in sport - I just wish there was the formation of a legitimate ethics committee which would act in good faith on society, because inevitably rights will erode and without one we will be left with less.
Edit: I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I’m interested to hear contrasting thoughts, please vocialize disagreements