Posted by janandonly 2 days ago
I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)
Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.
What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.
Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...
The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.
Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.
https://www.tiktok.com/@modelagencyai/video/7225020868131294...
But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.
You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...
Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.
To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.
Just don't goon.
I've been reading "illegal" manga for 20 years. I've never once thought that these acts would be okay to do in real life.
Same when I read the 1906 novel Josephine Mutzenbacher.
What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't? How would you even scientifically prove this? There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to rape or rape prevention.
Does modern sexual objectification and gratification increase the likelyhood that men will seek to actualize their fantasies? I believe it does.
From my own experience growing up watching porn from around 11-12 years of age and being an incel, when I was 21 I finally took things into my own hands and went to prostitutes to try and recreate those porn movies I was watching. I did not rape anyone but because of porn I learned that sex should be aggresive, that women respond "positively" to aggresive sex. I was sexually aggresive with the escorts I frequented, because of porn.
Over the span of 10+ years of doing this I even noticed shifts in sensibilities of escorts. Like young escorts these days by default gag when doing oral because this is what the market required in the past how many years but wasn't so common 10+ years ago.
For the record, in my experience, not even most escorts actually ENJOY aggressive sex. You would think they get used to it but trust me they don't. Aggressive sex is a perversion and I say this from experience not dogma.
I think it’s very obvious when looking at the last 20 years. Porn availability increased ridiculously since around 2000 due to internet becoming widespread. But look at statistics on rape in most countries and you see its decreasing in the large majority. Does that not convince you that at least there seems to be no causation??
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1464272/reported-sexual-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1418831/sexual-offences-...
I realise I respond to a stupid argument. I'm just annoyed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rape_in_the_Unite...
It’s clearly going down in most places, including the USA.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
I don't know what to tell you, except to say the messiness of the data goes to underline how poorly sourced your claim is.
It's like saying that pictures of gay people encourages homosexuality
I have this great idea. It involves clothes that completely cover up the people that could cause temptation, creating separate spaces for them, and so.
You're not equating pedophilia with child abuse, are you? Because having an attraction to children (pedophilia) isn't in itself a crime.
I wonder who gets to decide what's okay.
Throught the same mechanism that violent games encourage violence, I presume?
Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever. There are many clues that those kinds of things work in the completely opposite way than you imagine.
I hate that it exists. I hate that there are people who are seeking this. But I also hate when people state confidently things that might be completely wrong and write laws accordingly.
That sounds like an actual negative effect, if there is actually causation. But I'd argue social media has overall a much more general influence by putting our whole lives into a panopticon. It is very hard to escape its reach even if one is not a social media user.
To be fair, understanding of the etiology of pedophilia is not super strong, but what there is doesn't, AFAIK, seem to support the kind of naive media-driven modelling that people like to apply to all kinds of behavior (Satanic Panic approach to D&D, Columbine and violent video games, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.)
What about a scenario where a person that could be satisfied by such materials in absence of them discovers actual children and hurts them?
Many men, who don't have luck with women, lust for women, but very few actually go out and hurt them. For each one that develops violent tendencies through pornography there are probably many that have their violent tendencies kept in the realms of fantasy thanks to pornography (and awareness of laws that punish actual violence).
My point is that it's too important subject to rely on just guesswork. There should be research into this because there's a huge potential for eyeballed solutions to actually hurt the vulnerable more than they help.
What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.
Do you support robust and mandatory age verification to enforce existing rules on social media websites, like Instagram?
I said “deemed”. The judge can decide anything even if the user really is above 18.
Not even to ask how you enforce age verification of characters in a drawing?
All the artwork websites I access are publically accessible artwork websites.
Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.
Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java
Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.
Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
I have built bare minimum hello world bots in simplex and session and I think both had a lot of troubles to go through but if someone's interested, they can look at simplex for bot creation but they started to have client side verification/alert of content which admittedly is a very honeypot-alike activity/slippery slope itself.
Signal has some of the least controversies even though its centralized, Matrix is another good one and personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser thus having more widespread adoption imo.
XMPP is another good protocol and at this point pardon me for yapping but I once saw someone break a nat using XMPP and using it to create website endpoint creation which was good too but personally I feel like signal is the most trustworthy overall. I wish someone can make signal's bot genuinely simple as telegram bot creation as there is a lot of potential
Just like with Brexit, the majority of UK's population voted (and will keep voting) for this.
Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)
If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.
Why would cultural acceptance matter? Classifying drawing something - regardless of what it is - as a "crime" is ridiculous.
Like, for example, I don't like rape (or strangulation, something else they'll start arresting people for now since they recently made it a crime), but I don't want to see people jailed for drawing it, or jailed for looking at anime/drawings/manga/visual novels of/containing it.
I'd rather see people who actually abuse, exploit or cause general suffering to another human being arrested and jailed.
Does it? If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care? Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
No and I'm sure every judge in Britain would throw that case out.
> Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
Just like the printed word. Books should be banned and burned. We should start with Orwell since his writing has been used as a manual for so much abusive behaviour.
Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances". They should go get busy with some real crime.
Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".
Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.
Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.
If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.
That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.
There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.
Not at all. The UK, just as an example, explicitly bans images (as opposed to photographs, which are covered under different law) of children that are pornographic and obscene. That is, by legal professionals, interpreted as including manga, comics, and CGI.
You do not need some universal "default position" to understand the laws as they currently exist.
50kph is a number.
"Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.
On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.
The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?
There was at least one case where prosecution never, ever, seen the evidence of supposed CSAM found on accused's computer, and if not for the lucky person having a slightly less overworked public defender, they had high chances of being found "guilty" if of minor offense for having what used to be staple of family photo albums - photo of the toddler grand-kids playing in kiddy pool, which was reported by computer tech at a laptop repair business.
Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.
> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.
I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.
You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.
I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352710
I think an argument for the ambiguity of sexualized drawings of children must include specific examples. If he's not posting examples, I'm left assuming he probably knows they are indefensible.
What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services. This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.
The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.
We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.
Additionally, making surveillance by corporations the norm they've eroded everybody's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the standard by which U.S. courts judge if surveillance has gone too far. Now that we're all used to this level of corporate surveillance we won't blink when the government does it too.
IOW if corporations weren't hoarding this data governments would have a much harder time securing it.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
Name and shame via a broad media campaign. It only has to happen a few times for nobody to want to propose this kind of thing anymore.
Defeating one bad law isn't enough.
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.
It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
I think the EU is well on its way of accomplishing just that. Not that it is unique in aspirations
You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.
If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.
I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.
Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.
See p. 11 of https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-...
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
Encrypting, end to end, would be the equivalent of posting a letter. The contents are concealed and thus are protected.
I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law.
And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.
And US presidents have a long history of corruptly and brazenly benefiting themselves. Sometimes you see those before-and-after charts showing how much money they make while in office in excess of the official salary. The typical modern US president makes at least 10 of million in office and it isn't from the salary. Nobody likes it, but there is an open question of what exactly can be done about it.
Which apply equally to the government?
The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries
Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws
Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.
A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.
We need to make every EU law contiguent on subsequently being adopted by the people - and at a significant majority (say 75% of eligible voters).
Yes that means fewer new laws, which is not a bad thing when the EU people are so detached from their population.
In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.
I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!
i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.
This is just one example showing that circumventing any legal block, without ability to control every form of communication, does not achieve it's goal.
And if any government can control all such forms of communications, we are already beyond saving.
Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.
Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.
Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
Nobody really cares what the excuse du jour is because everybody knows that's what it is. Authoritarians want to build a censorship apparatus to use against the public, but if they say "we want to spy on our political opponents and censor people who disagree with us" then nobody would support it, so instead they say "we have to get the pedos and Putin" even though that's 0.5% of what a system like this would actually be used for if implemented.
It's like a lot of things.
Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.
(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.
This is that. What you are seeing, repeated attempts to discuss a proposal, is the process by which the EU bureaucracy weighs the downsides. When you see it being pushed, that's evidence that some member states do not find "the correct answer" to be "no further change". That will eventually necessitate a compromise, as all things do.
> (Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious
You are editorializing to a degree that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with you. You HAVE to assume the best in your political adversaries, otherwise you will fail to understand them. They are not abusing anything, and they don't think it's "surveillance overreach". They believe it to be just and fair, otherwise they wouldn't propose it.
> We will build resilience against hybrid threats by enhancing the protection of critical infrastructure, reinforcing cybersecurity, securing transport hubs and ports and combatting online threats.
for their own personal benefit? What? (Quote from the ProtectEU document)
Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.
I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.
I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.
At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).
yea I get a few companies have too much power. That doesn't really change the point except to argue that they too should be more restricted
Bullshit. We are by far - by FAR - the most surveilled we have ever been in history, including under the worst of the Stasi, yet they lie to us about "going dark". The most minuscule scrap of privacy is a problem to be solved to them.
A few examples of how mitigate the problem
* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.
* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.
* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.
* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).
CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.
The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.
In any case here's the actual "ProtectEU" text the Comission sent on the first of April which contains most of the text Mullvad is quoting from the "presidency outcome paper": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
As a bonus, here's input report listing the problems that are supposed to be solved: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/05963640...
This is from the introduction:
> Access to this data is understood as access granted to law enforcement subject to judicial authorisation when required, in the context of criminal investigations and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in the cases where such judicial authorisation is necessary due to the sensitive nature of the data in question, it represents an integral part of the applicable legal and operational framework for facilitating access to this data by law enforcement. Access to data on behalf of law enforcement authorities must be achieved in full respect of data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity legislation, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case-law on these matters and applicable standards on procedural safeguards.
There's also this one: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/WK-11640-2025-...
The first one appears to be the result of the of the second which called member states to submit their opinions.
Food for thought.
An easy way to solve this is all laws should have an expiration date by default.
But you’re right overall: most of the Act’s powers were repeatedly renewed or re-created under other laws.
Sunset clauses aren’t a silver bullet, but they do occasionally stop or slow things that would otherwise become permanent.
Today's Locri is in Calabria, a region in Italy that many consider infested with mafia-like organizations, which is of course sad, but also ironic.
That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
Unfortunately, a great many people simply refused to distance and wear a mask, and then when they became infected, spread it far and wide, sometimes not even aware that they were doing so. Approximately 40% of those infected were asymptomatic, meaning they would feel fine but still make others around them sick (or end up killing them).
At least this is talked about and discussed... unlike in China, or Russia, or the US's own 20+-years-and-still-going-patriot act.
On another topic, I don't know how mullvad intends to avoid compliance.
"If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what."
Saying "we can't give you logs because we don't have them" just means that they need to start logging or gtfo of the EU.
That way, it essentially has to do a two step solution, of repealing the previous law that prohibits it, and then introducing their own.
"Going Dark" has been the umbrella term various worldwide intelligence orgs have been using since the mid-2010s to describe their lack of access to encrypted communications. For example, here's FBI Director James Comey using the term in 2014: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-fbi-director-james-... It's a coordinated broad branding effort by intelligence agencies across the west, but I doubt that this specific EU initiative itself has ever been called "Going Dark" even internally.
They were incorporated as 1337 Services LLC in Nevis (the Caribbean island) and recently it suddenly changed to Njalla SRL in Costa Rica. Looks like some guy wrote a post about it where he contacted them, they said "internal restructuring, nothing to worry about" and refused to elaborate further.
I know Peter Sunde (of TPB fame) founded it but I don't know if it has changed hands now.
Rolling your own L2TP/IPSec gets flagged by the China firewall these days