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The European Commission is on a power trip.

rtkwe 3y ago
State security apparatus is forever in a conflict with personal privacy rights. Everything that protects Paul Public also protects Chris Criminal/Tommy Terrorist(/Randy Revolutionary), it's an old issue that pushes continuously for weakening any form of privacy protections from legal (investigators love that so much of our lives now lives in 3rd party hands so they can access it easier) to technological (the continuous assault on encryption since it became feasible for the average person to use in communications). As a side note this is also something that anyone who works in privacy preserving software will have to recon with at some point if they think seriously about their goals. If your tools are strong enough to protect journalists (or insert whatever oppressed group you prefer) in hostile regimes it's good enough to protect criminals doing things you personally abhor.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  Criminals doing bad things it's the cost of having privacy. We never had and we will never have a perfect society. Just look at the EC members: they hide their communications, use WhatsApp to negotiate contracts worth billions of dollars (see the Pfizer direct "negotiation" between von der Leyen and Pfizer) but we should give up encryption because criminals use it as well... The hypocrisy is astounding.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>The European Commission is on a power trip. Never waste a good crisis. It's been well documented that crisis events are the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws that lead to erosion of freedom and wealth transfers from poor to rich, as those types of events provide the perfect excuse to bypass the usual and very long and through democratic processes where everyone takes their sweet time to dissect, analyze and debate them. And we recently had plenty of crisis: Covid, inflation, waves of refugees, war in Ukraine, war in Israel. "Don't think about it too much you poor taxpayer, you don't understand this issue anyway, it's too complex for you and plus, you're too busy being distracted and worrying about this virus/rampant inflation/CoL/war to have time to think about such petty issues like your privacy, so just sit back, relax, worry about paying your rent, and let us worry about protecting your online privacy, m'kay?"
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws Coming from my perspective, in a family who fought multiple wars to preserve liberal democratic governments based on social contract, this seems backward, and beyond my value system. Anything that I would see as a legitimate "government" would be pro-democracy and fully in the service of its citizens. If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it. Under this perfect standard, you never had a "real government" in the first place. You had, at best, some approximation of it, and you gradually lost it to time.
  - x-complexity 3y ago
    > If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it. - "we ought to figure out how we lost real government": It happened because of the inability to collectively overcome recency biases, which the State often exploits to their benefit; A tragedy happens, people want it fixed, the government gives a "fix" that grants them more power, and when its realized that too much was given away, it's by then too late to fully reverse the "fix". - "what we have instead": What we have now is a State whose main focus is its own self-preservation, even when certain high-level agents/politicians have the goal of doing the opposite. Day-to-day-wise, the State is mainly focused on making sure that the State continues to exist, with the accomplishment of what it was meant to do in the first place being secondary. - "how to get rid of it": Only two types of events can eliminate such a State. (1) An event so cataclysmic that not even a State (with total control over everyone & everything) can survive; (2) A ground-up total rejection of the State as a whole, even the good parts; (3) A rival State defeating the existing State & taking over. The event that causes (1) implicitly also means the destruction of modern society & a regression to medieval ages. (2) will be hard to drum up support for given the benefits from the good parts of the State, even if they're ephemeral. The new State from (3) is just as likely to be as bad/good as the old state, just with different warts. At its core, its a human hardware/software problem. The human hardware needs to be made more resilient against adversarial attacks & internal failures, so as to reduce the need for a State to begin with. Similarly, the human software also needs to be improved to mitigate cognitive biases as much as possible.
sneak 3y ago
Every government is on a power trip. It’s not specific to any one implementation. The organizations that push things like this self-select for power hungry people who see the majority of people not as peers but as subjects to be ruled over. It works the same everywhere. This is not a European thing.

State security apparatus is forever in a conflict with personal privacy rights. Everything that protects Paul Public also protects Chris Criminal/Tommy Terrorist(/Randy Revolutionary), it's an old issue that pushes continuously for weakening any form of privacy protections from legal (investigators love that so much of our lives now lives in 3rd party hands so they can access it easier) to technological (the continuous assault on encryption since it became feasible for the average person to use in communications). As a side note this is also something that anyone who works in privacy preserving software will have to recon with at some point if they think seriously about their goals. If your tools are strong enough to protect journalists (or insert whatever oppressed group you prefer) in hostile regimes it's good enough to protect criminals doing things you personally abhor.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
Criminals doing bad things it's the cost of having privacy. We never had and we will never have a perfect society. Just look at the EC members: they hide their communications, use WhatsApp to negotiate contracts worth billions of dollars (see the Pfizer direct "negotiation" between von der Leyen and Pfizer) but we should give up encryption because criminals use it as well... The hypocrisy is astounding.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>The European Commission is on a power trip. Never waste a good crisis. It's been well documented that crisis events are the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws that lead to erosion of freedom and wealth transfers from poor to rich, as those types of events provide the perfect excuse to bypass the usual and very long and through democratic processes where everyone takes their sweet time to dissect, analyze and debate them. And we recently had plenty of crisis: Covid, inflation, waves of refugees, war in Ukraine, war in Israel. "Don't think about it too much you poor taxpayer, you don't understand this issue anyway, it's too complex for you and plus, you're too busy being distracted and worrying about this virus/rampant inflation/CoL/war to have time to think about such petty issues like your privacy, so just sit back, relax, worry about paying your rent, and let us worry about protecting your online privacy, m'kay?"

nonrandomstring 3y ago
> the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws Coming from my perspective, in a family who fought multiple wars to preserve liberal democratic governments based on social contract, this seems backward, and beyond my value system. Anything that I would see as a legitimate "government" would be pro-democracy and fully in the service of its citizens. If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it. Under this perfect standard, you never had a "real government" in the first place. You had, at best, some approximation of it, and you gradually lost it to time.
- x-complexity 3y ago
  > If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it. - "we ought to figure out how we lost real government": It happened because of the inability to collectively overcome recency biases, which the State often exploits to their benefit; A tragedy happens, people want it fixed, the government gives a "fix" that grants them more power, and when its realized that too much was given away, it's by then too late to fully reverse the "fix". - "what we have instead": What we have now is a State whose main focus is its own self-preservation, even when certain high-level agents/politicians have the goal of doing the opposite. Day-to-day-wise, the State is mainly focused on making sure that the State continues to exist, with the accomplishment of what it was meant to do in the first place being secondary. - "how to get rid of it": Only two types of events can eliminate such a State. (1) An event so cataclysmic that not even a State (with total control over everyone & everything) can survive; (2) A ground-up total rejection of the State as a whole, even the good parts; (3) A rival State defeating the existing State & taking over. The event that causes (1) implicitly also means the destruction of modern society & a regression to medieval ages. (2) will be hard to drum up support for given the benefits from the good parts of the State, even if they're ephemeral. The new State from (3) is just as likely to be as bad/good as the old state, just with different warts. At its core, its a human hardware/software problem. The human hardware needs to be made more resilient against adversarial attacks & internal failures, so as to reduce the need for a State to begin with. Similarly, the human software also needs to be improved to mitigate cognitive biases as much as possible.

sneak 3y ago

Every government is on a power trip. It’s not specific to any one implementation. The organizations that push things like this self-select for power hungry people who see the majority of people not as peers but as subjects to be ruled over. It works the same everywhere. This is not a European thing.