Posted by layer8 2 days ago
As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.
Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.
I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies. They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for.
We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
That is preposterous.
We dismiss the suggestion of removing the right to privacy precisely because it doesn’t stop these crimes but it does support political repression.
The crimes go on, only criticism of the government for failing to address them is stopped.
EDIT: the more I reread your post the more I suspect this might be exactly the point you are making. Sorry, too subtle for me first thing in the morning. Need more coffee.
"They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for."
That reads like just stating government perspective.
"We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."
But this says something different to me. Because yes, I do see it as a inherent flaw if governments focus is on things that are mainly good for the government. Government's job should be focusing on what is good for the people.
Allegedly, Spanish police is a great supporter of Chat Control, not because of CP, but because of them wanting to spy on Catalan and Basque separatists more effectively.
Several Catalan politicians were prosecuted for holding an "illegal referendum" and had to hide in Belgium for some time.
Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?
But they aren't thinking of our interests, they are thinking of theirs which is what I think that the parent comment wanted to share that their and our interests are fundamentally conflicting and so we must fight for our right I suppose as well.
This is not because I support their mass surveillance proposal, I am strongly against it. I think that the politicians are naive (maybe even to the point of warranting the label stupid) and ignore the huge risks that exists of future governments to start using the mass surveillance platform, once it is in place, to start doing actual censorship. I am also extremely worried about the slow scope creep that will inevitably result from this; today it starts with CSAM and terrorism, next year it is about detecting recruiting of gang members, and in a couple of years it is about detecting small-scale drug transactions.
The inherent flaw is: It is despotic and only serves despots and their minions, at the cost of oppressing the majority of people.
I know that. The problem it is evil, not that it is stupid and silly.
The whole point is that I do not want to give government power over me like it happened in China and Russia.
With "think about children" as smokescreen.
I agree, it's a great, proven tool to do away with political enemies, and to selectively enforce the law, for whatever motivation.
I just don't understand what you mean by
>We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.
We (as in, "the people") don't do any disservice for us by opposing such an effort. Specifically because we are also looking at what goes on in Russia and China to name a few. Authoritarian regimes do "work", but don't, generally, want that kind of working over here in Europe for example.
>many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to (total surveillance)
It's not about the malicious elites. These societal problems surveillance keeps being pushed for never get fixed in either China or Russia. Yet people (not just politicians) keep pushing for it or at the very least ignoring the push. A decade+ after the push, things like KYC/AML regulations are not even controversial anymore, and never even were for most people. Oh, these are banks! Of course they need the info on your entire life because how else would you stop money laundering, child molesters, or shudders those North Koreans? What, are you a criminal?
And of course you somehow manage to blame the usual bad guys for something that happens in your society, because of course they're inherently evil and are always the reason for your problems. Guess what, the same often happens there and they copy your practices. Don't you have your own agency?
The reality is that the majority in any place in the world doesn't see privacy, or most of their or others' rights for that matter, worth fighting for. Having the abundancy and convenience is enough.
This is the downside of public education: the state isn't incentivised to teach you things that could undermine its power.
> do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.
Your comment is precisely what I mean when I said people end up fixating on #1 to the exclusion of #2.
I didn't claim "there are no problems that can be solved or goals achieved by means of mass/total surveillance". My topic was societal problems. The political dilemma "how do I retain power and curtail disagreement?" isn't in this category.
I guess this is what we need in the West too. Lets just cement the current ruling class in for decades.
What is your sales pitch? "Hey, you guys should try having a less stable government, in exchange you'll get some abstract platitudes about freedom and privacy."
Also, Russian and especially Chinese leadership doesn't go unchallenged. Chinese leadership has had many transitions. While Putin has squatted on the leadership of Russia for a very long time now, it isn't because he's not popular, and he's forced to do a lot of things he'd rather not do because of pressure on his leadership.
How do the neoliberal rulers in the West stay on top with extreme minorities of popular support, like in France or the UK? Why does popular opinion have no effect on the politics of the US*, and why are its politics completely run by two private clubs with the same billionaire financial supporters (that also finance politics all over the rest of the West)? How do they do it without massive surveillance, censorship and information control? Or a better question: how can we be given the evidence of massive surveillance efforts and huge operations dedicated to censorship and information control, over and over again, and still point to the East when we talk about the subject? Isn't that "whataboutism"?
* "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595
But the ISPs couldn't implement it in a practical way and essentially refused until they were given something doable. That ended up, in some cases, being "register every 500th TCP package" (or similar; it might've been DNS lookup).
At the same time, if the police wanted actual digital surveillance, they'd just contact the ISP and say "Hey, can we get ALL the traffic for this one person who is under suspicion?" and the ISPs would, in some cases I'm familiar with, comply without a court order. So there was a clear path of execution for actual surveillance while at the same time this political circus made no sense.
Imagine you're surveilling a place for criminal activity and you're recording one second of audio every 8 minutes. Surely gold nuggets are gonna leak out of that.
Most people can pretty clearly relate to one of these perspectives over the other, and it’s pretty clear what actions follow from that.
Humans are inherently flawed and they're inherently kind. We're evolutionarily primed for competition and cooperation. Antisocial behaviour can be both inherent and environmental. I feel you might be setting up a false dichotomy when the motivations for political beliefs are often pretty complex and varied.
It is common for "liberal" governments, as in the UK at the moment, who are inclined to pass censorship, surveillance and control (of people's lives) laws. It is also common for "conservative" governments to do the same.
What is very common is for people to think themselves and people like themselves to be naturally kind and people unlike themselves as fundamentally flawed.
> I think I represented the ideology of conservatism and liberalism correctly here, so call out the social sciences over that.
If you are saying that you there is a correct definition within the social sciences, can you cite an authoritative source for that?
In any case you were talking about "the world view people have" and I think your definition correlates very poorly with those of people one would normally describe as "liberal" or "conservative". I am not even sure which mindset you associate with the "monitor and control" mentality. I think you mean its a conservative mindset, but a lot of the people I know who most strongly oppose it are conservative or Conservative (as in members of the party that has the word in its name).
This might be a US vs UK difference, of course. These are not words that are really used very consistently within societies, let alone between them.
> so call out the social sciences over that.
Happy to do so if that is what they say!
You can start at Wikipedia, for example, which quotes Thomas Hobbes:
> the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralized authority with royal sovereignty to guarantee law and order.
And further:
> Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by political scientist Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative view of human nature and pessimism of the potential to improve it through 'utopian' schemes.
I don’t mean to insinuate "conservatives are evil and want to spy on citizens", but merely that they are generally more inclined to believe people are inherently incapable of behaving well, so they need to be nudged towards the right thing. Really believing this makes it far more likely to view government monitoring as a plausible solution to the problem they see. And again, I’m saying this without implying any judgement.
Conservatives generally see people as capable of self-direction and argue for minimal interference because virtue needs room to act.
Progressives also tend to see people as capable of good, but assume outcomes depend on systems, so they push for more state involvement to improve those conditions.
Neither thinks humans are irredeemable. Both generally believe humans are inherently kind. The difference is whether you trust individuals or bureaucracies to manage human weakness.
Who made this definition, left wing scholars? I doubt many conservative persons would say this.
You could just as well say that this is the central pillar of communism, that people need to be controlled since they are too evil if they are free to form companies and structure themselves. Or that this is the central pillar of social democracy, that without big taxes and central institutions to spend peoples money on things that benefits them they will make bad choices and not get the things they need.
Every government is about taking control from the people, I don't get what you mean that conservatives would do this more than any other group.
> Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general.
I’m neither American nor using US partisan definitions. I’m using the terms as they’re broadly understood in political theory and history.
> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them.
That’s a paternalist or technocratic premise, not a conservative one. Classical conservatism accepts human fallibility but trusts evolved social norms not bureaucracy to contain it. The belief that people must be centrally guided is the antithesis of that tradition.
> So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.
You might try the same. Hobbes wasn’t a conservative - he was an absolutist. Quoting him to define conservatism is like citing Marx to define capitalism.
I say it should be kept in the university library under lock and key, something philosophy professors can sit and debate in their spare time behind closed doors. /s
I have.
> will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures
I do.
> that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path
No. When people are misguided that will even more apply to those in power and with weapons. The fact that I view everyone as likely misguided means nobody should have any say over the other.
The modern trend to frame conservatism and authoritarianism as "the same thing" is very bad and leads to the normalization of authoritarianism.
It is also this mindset of wanting to micromanage things/people in hope for better performance. Those are the usually the ones pushing for scanning people's private messages. People like Stalin and Mao would love stuff like that. The urge to micro-manage is a very band-aid type of solution and not dealing with complexity of the situation.
Well that's kind of the thing. With AI it is. In theory, they can now monitor all of us at the same time on a scale never before thought possible. The time of "big brother has better things to do than monitor you specifically" is over.
I have always felt like what these services would do is to push towards things like matrix/signal etc. and matrix is decentralized as an example so they can't really do chat control there but my idea of chat control was always similar to UK in the sense that they are gonna scare a lot of people to host services like this which bypass intentionally or unintentionally this because if they bypass it, they would have to pay some hefty fees and that possibility itself scares people similar to what is happening in the UK itself.
VPN's are a good model maybe except that once they get on the chopping block, they might break the internet even further similar to chinese censorship really. Maybe even fragmenting the internet but it would definitely both scare and scar the internet for sure.
"Ideas are bulletproof, Mr Creedy". It's valid for good and bad ideas.
People refuse to think ahead, or simply can't.
But the reality is that there will always be a scumbag dad who decides to molest his daughter.
HN assumes evil but this is a "road paved with good intentions" kind of deal.
They are the same picture. Every evil person thinks they have good intentions. The Nazis were literally thinking and saying they resurrect the German nation and lead Germany to the eternal, "thousand year long" empire.
More IT people in politics.
The mass-surveillance proponents will always exist in small numbers, but it gets revived every other month because the number of ignorant politicians receptive to the idea is a function of their ignorance and malformed understanding of reality.
But that isn't their fault.
It's the magic tech companies are selling - and it's knowledgeable individuals who have to effectively communicate and explain bullshit.
Luckily people who spend all day looking at screens make for notoriously bad politicians.
Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."
"Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy."
There were less social problems back then. Better times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Now we just do the same, more efficiently, with AI spies.
Have you ever heard of the Red Scare "McCarthyism" or the Patriot Act? The EU is the opposite of East Germany, nothing was inherited; they were robbed and left behind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_wars
Just last year, France used similar argument of "exporting illegal encryption against Telegram" to get the master keys to decrypt all end-to-end encrypted messages:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41359745
The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did. The secret legacy police is still going strong in countries like Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, as we have seen from the cases where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.
Patriot Act was in 2001, you dont have to break encryption when the NSA can sniff at the source, but let's not just stop there have a look at this:
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeli...
>The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did.
And what has that to do with "socialist heritage"? IF East Germany had a proper purge then nothing was inherited into the EU right?
>where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.
Yes and then there was Watergate...but again what has Nixon in common with socialism? And maybe have a look at "Merkelphone" when "Friends spy on Friends"
https://theconversation.com/merkelphone-scandal-shocks-europ...
You contradict yourself.
That's not how end-to-end encryption works.
Are there for example cases where NSA is sniffing Signal app, or even WhatsApp "at source"?
>That's not how end-to-end encryption works.
Hell even the German police can "access" Whats-Up/Facebook.
>>German security forces can access personal Whatsapp messages of any user even without installing spyware, several German media institutions reported.
>>attains the information of suspects via "Whatsapp Web."
https://www.dailysabah.com/world/europe/german-police-can-ac...
And btw the NSA for example is "at first" more interested in metadata, if interesting, cracking of data will begin sometimes talk with big business.
I stop here have a good day.
They specifically state in the introduction of Chat Control act that the reason for the banning end-to-end encrypted communications is that criminals use WhatsApp and police cannot crack the message, hence the Chat Control act. The police cannot crack these messages and they want to read everyone's messages and that's the whole point of making encryption illegal.
If you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can read more about Chat Control and encryption here:
https://edri.org/our-work/chat-control-what-is-actually-goin...
but this is still somehow breaking encryption.
.. and stored! Which is the worst part, IMO, because once you have a record it's only a matter of time until it reaches the wrong hands.
Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Denmark-surprisingly-abandons-p...
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
That’s a tough bar to get past…
It’s easier to destroy things than to restore them.
We, the UK, will never be able to rejoin the EU on the same sweetheart terms as we had previously. That’s gone and can’t be replicated.
In much the same way as those campaigning for Scottish independence continue to campaign forever no matter how many referendums they loose, no one will be able to recreate the UK if they succeed.
You need the thinest majority to win and you can keep campaigning forever.
Which is why there was so much outside interference and breaking of the Brexit campaign rules. No matter the cost it can’t be reversed.
No such rule exists. Historically, it's been almost impossible to remove any piece of regulation or bureaucracy once it has taken root. Radical dismantling of institutions is a rare thing. That's the same for public services or, say, chat control. I did not expect Brexit to succeed: in fact it only happened because David Cameron had a whimsical moment of fairness and respected a referendum result, against general expectations since he had nothing to gain.
Looking back up the thread, we're equating nagging to construct something (chat control) with nagging to dismantle something (UK EU membership). And I suppose Scottish independence would have aspects of both construction and destruction. The pernicious things that are hard to change are attractive-sounding policy ideas, whether they build up edifices or tear them down.
An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.
This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
Adding a new member state always requires unanimous consent from existing member states, for good and ill.
If you have a system where passing a law requires three separate elected bodies to approve it, the problem is that it makes bad laws sticky. If a sustained campaign can eventually get a law passed giving the executive too much power and then the executive can veto any future repeal of it, that's bad.
The way you want it to work is that granting the government new powers requires all government bodies to agree, but then any of them can take those powers away. Then you still have all the programs where there is widespread consensus that we ought to have them, but you can't get bad ones locked in place because the proponents were in control of the whole government for ten seconds one time.
Also, any sort of "vetoing direct democracy", where voters can repeal a law.
The second one is great. Direct democracy but you can only use it to repeal things. Let the general population veto the omnibus and make them go back and split it out.
So like France and Germany?
> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.
1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation. 2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.
> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized
Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.
Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
We aren't at the end of history.
We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.
Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated
[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/PIN/?uri=CELEX:52...
And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.
The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.
When you can't even figure out that having blatantly and openly vindictive and corrupt people in government is a bad idea, the fact that they aren't annually revisiting some legislature that's an issue for the 5% of the population that is the tech crowd isn't the problem. Like, it's a problem, but but it's not the problem.
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.
I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.
But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.
What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
Every time your law fails to pass you cannot revisit it for a longer period of time.
1year 5years 10years Etc
Means that laws with enough political will get passed, but bad laws can be more easily blocked.
... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.
Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.
Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.
This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.
You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).
Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).
That's pretty much what the US constitution is. Once something's in it, it doesn't realistically get out of it.
This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.
We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.
I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.
Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)
It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.
The biggest difference is that there's little effort involved here. One click to send mass emails out to all relevant politicians. No they can not ignore a constant stream of emails from the electorate. Frankly, it doesn't seem like you understand why this site was different or effective.
Politicians never step back. They only pause.
So, "the left" hasn't done it first, it's a practice that's much older than Roe v. Wade. Just see all the fun games that have long been played with using the Commerce Clause. And besides, your equation isn't fair in the slightest, where one of your sides undeniably grants people rights (even if on shaky grounds), while the other consolidates power and takes those rights away. But oddly enough, only the transgressions of the left have been mercifully corrected by the court, while some other new developments are to be left undisturbed for the foreseeable future. I wonder why?
Amending the US constitution is not supposed to be easy. You are supposed to accomplish most tasks through legislation. I see no reason why the legality of abortion should not be accomplished through legislation. In any case, the constitution has been amended 17 times, most recently in 1992. I don't see any slam-dunk amendments which are in need of ratification. If amendments aren't being ratified, maybe it's because we don't have broad consensus on changes which should be made. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
With regard to the rest of your comment, you appear to be responding to something I didn't write. I didn't claim all transgressions were equivalent in magnitude, nor that "new developments" should be "left undisturbed". I think Trump is generally a terrible president. However, I see ways in which the left laid the foundations for Trump's transgressions by undermining the social contract in the US in a lot of different ways, and I want to persuade people that maintaining the social contract is inherently valuable in and of itself, the same way maintaining cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma is valuable.
(Though, the difficulty of even passing laws is something I also noted, but omitted from the original comment. Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years? Why is the judicial branch the main arm of enacting changes for the current changes, with the legislature largely choosing to do increasingly fewer things as time goes on?)
Sorry about my snarky last paragraph - the last sentence of your original comment read as partisan for me, because the unspoken implication in it, at least to my ear, was that Trump's administration was the first on the right to meaningfully engage in judicial games (after the left had been doing it for a long time), and therefore that they're getting their fair comeuppance and making the score even.
I agree it shouldn't be impossible.
>Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written
I don't think that's a fair comparison since those initial "amendments" are more like changes to the first draft, and didn't go through the usual amendment process.
>I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them.
Agreed. Although, in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
>the US founders are almost demigods
They aren't demigods. But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results. (Keep in mind that right before the US Constitution was written, the union was on the verge of falling apart, and the main objective was simply to stabilize it.) My [non-expert!] view is something like: The founders' thinking about democracy was more lucid than, say, 90% of conversations about democracy today, but less lucid than, say, the top 1% of conversations about democracy today. I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid. (For example, many people think the President should be chosen based on the popular vote instead of the electoral college, and neglect several important advantages the electoral college has which make it a superior method in my view.)
As a concrete illustration of the "90% of conversations are less lucid" point: Voting systems theorists generally agree that ranked choice voting is inferior to plurality voting, but state ballot initiatives to replace plurality with ranked choice tend to fail. I expect if we rewrote the constitution, decisions would get made in this sort of manner. Perhaps one could handpick a team of experts to write a constitution that's actually better, but that would lack democratic legitimacy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ultimately, the path to improving the constitution lies in small-scale trial runs of better methods, and educating the public about e.g. the advantages of ranked choice over plurality.
>Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years?
They have done so, in many states. (I'm very pro-federalism.)
>Sorry about my snarky last paragraph
Apology accepted, respect!
In Continental Europe, the tradition is even longer and students of law start by studying Ancient Roman law, precisely in order to understand on which principles modern laws are built.
So we are to believe Hummelgaard wants to protect children by enabling vast surveillance, so all the bad offenders out there can get ... 4 months in prison.
Its not really adding up. And he still hasn't presented any argument for the thing except that you are pro child abuse if you don't agree with him. I'm at the point where I hope he's corrupt and its not just all about power for him.
If CC were ever implemented it should have a x year trial period where ONLY policymakers should be monitored.
Jusus, what a shit show from DK government.
You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again. This isn’t the US after all…
Moreover, nobody with that quality of evidence against them would be sentenced to only 4 months - laxity for CSAM possessors is a european phenomenon and most pro-pedophilia activist groups are based in Europe. The average sentence for CSAM possession in the US is 70 months.
This is what I object to, not really your comment. Is this factored into the sentencing? If he weren't a public figure would he have a harsher sentence?
> You don’t have to worry about him doing anything in Politics again
Sure, if everyone in Denmark remembers this guy then he won't be popular. But really we don't have to worry about him? 4 months later is he just free to go back to collecting CP, maybe leave Denmark, etc?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/92/oj/eng
Article 5.2 concerns environmental impact assessments?
Even ignoring all this, Directives do not themselves automatically become enforceable in member State's legal systems either - "Regulations" do, and this is not one, the trial will be conducted subject to Danish criminal law.
A new game will emerge in which the best players are the ones who excel at finding secrets of others and use them as leverage. We had a president on national TV threating a challenging candidate that he will reveal their secrets... Think about that for a moment and you'll find so many wrong things that this implicitly admits to.
The disease was a blessing compared to the complications of the cure.
Nations like to hope things won't happen to them.
Historically, nearly all states have been surveillance states (including early America). all that has changed in the last ~30 years is technology (capability), and public attitude.
Mail snooping has been around as long as mail has been around. Warrantless wiretaps on telphone lines were around in just about every country that started having telephones, including the US. AT&T's NSA listening room (the company that invented telephones) isn't unique or special. Book ciphers were invented because snooping courier's messages was so common.
The NSA didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason either.
I'm not disagreeing with your view, I'm just saying that the anti-surveillance sentiment is particularly unique to the cultural "West", and to the post-WW2 generations.
1) yes, people are more likely to fight it.
2) it's being done at an unprecedented and very intrusive scale.
Wiretapping required more labor on all fronts. Mail snooping the same.
If the "East" isn't fighting this, it might simply be because they see no recourse with their less democratic institutions. (I'm borrowing from you for this last point, I'd never presume the West to be as democratic as we'd like to believe.)
This scale has been possible since at least the mid 00's (20 years now , technically a historical fact). consider that most of the files in snowden's leak were from around '08.
But look at it this way, surveillance already exists, all major governments are hacking into people's phone and spying on them, and forcing telco's to do dragnet surveillance. chat control is about doing it at a greater scale and formalizing it for normal law enforcement use instead of things like counter-terrorism.
We don't get authoritarianism without an actual will from a group of people with enough power and support to achieve it. Mass surveillance is simply a milestone on their path to oppression.
What controversy? People just said no.
Aside from that, raising public awareness like the Chat Control initiative did is the way to go. And voting in the EU Parliament elections.
https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-2115...
https://www.ft.dk/da/aktuelt/nyheder/2025/09/borgerforslag-n...