Posted by janandonly 2 days ago
Only recently have we witnessed, particularly in the EU but also in the US and Canada, the blocking of personal bank accounts of individuals who were simply "inconvenient" to the ruling class, from Wikileaks to OnlyFans creators, Francesca Albanese, Frédéric Baldan, Jacques Baud, and various players in the crypto world, all without trial, without any crime committed, just unwelcome.
This makes it clear that for Democracy to exist, a balance of power is needed, including internal balance, which requires that the population remains outside the potential control of the State to preserve a significant degree of freedom. Privacy is one of these fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech, because the ideas circulating can be dangerous, but it is far more dangerous to have someone with the power to prevent ideas and news from circulating.
I also grew up in a world where intelligence fieldcraft was an in-person activity where it was just about possible for one side to keep track of the other side, or at least hold some kind of leverage, counter-leverage, and counter-counter-leverage to stop the Cold War getting out of control.
The internet, as well as giving us all this freedom to communicate, also gave the Controls of this world — high level intelligence officers based in their home countries but directing operations overseas — a wonderful new lever to influence, harass, and sabotage. Why burn an agent when you can find a useful idiot in a foreign country to agitate on your behalf?
I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?
and more importantly - whose influence? how do we pick whom do we ally ourselves with and who we go against? How do we prevent such system from being abused to just entrench current powers that be, and stifle genuine opposition?
If it is done behind closed doors, there's not much difference in EU becoming like Russia or China, with a coat of liberal paint instead.
The left, the anti-immigration parties and really, any party which isn't wholly 'let's do the same as we've always had' probably imagine that this would be used to their disadvantage somehow.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/digital-house-arrest-how-th...
The irony.
Aside from that I also thought EU is more left than right wing right now. Nothing what they try to push this term of office seems right wing to me.
The most 'accessible' options to a disgruntled populace (or a small portion of it, down to N=1) are generally recognized as extreme things that very few sane people are on board with, because they are recognized widely as bad precedents for societies. Things like issuing death threats, assassinations, or burning down parliament buildings. To state what I hope is already obvious - this is not an endorsement of violence. For one Japan's history of 'government by assassination' was incredibly ugly and helped lead to extremism which helped lead to Imperial Japan's conduct becoming notorious as they did.
There are other far more peaceful options to be considered but they would require high degrees of coordination and agreement. For an example, the classic Amish shunning - if legislatures faced utter social ostracism for their attempts then they would be unlikely to attempt it again.
I'm not sure what policies could even provoke such extreme responses as those listed (violent or otherwise) in the first place, but for better or worse Chat Control isn't one of them. My most realistic guess would be that trying to abolish the pension/retirement system altogether.
How long before the EU has its own version of China's Great Firewall?
20 years ago in the EU & US.
Now you can argue there is a democratic deficit in those countries, sure.
They are the only long lasting institution that can do time arbitrages (wait for the right presidency to push new regulations), they have the means to pressure individual MPs, and they are the ones holding the pen during the negociations between the parliament and the States. The EC is also the master of the legal agenda, the banana republic-style parliament can't decide which laws they vote.
Because the EC has little to no budget to spend, and its only tool is regulation (that doesn't require cost/benefit analysis btw), they...spend their day regulating. They are not constrained by execution either since the States are in charge of applying and dealing the regulations, however how detached from reality they are.
The EC bureaucrats come from a small elite, remote from the reality of the common man. Ursula Von der Leyen is a good example of this. Fun fact, a phd is required to become a EC bureaucrat, so many of them...just buy the services of a post-doc researcher to write it for them. I used to work with a colleague who did it as a side job.
EU severely lacks checks and balances if it tries to be something more than trade union.
No one is responsible for the commissioners' actions, and they can't be fired. When Von der Leyen lied and refused to show her text messages where she privately negotiated Covid vaccines, nothing happened. When the EU commissioner for digital markets left and got hired by Uber right after... nothing happened, as no one was responsible.
Commissioners hold the legislative power, as they choose which laws to introduce and hold the pen during negociations. It's pure, unchecked bureaucratic power that ends up with a never ending flow of stupid regulations that weaken Europe slowly.
So what exactly are you screeching about? Which nation on this world has leadership that never proposes anything like this? Which one is 100% pure and noone even thinks about bad things to bring up to a vote?
Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.
A country serving small minority of large companies is the best description of the US, not the EU.
Let's assume for a moment that would be true. And let's also ignore the lack of a nuclear weapons in most EU countries.
How does breaking encryption for normal people help? Spies and Operatives will just use PGP and ignore these laws, because that's what spies do.
Before online encryption, spies still used code books but having one in your house was essentially proof you were a spy.
Are you attempting to justify ChatControl with that situation? You might need to help us out with how you arrived at that exactly
If there is a moment when the EU could not afford to take hits to their popularity, it is now. And here we are, gifting free shots to anti-EU populists.
Trust the computer scientists on how to prevent crime? Uh, well that's certainly creative.
https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/control-of-i...
But the whole “think of the children” schlock has always been a power grab. Otherwise we’d start by eliminating child poverty which is a huge factor in the level of actual abuse they receive.
