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The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democ

The title should be shortened from "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance" simply to: "Undermining Democracy: The European Commission". The EC is sheer horror. The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer. I've done a short consulting gig at the European Parliament, which at least tries to be the good guys. But the EP is tiny compared to the EC and the EC is pulling the strings: the EP is supposed to bring some kind of democracy but there's none. All these rules are benefitting people in power and they're all ever more intrusive. For example the MiCA one (Markets in Digital Assets), which is not at all only about cryptocurrencies/crypto-tokens (it's also about upcoming centralized "euro coin" emitted by EU central banks), is sheer horror too. I've read it all and it's madness. Insanity. It's all about control. Complete, total and utter control over every single aspect of EU citizens' lives. They want to know everything about everyone: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Those who believe it's "for our own good" are out of their minds.

kubb 3y ago
Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.
- admissionsguy 3y ago
  > We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. Well, I actually do.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    Can you expand on why, please? From the outside looking in, most European countries seem much better at most things than where I live in the US (unless you're very wealthy, I guess).
    - hef19898 3y ago
      You are on forum of temporarily embarased billionaires (now coping with mass FAANG layoffs), so what do you expect?
      - refurb 3y ago
        This is kind of a lazy answer. Who said anything about billionaires? Many people see the benefit of a more vibrant growing economy in the US vs the EU and at the end of the day, end up personally benefiting from it to with (much) higher wages.
    - zo1 3y ago
      Not OP. But some of us have seen how the life can function "just fine" even without the huge amount of control and laws that the EU has. I'm gonna be a bit crass here to convey my point. I currently live in a "shithole" country, and I'd still not want to live in the EU in comparison. I've had this discussion with many people that came back, with family that lives there, with my wife seeing if we want to move there "for our kids future", and always it ends up being a "No", or "let's see if it looks better next year". Sure, maybe there is a pocket here, a pocket there, or a city/state/province etc that I would want to live in, or is "Okay". But the rest looks positively horrifying. For starters, I don't want to live in a place where I either have to be ridiculously wealthy or a slave my entire life just to own land that isn't a tiny capsule apartment in an overcrowded city. Land I probably won't be able to do what I want on exactly, anyways. Anywho, I'm biased. I see Europe as the "pathetic" and "weak" West that is basically slowly killing itself out of some sort of collective cultural guilt for who knows what. It's killing itself in the name of some noble good, whilst the world filled with state-level bullies is destroying the world. No thank you.
      - ur-whale 3y ago
        > Land I probably won't be able to do what I want on exactly, anyways. I can confirm this. One of the myriad of reasons that made me leave the EU for good. Land "ownership" is a joke in the EU. Worse, it's actually a scam: if you own property in most of the western EU, you have about the same rights a tenant would have.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. " More like slow addition of smothering layers of bureaucracy upon bureaucracy until your breathing space is severely limited. Combined with our ghastly demographics, I think our growth is a thing of the past. In many individual EU countries including mine, something like Chat Control 2.0 would not fly and the attention of the public would be very negative; especially east of the Iron Curtain, memories of authoritarian regimes are too strong for people to trust their politicians with this kind of power. Brussels is distant enough that EU politicians can pull off such legislation without the general public being aware of it. The distance between the EC and a random European is way too big. Even bigger than the distance between the Feds and a random American in USA.
  - dmcq2 3y ago
    The principle of subsidiarity was supposed to counter making laws affecting individuals like this would, this sort of stuff should be up to individual countries. The bureaucrats are trying to expand out of their remit.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      "The bureaucrats are trying to expand out of their remit." Which, to be frank, was totally expectable and the fact that the system wasn't prepared enough for this behavior constitutes a significant weakness.
  - Agingcoder 3y ago
    Hungary and Poland don’t strike me as very lax governments, so it’s not obvious to me that people in Eastern Europe would actively fight that kind of legislation.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      Locally, such a proposal would immediately become subject of the local cultural war. Journalists would hop on the news and make clickbait of them incessantly. But few people, including the media, pay real attention to anything that happens in Brussels.
- blibble 3y ago
  > We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. some of us have managed to, it is possible > But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing. it will eventually, it always does
- waihtis 3y ago
  It would be beneficial to understand the underlying mechanics (very untransparent centralization of power to an unelected commission) and the risks involved before smugly dismissing concerns about it.
  - quonn 3y ago
    The commission has a member of each EU country and those members come from the elected governments. It‘s just like the government is not elected in many countries but instead the parliament is elected and that votes for a prime minister who chooses his ministers.
    - jowea 3y ago
      If the EU worked like a normal parliamentary government then parliament would have the right to initiate legislation. And it would be able to nominate whoever it wished for president of the commission as long as there was a parliamentary majority. The EU has confederal aspects that don't really work in the ways normal modern democracies work.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Which kind of makes sense, as the fear isbthat the emeber nations loose their sovereignty. Hence, the elected governemnts of those memeber states agreeing on things, with the directly elected EU parliament approving theom, or not. Seems like a reasonably balance here.
- riedel 3y ago
  As long as the parliament is against a very specific clause chances are low that legislation passes. However, recent EU acts are therefore a mixed bag of incoherent clauses: Comission, council and parliament all push there parts through with lobbying all over the place. In the end it seems that hardly anyone understands the overall mechanics anymore. I would even argue that we sometimes even have too much democracy (well rather too many levels I guess). We would actually need better legislative techniques and a more coherent vision. The EC and their DGs are often understaffed and underqualified IMHO.
seydor 3y ago
The Eurocrats are only accountable to other eurocrats and it shows. The EU also has a very large publicity budget. The EP s vice president for Blockchain and AI was found to take bribes from qatar last year.
sofixa 3y ago
> The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer Can you tell me what is the correct number of laws? What's your threshold? And what happens when a new thing appears / enters the mainstream, do you have to remove an old law first before creating a new one? As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Should we have to remove e.g. the rail packages to be able to legislate on them? Or screw it, anarchy? > But the EP is tiny compared to the EC and the EC is pulling the strings: the EP is supposed to bring some kind of democracy but there's none. You know that the European Parliament has to vote on EC proposals, right? And if they refuse them, they don't pass.
- ta8645 3y ago
  > As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Why the heck is any new law needed at all for copyright? The only accusation is that LLMs did not respect current copyright laws, not that the current copyright law is insufficient. Specifically, there was a commonly used corpus of pirated copyright material (books3) that was used to train many LLMS. Its hosting was withdrawn when challenged by copyright holders. That's the system working as intended.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    Because an algorithm isn't a human, so the usual "fair use" and inspiration arguments do not apply 1:1. The possibilities opened by e.g. film studios recording voice actors, trainign algorightms on them and then just reusing their voices, or deepfaking actors' faces, or Copilot giving verbatim copyrighted code are endless and quite different than what was currently possible. Does Microsoft violate copyright by training a model on copyrighted works? A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does? Why the heck do people think laws should be warped to try to be applied to things the writers of the law couldn't even conceive of? Are planes regulated the same ways that cars and horses before were?
    - ta8645 3y ago
      > [examples of supposed problems] None of those have anything to do with LLMs which was the issue stated in your original post. > A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does? Yes.
api 3y ago
It seems like over the past 10 years there has been a global retreat from freedom and democracy. China is returning to at least a superficially softer version of Maoism. Russia has returned to Stalinism. The Middle East never had much of a liberal tradition but it’s certainly not gained any ground. The US is flirting with populist strong man rule with Trump and RFK. South America seems to keep oscillating between authoritarian socialism and their own forms of right wing strong man rule. Not sure about Africa but from afar it still seems dominated by strong men or illiberal theocratic states. The UK and EU felt like an exception but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are trending toward undemocratic bureaucracies in service to either the bureaucracy itself or the powerful. Surveillance is everywhere and is barely challenged. After all we get cute videos on social media and apparently cute videos are more important than freedom or human rights. One problem might be that we teach everyone about the dangers of fanatical explosive totalitarian movements like Hitlerism and Stalinism but not enough about “softer” creeping authoritarianism that is less easy to identify or oppose. Both are a risk but the strong man cult type is easier to mobilize people against.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mrtksn 3y ago
  >The UK and EU felt like an exception but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are trending toward undemocratic bureaucracies in service to either the bureaucracy itself or the powerful. The whole public opinion shifted towards security over everything, unfortunately. As a result, the institutions follow.
  - throwaway50662 3y ago
    No, not the whole. There are entire states in the EU that are against that. Unfortunately these are the smaller ones so they can't do anything about it and it's being forced upon their populations, regardless of what anyone says about how sovereign they are.
    - 3y ago
rayiner 3y ago
[flagged]
- rolisz 3y ago
  Romanian here: the progress this country has made in every single aspect is huge in the 15 years since we joined the EU. Are there downsides? Sure. But yes, the progress for now is massive.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  You mean the very thing that made the USA the single world superpower by allowing it to act as a unified block instead of a pile of constantly bickering and sometimes warring states? Yeah gee why would we think that.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    How has that been working out for the EU?
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Look no further than the UK to judge for yourself.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      So far so good I guess? The Euro/single market has made trade and daily lives so much easier and grasped fiscal control out of individual states' incompetent hands, Schengen makes travel a breeze. EU funding continues to equalize development throughout so that we can function more fairly as a continent (in economic terms). Erasmus programmes letting people study across the EU are great, the food safety regulations and support for farmers are pretty good and GDPR has been fantastic so far. The current Commission does impotently scream its fascist views, but luckily they can't do shit without the Parliament's approval, which unfortunately for them happens to be an actual democratic entity. As long as the checks and balances continue to work we'll be fine. Obviously there hasn't been anything done in terms of a centralized military, but we'll get there eventually and NATO is a decent stand-in for now. And the train network is also still quite a train wreck when it comes to international connections which I'm also hopeful will be eventually addressed. But it won't ever be without a federal authority demanding it, because each country fundamentally only cares about itself. And of course the EU's greatest achievement, forcing Logitech to finally drop microUSB lmao.
raverbashing 3y ago
Also it's important to notice the "European Commission" is the fancy name for the representatives of all the EU countries Of course, it has a structure, executive, etc, but essentially they are composed of representatives of the EU27 countries
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  It is a very complex system, and I say that as a US person who is used to a very complex system. In fact, I'm not really aware of any democratic nation with anything quite as byzantine. The EU Commission President is nominated by the EU Council, which is itself comprised of the heads-of-state of the member states. The President is then confirmed by the EU Parliament, which is directly elected by voters. So far this seems straightforward. However: the remaining Commission members are selected by the Council of the European Union (CotEU), which is apparently not the same thing as the EU Council! Except that the Commission President also gets a vote in their selection. I tried to understand how the CotEU members are accountable to the voting public, but frankly the Wikipedia article is too hard to understand. The elected Parliament does not appear to get a say in this part of the selection. Then the Commission President selects the policy direction and assigns policy areas to the Commission members. The articles I found hint at the idea of consensus voting, but don't state it very explicitly. In any case, the President seems to have overwhelming authority within the Commission, given their role in selecting the members and the policy initiatives. At the same time, 26 out of 27 Commission members are selected by the CotEU and presumably the President depends on their good graces. I assume this makes more sense to EU citizens, who must learn about it in school. In total, power seems to be distributed in confusing ways across seven different governmental bodies, of which only one is directly elected? It's an interesting system, but maybe not the one I would choose given the current outcome.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Both, the European parliament and the European Council are voted for, the first directly by EU citizens, the latter by citizens of the individual EU countries everytime a new national election, and subsequent goverment formation, happens.
barrysteve 3y ago
They already 'know everything' (or enough) to control my life. You think I can rob a bank tomorrow and not be known? Past a certain 'crime threshold' and the three letter agencies take a keen interest in everything/anything I do... I'm out of trouble right now, that's all. Let them control everything... in the long long term it will be flipped against them. 1984 oppressed the political class. And when the political class flees visible power... the same 'cybersecurity' folks will occupy the power vacuum, trapping themselves in their own tech bubble. I've never seen someone so Secure.. as someone who constantly preens his security cameras, his up-to-date door locks, his impenetrable garage walls.... The whole state of tech right now is a racket, designed to make those pigs 'more equal than others' feel emotionally safe in their data centres. The only way to get the pigs off our back is to manualize tech and make all the average joes on this planet, able to control tech from top to bottom, completely transparently and completely separate from the System. When my son can trivially modify the instruction set on the CPU in his Smart Chainsaw, and reconfigure every single bit of code and enter every abstraction layer - as easily as we change capacitors on a dishwasher - then the guy in the security bunker analyzing every single molecule entering his 'secure enviornment' is laughably 'secure'...
lock-the-spock 3y ago
Honestly a quite funny post. You offer strong emotion wrapped in a story lending supposed crédence but give no single fact of what this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing. You read one (extremely technical and niche) regulation and it's horrible, in what way? And the European commission does not adopt regulations, it's parliament and council that do (the commission only proposes them). Honestly this kind of post serves no purpose or benefit. I certainly disagree (e.g. the commission is very useful in fighting against authoritarianism in Central Europey research funding, data protection, trade, ...) but there's not even facts to disagree with, just an emotional fact-free rent. If I was a troll that's how I would write.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  [flagged]
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Since you flagged the other comment, let's try again. You are critiquing his tone and pooh-pooh'ing his concerns. As I said above, this is only the opening shot in the war. In a year or two, they'll be back with a somewhat smaller, less ambitious plan, removing the parts that were most objectionable while keeping the spirit. Repeat, until the opposition is too worn down to be effective. As for "this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing" - there are plenty of other comments here explaining what's abhorrent.
notafalseflag 3y ago
Some keywords for this: "Bin Laden. Bin Laden. Bin Laden" And now the competition gets a copy of their competitors' communications. Is there a one word phrase that exfiltrates and obscures sensitive communications when there is state censorship? That's a critical vulnerability for secure operations.
- LocalH 3y ago
  probably "overthrow"
mrtksn 3y ago
>It's all about control. Complete, total and utter control over every single aspect of EU citizens' lives. They want to know everything about everyone: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Notice that similar law attempts were made by UK or pretty much any state. UK is trying real hard to make encryption illegal. This trend is not something European, EU based or about bureaucracy or anything like that. Governments by default want to know and control as much as they can and now the technology is advanced enough to actually let them do that. It's everyones desire to know and control everything. We are in an era where we have to fight that back and make that unfeasible again. IMHO that would be through encryption.
moffkalast 3y ago
As much as the Commission is undemocratic in nature and should be curbed, from what I understand the recent privacy fiascos are largely the fault of von der Leyen for allowing this nonsense to be presented and voted on. We just have to hold out until next year when their term is over and the witch is gone. I mean how much do you have to suck to make people think that Juncker was good in comparison.
dalbasal 3y ago
Idk... The EC pushes through controversial decisions, that are not controversial between states... the bar is generally something high in this regard. National Governments get a buffer between them and discontented citizens, because "it's the EU." There is also a lot of pressure to conform to EC "consensus," parties/individuals that want to be seen as government material. EC totally discounts digital privacy especially privacy from state actors and there is corruption, carve out a and such. I disagree with a lot of their agreements. I agree that they make far too many laws and are way too bureaucratic but.... EP is a shitshow on another level. It's literally the star wars senate. Endless factions, recreational politics. No about to act in a way that might result in anything but show. It's trump, but boring. National governments also don't lack in corruption. Politics sucks. IMO, what is badly missing is an active electorate. Civil society. There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. ATM, EC is taking advice from tech industry,dirty insiders and spooks. No one speaks for "The Cause" because, to paraphrase americans... "When I need to speak to Europe's digital freedom people, who do I call?"
- malermeister 3y ago
  You probably call the CCC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    Or the European Pirate Party or similar. They have a handful of elected MEPs at any given time. That is the problem though. That's not very serious politics. If it's a coalition of tech companies, law enforcement and whatnot vs pirates and anarchists... guess who wins? A normative, liberal movement/coalition that is for digital freedom is not far fetched. It just doesn't exist. That's why we're losing. This post demonstrates the problem quite well.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. https://edri.org https://edri.org
rjzzleep 3y ago
The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations. I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.
- pavlov 3y ago
  > “I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.” How else could it work? Within the larger group, the majority rule means that someone gets voted down. Requiring unanimous support for all initiatives means nothing gets done most of the time. In the US, the national Democratic Party doesn’t support everything that the Vermont Democratic Party wants. That’s just political reality.
- jowea 3y ago
  > The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations. Why you think that? It's the moderate conservative party. How many liberal democracies doesn't have one of those as a major party? > I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for. I'm not sure this exactly you're complaining about, but isn't that the inevitable result of any quasi-federal system? The federal government will inevitably end overriding what an individual state wants sometimes.
mistrial9 3y ago
where are your details? specifics? references to issues or particular documents..
Agingcoder 3y ago
I’m not sure I understand : European Commissioners are nominated by elected National governments, and approved by parliament. How is this not democratic ? Whether you agree with these policies or not is a different matter altogether.
- owlstuffing 3y ago
  Perhaps the sentiment is more about how our expectations of democracy are completely out of line with the results of democracy.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    That is because of the fatal flaw of democracy: The demos is people and the majority of people are stupid.
  - Agingcoder 3y ago
    Indeed, you’re most likely right. I’ve seen around me a growing sentiment along the lines of ´ my views and candidates didn’t win so democracy doesn’t work’ coupled with ´this allows me to claim that violence / authoritarian regime with my views is ok’. I wonder whether people are slowly realizing now that democracy has limits, whereas they used not to, and don’t like it. Democracy essentially says that you have a say, but so does everyone else, so it’s going to be messier than expected !
- throwaway50662 3y ago
  National government is a very different thing from national parliament. In my state the national government came out of a political compromise. The leading party has 15% support. They are limited by the national parliament in whatever they try to do here - but not in EC. Giving them control over the whole population through the EC is a spit in the face of 85% of the population. And it's very visible right on this issue - the leading party supports what the rest of the population would label as totalitarian and oppressive. They tried but were unable to pass stuff like this at home, but they support it in the EC.
callalex 3y ago
Yea, but the lack of world wars is pretty nice.
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
Anyone who needs a less abstract impression, check the feed of EC Thierry Breton [0]. A painfully clear impression of how those people think about freedom of speech. [0] https://x.com/thierrybreton https://x.com/thierrybreton
- hef19898 3y ago
  Twitter and Musk do not equal free speech, not even in the US let alone Europe...
ur-whale 3y ago
> Those who believe it's "for our own good" are out of their minds. Very glad to see some of the sheeps aren't completely clueless over there!
throwaway9274 3y ago
European societies have more fractious populations and a far more elite-mediated society than the U.S. As a result, their union of states is both more fractious, in that it is a confederation and not a true federal government, and more elite-mediated, in that its function depends more upon the consensus among national elites than among national populations. Put another way, it is more important that Paris agrees with Berlin than that Bautzen agrees with Lille. Is that anti-democratic or just a more republican (small r) form of democracy? I am not sure. But it is different.
scott_w 3y ago
Oh man, I’m so glad my country (the U.K.) left the E.U. and no longer have to worry about all that government corrupti- oh…
- blibble 3y ago
  there's a major difference with the EU system is is not possible for the parliament to modify or remove previously passed legislation, once you have a bad law it's essentially permanent this is not true of the UK system (see what happened to the Identity Cards Act 2006)
  - scott_w 3y ago
    That’s total gibberish. It’s not easy but it’s absolutely possible to amend EU legislation. It works in exactly the same way as the UK: by enacting new legislation.
    - blibble 3y ago
      > That’s total gibberish. okay, so how can the parliament do it?
      - scott_w 3y ago
        By passing new laws with the EC. You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t.
        blibble 3y ago
        > By passing new laws with the EC. right, so it can't, thank you > You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t. are you a time traveler from before the 1640s? there was a civil war fought over this point, parliament won and is sovereign the parliamentary majority and government are not the same thing this should be obvious to anyone from the 2019-2020 mess where the government didn't have a majority there is no government approval anywhere in the legislative process most bills are proposed by government ministers (by the fact they also happen to be parliamentarians), but this is also not a requirement bills can be proposed and passed into law entirely by parliament, they're called "private members bills"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kubb 3y ago

Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing.

admissionsguy 3y ago
> We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. Well, I actually do.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Can you expand on why, please? From the outside looking in, most European countries seem much better at most things than where I live in the US (unless you're very wealthy, I guess).
  - hef19898 3y ago
    You are on forum of temporarily embarased billionaires (now coping with mass FAANG layoffs), so what do you expect?
    - refurb 3y ago
      This is kind of a lazy answer. Who said anything about billionaires? Many people see the benefit of a more vibrant growing economy in the US vs the EU and at the end of the day, end up personally benefiting from it to with (much) higher wages.
  - zo1 3y ago
    Not OP. But some of us have seen how the life can function "just fine" even without the huge amount of control and laws that the EU has. I'm gonna be a bit crass here to convey my point. I currently live in a "shithole" country, and I'd still not want to live in the EU in comparison. I've had this discussion with many people that came back, with family that lives there, with my wife seeing if we want to move there "for our kids future", and always it ends up being a "No", or "let's see if it looks better next year". Sure, maybe there is a pocket here, a pocket there, or a city/state/province etc that I would want to live in, or is "Okay". But the rest looks positively horrifying. For starters, I don't want to live in a place where I either have to be ridiculously wealthy or a slave my entire life just to own land that isn't a tiny capsule apartment in an overcrowded city. Land I probably won't be able to do what I want on exactly, anyways. Anywho, I'm biased. I see Europe as the "pathetic" and "weak" West that is basically slowly killing itself out of some sort of collective cultural guilt for who knows what. It's killing itself in the name of some noble good, whilst the world filled with state-level bullies is destroying the world. No thank you.
    - ur-whale 3y ago
      > Land I probably won't be able to do what I want on exactly, anyways. I can confirm this. One of the myriad of reasons that made me leave the EU for good. Land "ownership" is a joke in the EU. Worse, it's actually a scam: if you own property in most of the western EU, you have about the same rights a tenant would have.
inglor_cz 3y ago
"Haha, sure, it’s real invigilation terror over here in Europe. " More like slow addition of smothering layers of bureaucracy upon bureaucracy until your breathing space is severely limited. Combined with our ghastly demographics, I think our growth is a thing of the past. In many individual EU countries including mine, something like Chat Control 2.0 would not fly and the attention of the public would be very negative; especially east of the Iron Curtain, memories of authoritarian regimes are too strong for people to trust their politicians with this kind of power. Brussels is distant enough that EU politicians can pull off such legislation without the general public being aware of it. The distance between the EC and a random European is way too big. Even bigger than the distance between the Feds and a random American in USA.
- dmcq2 3y ago
  The principle of subsidiarity was supposed to counter making laws affecting individuals like this would, this sort of stuff should be up to individual countries. The bureaucrats are trying to expand out of their remit.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "The bureaucrats are trying to expand out of their remit." Which, to be frank, was totally expectable and the fact that the system wasn't prepared enough for this behavior constitutes a significant weakness.
- Agingcoder 3y ago
  Hungary and Poland don’t strike me as very lax governments, so it’s not obvious to me that people in Eastern Europe would actively fight that kind of legislation.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Locally, such a proposal would immediately become subject of the local cultural war. Journalists would hop on the news and make clickbait of them incessantly. But few people, including the media, pay real attention to anything that happens in Brussels.
blibble 3y ago
> We all just want to escape this tyrannical dictatorship. some of us have managed to, it is possible > But, the European Parliament is against this legislation, and for the moment it’s not passing. it will eventually, it always does
waihtis 3y ago
It would be beneficial to understand the underlying mechanics (very untransparent centralization of power to an unelected commission) and the risks involved before smugly dismissing concerns about it.
- quonn 3y ago
  The commission has a member of each EU country and those members come from the elected governments. It‘s just like the government is not elected in many countries but instead the parliament is elected and that votes for a prime minister who chooses his ministers.
  - jowea 3y ago
    If the EU worked like a normal parliamentary government then parliament would have the right to initiate legislation. And it would be able to nominate whoever it wished for president of the commission as long as there was a parliamentary majority. The EU has confederal aspects that don't really work in the ways normal modern democracies work.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Which kind of makes sense, as the fear isbthat the emeber nations loose their sovereignty. Hence, the elected governemnts of those memeber states agreeing on things, with the directly elected EU parliament approving theom, or not. Seems like a reasonably balance here.
riedel 3y ago
As long as the parliament is against a very specific clause chances are low that legislation passes. However, recent EU acts are therefore a mixed bag of incoherent clauses: Comission, council and parliament all push there parts through with lobbying all over the place. In the end it seems that hardly anyone understands the overall mechanics anymore. I would even argue that we sometimes even have too much democracy (well rather too many levels I guess). We would actually need better legislative techniques and a more coherent vision. The EC and their DGs are often understaffed and underqualified IMHO.

seydor 3y ago

The Eurocrats are only accountable to other eurocrats and it shows. The EU also has a very large publicity budget. The EP s vice president for Blockchain and AI was found to take bribes from qatar last year.

sofixa 3y ago

> The thousands of years old saying: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state" has never been truer Can you tell me what is the correct number of laws? What's your threshold? And what happens when a new thing appears / enters the mainstream, do you have to remove an old law first before creating a new one? As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Should we have to remove e.g. the rail packages to be able to legislate on them? Or screw it, anarchy? > But the EP is tiny compared to the EC and the EC is pulling the strings: the EP is supposed to bring some kind of democracy but there's none. You know that the European Parliament has to vote on EC proposals, right? And if they refuse them, they don't pass.

ta8645 3y ago
> As a concrete example, LLMs and how they relate to copyright and image rights. Why the heck is any new law needed at all for copyright? The only accusation is that LLMs did not respect current copyright laws, not that the current copyright law is insufficient. Specifically, there was a commonly used corpus of pirated copyright material (books3) that was used to train many LLMS. Its hosting was withdrawn when challenged by copyright holders. That's the system working as intended.
- sofixa 3y ago
  Because an algorithm isn't a human, so the usual "fair use" and inspiration arguments do not apply 1:1. The possibilities opened by e.g. film studios recording voice actors, trainign algorightms on them and then just reusing their voices, or deepfaking actors' faces, or Copilot giving verbatim copyrighted code are endless and quite different than what was currently possible. Does Microsoft violate copyright by training a model on copyrighted works? A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does? Why the heck do people think laws should be warped to try to be applied to things the writers of the law couldn't even conceive of? Are planes regulated the same ways that cars and horses before were?
  - ta8645 3y ago
    > [examples of supposed problems] None of those have anything to do with LLMs which was the issue stated in your original post. > A human can read them and use them for inspiration, is that what a model does? Yes.

api 3y ago

It seems like over the past 10 years there has been a global retreat from freedom and democracy. China is returning to at least a superficially softer version of Maoism. Russia has returned to Stalinism. The Middle East never had much of a liberal tradition but it’s certainly not gained any ground. The US is flirting with populist strong man rule with Trump and RFK. South America seems to keep oscillating between authoritarian socialism and their own forms of right wing strong man rule. Not sure about Africa but from afar it still seems dominated by strong men or illiberal theocratic states. The UK and EU felt like an exception but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are trending toward undemocratic bureaucracies in service to either the bureaucracy itself or the powerful. Surveillance is everywhere and is barely challenged. After all we get cute videos on social media and apparently cute videos are more important than freedom or human rights. One problem might be that we teach everyone about the dangers of fanatical explosive totalitarian movements like Hitlerism and Stalinism but not enough about “softer” creeping authoritarianism that is less easy to identify or oppose. Both are a risk but the strong man cult type is easier to mobilize people against.

deleted 3y ago
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mrtksn 3y ago
>The UK and EU felt like an exception but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both are trending toward undemocratic bureaucracies in service to either the bureaucracy itself or the powerful. The whole public opinion shifted towards security over everything, unfortunately. As a result, the institutions follow.
- throwaway50662 3y ago
  No, not the whole. There are entire states in the EU that are against that. Unfortunately these are the smaller ones so they can't do anything about it and it's being forced upon their populations, regardless of what anyone says about how sovereign they are.
  - 3y ago

rayiner 3y ago

[flagged]

rolisz 3y ago
Romanian here: the progress this country has made in every single aspect is huge in the 15 years since we joined the EU. Are there downsides? Sure. But yes, the progress for now is massive.
moffkalast 3y ago
You mean the very thing that made the USA the single world superpower by allowing it to act as a unified block instead of a pile of constantly bickering and sometimes warring states? Yeah gee why would we think that.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  How has that been working out for the EU?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Look no further than the UK to judge for yourself.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    So far so good I guess? The Euro/single market has made trade and daily lives so much easier and grasped fiscal control out of individual states' incompetent hands, Schengen makes travel a breeze. EU funding continues to equalize development throughout so that we can function more fairly as a continent (in economic terms). Erasmus programmes letting people study across the EU are great, the food safety regulations and support for farmers are pretty good and GDPR has been fantastic so far. The current Commission does impotently scream its fascist views, but luckily they can't do shit without the Parliament's approval, which unfortunately for them happens to be an actual democratic entity. As long as the checks and balances continue to work we'll be fine. Obviously there hasn't been anything done in terms of a centralized military, but we'll get there eventually and NATO is a decent stand-in for now. And the train network is also still quite a train wreck when it comes to international connections which I'm also hopeful will be eventually addressed. But it won't ever be without a federal authority demanding it, because each country fundamentally only cares about itself. And of course the EU's greatest achievement, forcing Logitech to finally drop microUSB lmao.

raverbashing 3y ago

Also it's important to notice the "European Commission" is the fancy name for the representatives of all the EU countries Of course, it has a structure, executive, etc, but essentially they are composed of representatives of the EU27 countries

matthewdgreen 3y ago
It is a very complex system, and I say that as a US person who is used to a very complex system. In fact, I'm not really aware of any democratic nation with anything quite as byzantine. The EU Commission President is nominated by the EU Council, which is itself comprised of the heads-of-state of the member states. The President is then confirmed by the EU Parliament, which is directly elected by voters. So far this seems straightforward. However: the remaining Commission members are selected by the Council of the European Union (CotEU), which is apparently not the same thing as the EU Council! Except that the Commission President also gets a vote in their selection. I tried to understand how the CotEU members are accountable to the voting public, but frankly the Wikipedia article is too hard to understand. The elected Parliament does not appear to get a say in this part of the selection. Then the Commission President selects the policy direction and assigns policy areas to the Commission members. The articles I found hint at the idea of consensus voting, but don't state it very explicitly. In any case, the President seems to have overwhelming authority within the Commission, given their role in selecting the members and the policy initiatives. At the same time, 26 out of 27 Commission members are selected by the CotEU and presumably the President depends on their good graces. I assume this makes more sense to EU citizens, who must learn about it in school. In total, power seems to be distributed in confusing ways across seven different governmental bodies, of which only one is directly elected? It's an interesting system, but maybe not the one I would choose given the current outcome.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Both, the European parliament and the European Council are voted for, the first directly by EU citizens, the latter by citizens of the individual EU countries everytime a new national election, and subsequent goverment formation, happens.

barrysteve 3y ago

They already 'know everything' (or enough) to control my life. You think I can rob a bank tomorrow and not be known? Past a certain 'crime threshold' and the three letter agencies take a keen interest in everything/anything I do... I'm out of trouble right now, that's all. Let them control everything... in the long long term it will be flipped against them. 1984 oppressed the political class. And when the political class flees visible power... the same 'cybersecurity' folks will occupy the power vacuum, trapping themselves in their own tech bubble. I've never seen someone so Secure.. as someone who constantly preens his security cameras, his up-to-date door locks, his impenetrable garage walls.... The whole state of tech right now is a racket, designed to make those pigs 'more equal than others' feel emotionally safe in their data centres. The only way to get the pigs off our back is to manualize tech and make all the average joes on this planet, able to control tech from top to bottom, completely transparently and completely separate from the System. When my son can trivially modify the instruction set on the CPU in his Smart Chainsaw, and reconfigure every single bit of code and enter every abstraction layer - as easily as we change capacitors on a dishwasher - then the guy in the security bunker analyzing every single molecule entering his 'secure enviornment' is laughably 'secure'...

lock-the-spock 3y ago

Honestly a quite funny post. You offer strong emotion wrapped in a story lending supposed crédence but give no single fact of what this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing. You read one (extremely technical and niche) regulation and it's horrible, in what way? And the European commission does not adopt regulations, it's parliament and council that do (the commission only proposes them). Honestly this kind of post serves no purpose or benefit. I certainly disagree (e.g. the commission is very useful in fighting against authoritarianism in Central Europey research funding, data protection, trade, ...) but there's not even facts to disagree with, just an emotional fact-free rent. If I was a troll that's how I would write.

AlbertCory 3y ago
[flagged]
AlbertCory 3y ago
Since you flagged the other comment, let's try again. You are critiquing his tone and pooh-pooh'ing his concerns. As I said above, this is only the opening shot in the war. In a year or two, they'll be back with a somewhat smaller, less ambitious plan, removing the parts that were most objectionable while keeping the spirit. Repeat, until the opposition is too worn down to be effective. As for "this abhorrent thing is that the European commission is doing" - there are plenty of other comments here explaining what's abhorrent.

notafalseflag 3y ago

Some keywords for this: "Bin Laden. Bin Laden. Bin Laden" And now the competition gets a copy of their competitors' communications. Is there a one word phrase that exfiltrates and obscures sensitive communications when there is state censorship? That's a critical vulnerability for secure operations.

LocalH 3y ago
probably "overthrow"

mrtksn 3y ago

>It's all about control. Complete, total and utter control over every single aspect of EU citizens' lives. They want to know everything about everyone: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Notice that similar law attempts were made by UK or pretty much any state. UK is trying real hard to make encryption illegal. This trend is not something European, EU based or about bureaucracy or anything like that. Governments by default want to know and control as much as they can and now the technology is advanced enough to actually let them do that. It's everyones desire to know and control everything. We are in an era where we have to fight that back and make that unfeasible again. IMHO that would be through encryption.

moffkalast 3y ago

As much as the Commission is undemocratic in nature and should be curbed, from what I understand the recent privacy fiascos are largely the fault of von der Leyen for allowing this nonsense to be presented and voted on. We just have to hold out until next year when their term is over and the witch is gone. I mean how much do you have to suck to make people think that Juncker was good in comparison.

dalbasal 3y ago

Idk... The EC pushes through controversial decisions, that are not controversial between states... the bar is generally something high in this regard. National Governments get a buffer between them and discontented citizens, because "it's the EU." There is also a lot of pressure to conform to EC "consensus," parties/individuals that want to be seen as government material. EC totally discounts digital privacy especially privacy from state actors and there is corruption, carve out a and such. I disagree with a lot of their agreements. I agree that they make far too many laws and are way too bureaucratic but.... EP is a shitshow on another level. It's literally the star wars senate. Endless factions, recreational politics. No about to act in a way that might result in anything but show. It's trump, but boring. National governments also don't lack in corruption. Politics sucks. IMO, what is badly missing is an active electorate. Civil society. There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. ATM, EC is taking advice from tech industry,dirty insiders and spooks. No one speaks for "The Cause" because, to paraphrase americans... "When I need to speak to Europe's digital freedom people, who do I call?"

malermeister 3y ago
You probably call the CCC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club
- dalbasal 3y ago
  Or the European Pirate Party or similar. They have a handful of elected MEPs at any given time. That is the problem though. That's not very serious politics. If it's a coalition of tech companies, law enforcement and whatnot vs pirates and anarchists... guess who wins? A normative, liberal movement/coalition that is for digital freedom is not far fetched. It just doesn't exist. That's why we're losing. This post demonstrates the problem quite well.
fsflover 3y ago
> There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. https://edri.org https://edri.org

rjzzleep 3y ago

The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations. I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.

pavlov 3y ago
> “I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for.” How else could it work? Within the larger group, the majority rule means that someone gets voted down. Requiring unanimous support for all initiatives means nothing gets done most of the time. In the US, the national Democratic Party doesn’t support everything that the Vermont Democratic Party wants. That’s just political reality.
jowea 3y ago
> The fascinating thing to me is that the EPP(European peoples party) which ironically is the strongest party in the EU and seems to be the one least representative of the people spans across almost all EU nations. Why you think that? It's the moderate conservative party. How many liberal democracies doesn't have one of those as a major party? > I find it very disturbing how the EU party system works above country party systems, where the EPP often overrides what the people in their own respective countries voted for. I'm not sure this exactly you're complaining about, but isn't that the inevitable result of any quasi-federal system? The federal government will inevitably end overriding what an individual state wants sometimes.

mistrial9 3y ago

where are your details? specifics? references to issues or particular documents..

Agingcoder 3y ago

I’m not sure I understand : European Commissioners are nominated by elected National governments, and approved by parliament. How is this not democratic ? Whether you agree with these policies or not is a different matter altogether.

owlstuffing 3y ago
Perhaps the sentiment is more about how our expectations of democracy are completely out of line with the results of democracy.
- malermeister 3y ago
  That is because of the fatal flaw of democracy: The demos is people and the majority of people are stupid.
- Agingcoder 3y ago
  Indeed, you’re most likely right. I’ve seen around me a growing sentiment along the lines of ´ my views and candidates didn’t win so democracy doesn’t work’ coupled with ´this allows me to claim that violence / authoritarian regime with my views is ok’. I wonder whether people are slowly realizing now that democracy has limits, whereas they used not to, and don’t like it. Democracy essentially says that you have a say, but so does everyone else, so it’s going to be messier than expected !
throwaway50662 3y ago
National government is a very different thing from national parliament. In my state the national government came out of a political compromise. The leading party has 15% support. They are limited by the national parliament in whatever they try to do here - but not in EC. Giving them control over the whole population through the EC is a spit in the face of 85% of the population. And it's very visible right on this issue - the leading party supports what the rest of the population would label as totalitarian and oppressive. They tried but were unable to pass stuff like this at home, but they support it in the EC.

callalex 3y ago

Yea, but the lack of world wars is pretty nice.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

Anyone who needs a less abstract impression, check the feed of EC Thierry Breton [0]. A painfully clear impression of how those people think about freedom of speech. [0] https://x.com/thierrybreton https://x.com/thierrybreton

hef19898 3y ago
Twitter and Musk do not equal free speech, not even in the US let alone Europe...

ur-whale 3y ago

> Those who believe it's "for our own good" are out of their minds. Very glad to see some of the sheeps aren't completely clueless over there!

throwaway9274 3y ago

European societies have more fractious populations and a far more elite-mediated society than the U.S. As a result, their union of states is both more fractious, in that it is a confederation and not a true federal government, and more elite-mediated, in that its function depends more upon the consensus among national elites than among national populations. Put another way, it is more important that Paris agrees with Berlin than that Bautzen agrees with Lille. Is that anti-democratic or just a more republican (small r) form of democracy? I am not sure. But it is different.

scott_w 3y ago

Oh man, I’m so glad my country (the U.K.) left the E.U. and no longer have to worry about all that government corrupti- oh…

blibble 3y ago
there's a major difference with the EU system is is not possible for the parliament to modify or remove previously passed legislation, once you have a bad law it's essentially permanent this is not true of the UK system (see what happened to the Identity Cards Act 2006)
- scott_w 3y ago
  That’s total gibberish. It’s not easy but it’s absolutely possible to amend EU legislation. It works in exactly the same way as the UK: by enacting new legislation.
  - blibble 3y ago
    > That’s total gibberish. okay, so how can the parliament do it?
    - scott_w 3y ago
      By passing new laws with the EC. You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t.
      - blibble 3y ago
        > By passing new laws with the EC. right, so it can't, thank you > You act like the British Parliament can pass law without government approval. Spoiler alert: it can’t. are you a time traveler from before the 1640s? there was a civil war fought over this point, parliament won and is sovereign the parliamentary majority and government are not the same thing this should be obvious to anyone from the 2019-2020 mess where the government didn't have a majority there is no government approval anywhere in the legislative process most bills are proposed by government ministers (by the fact they also happen to be parliamentarians), but this is also not a requirement bills can be proposed and passed into law entirely by parliament, they're called "private members bills"

deleted 3y ago

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