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Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem. Defeating one bad law isn't enough.

by ori_b 10mo ago

IlikeKitties 10mo ago
There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.
- hexbin010 10mo ago
  > There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy Which apply equally to the government?
  - IlikeKitties 10mo ago
    Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.
    - hexbin010 10mo ago
      Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU 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
  - pavlov 10mo ago
    Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them. Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.
    - rvnx 10mo ago
      It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention
      - izacus 10mo ago
        That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.
        tremon 10mo ago
        No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).
        izacus 10mo ago
        If this passes, Germany would have to approve of it, which makes your diction a bit wierd. A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.
- timschmidt 10mo ago
  Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full: "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_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Secret_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 10mo ago
    SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't. 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.
    - roenxi 10mo ago
      > 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. 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.
      - 10mo ago
- pcrh 10mo ago
  A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: >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_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Violation_of_the_convention_by_mass_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
  - hexbin010 10mo ago
    Exactly, great quote from the ECHR. Massive blanket exceptions for the prevention of crime or disorder
delusional 10mo ago
[flagged]
- MrNeon 10mo ago
  I'm curious, what would you personally consider to be a step too far in the fight against CSAM?
  - delusional 10mo ago
    Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer. 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).
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - socalgal2 10mo ago
      The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to. 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
- 10mo ago
BlackjackCF 10mo ago
These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
- goda90 10mo ago
  People need to do a better job of voting out people who push such laws.
  - idle_zealot 10mo ago
    That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
  - amelius 10mo ago
    Good luck convincing people not to vote for anti-immigration measures and other populist ideas instead.
    - greenmoon 10mo ago
      [dead]
    - idle_zealot 10mo ago
      You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists. Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
LtWorf 10mo ago
Well the italian constitution says that freedom and secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are not to be violated. Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.
mmooss 10mo ago
If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.
0ckpuppet 10mo ago
like the Amercan Bil of Rights?
tomjen3 10mo ago
That is not enough. 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.
fulafel 10mo ago
Secrecy of communiations frequently constitutionally protected: See p. 11 of https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-Constitutional-Privacy-and-Data-Protection-Rights-within-the-EU.pdf https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-...

Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem. Defeating one bad law isn't enough.

by ori_b 10mo ago

Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem. Defeating one bad law isn't enough.

IlikeKitties 10mo ago

There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.

hexbin010 10mo ago
> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy Which apply equally to the government?
- IlikeKitties 10mo ago
  Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.
  - hexbin010 10mo ago
    Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU 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
- pavlov 10mo ago
  Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them. Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.
  - rvnx 10mo ago
    It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention
    - izacus 10mo ago
      That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.
      - tremon 10mo ago
        No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).
        izacus 10mo ago
        If this passes, Germany would have to approve of it, which makes your diction a bit wierd. A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.
timschmidt 10mo ago
Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full: "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_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Secret_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
- Eddy_Viscosity2 10mo ago
  SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't. 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.
  - roenxi 10mo ago
    > 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. 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.
    - 10mo ago
pcrh 10mo ago
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: >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_Convention_on_Human_Rights#Violation_of_the_convention_by_mass_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
- hexbin010 10mo ago
  Exactly, great quote from the ECHR. Massive blanket exceptions for the prevention of crime or disorder

delusional 10mo ago

[flagged]

MrNeon 10mo ago
I'm curious, what would you personally consider to be a step too far in the fight against CSAM?
- delusional 10mo ago
  Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer. 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).
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - socalgal2 10mo ago
    The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to. 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
10mo ago

BlackjackCF 10mo ago

These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.

goda90 10mo ago
People need to do a better job of voting out people who push such laws.
- idle_zealot 10mo ago
  That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
- amelius 10mo ago
  Good luck convincing people not to vote for anti-immigration measures and other populist ideas instead.
  - greenmoon 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - idle_zealot 10mo ago
    You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists. Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.

LtWorf 10mo ago

Well the italian constitution says that freedom and secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are not to be violated. Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.

mmooss 10mo ago

If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.

0ckpuppet 10mo ago

like the Amercan Bil of Rights?

tomjen3 10mo ago

That is not enough. 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.

fulafel 10mo ago

Secrecy of communiations frequently constitutionally protected: See p. 11 of https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-Constitutional-Privacy-and-Data-Protection-Rights-within-the-EU.pdf https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-...