"Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."
For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards.
If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.
I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member.
I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
Any law voted yes by a politician would have:
A 6mo cool off period, and in that interim periodthe following would apply: the law in question would be Tripled (3x) and both ways (I.e. retroactive and future) to the elected officials, his immediate parents, sons, and siblings, as soon as the law is passed.
So if they pass a tax increase, the entire tax applies immediately to their family before it applies to the public.
Same would be surveillance. Same for healthcare changes. OR draft etc. They would eat their kill.
Its about time no?
Any regulatory body unelected chief + deputy should be subject to the same rules with a tidy bonus: agency rules would also impact the portfolio (materiality can be set at say FV in excess of 300% poverty line), or business relationships past + present for the "czars" and family members.
So If you want to run FDIC and want to make rules for banks, thats swell, but those rules will apply to bank X where your brother works, AND to bank Y where you were CEO. The new rule would apply to those banks first, the changes would be tripled, AND that would be applied retroactively.
Have fun with that revolving door!
A horrifyingly large amount of UK political decision-making that should be minuted is instead carried out secretly on whatsapp.
Nobody I know would run for state office. They pay poorly. You have to work in the state capitol, which in most state's is awful. You lose your privacy. And for what, a marginal legislative role?
The historic benefit was pride. But with nihilism in vogue and trust in government low, that reward is non-existent. Our intelligent and ambitious don't aim for public office. (It even feels trite to call it public service.) That's a problem.
Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are.
Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains".
If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there.
<personal pain point>
One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful.
In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences". The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind.
Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense.
I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out.
If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds.
Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion.
</personal pain point>
I would vote yes.
Beware the peculiar human creature who craves attention from strangers.
I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.
Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.
I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.
I'm probably in the minority on HN, but I think this is a good thing. It should be a matter of course, in a democratic society. Free speech doesn't live solely in digital communication (universally owned by some company) any more than it does in the classified ads in a newspaper.
Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up.
It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem.
More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.
It’s just tiring
So they migrate to non-democratic sections of the political sphere to assert themselves, and EC is one of those. The EU has a significant "democratic deficit" as a whole, too much indirection between people and the ruling Eurocrat class.
Still, it is disturbing to watch all of Orwell's ideas getting implemented in real life
There are lots of good things coming out of the European Commission and some really great things. Obviously there is going to come some crap to, and a few really really bad things, like this one. I agree that it's tiring to fight those, but there is no sunshine without rain.
It’s tiring. They hope to wear people down.
I am sorry. There is mostly vile hate and vitriol for her in the entire country. Her entire career was a show of the Peter Principle.
I'd be more fine with that if they only regulated narrowly defined inter-state issues in the EU.
But stuff like this... There's no mandate. And there's no reason this couldn't be done locally in every member state where the population wants that.
In the EU we have the Parliament, which is elected by the people, the Council which is composed by Prime Ministers, Presidents, whoever rules each country and the Commission, which is proposed by the Council and elected by the Parliament. Not so different from what I see in my country.
EP elections are well publicized and every EU citizen has the right to vote on it
"Every five years EU citizens choose who represents them in the European Parliament, the directly-elected institution that defends their interests in the EU decision-making process. The next European elections will take place in 2024."
Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead.
Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.
It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past
The Government is our voice and our strength, and we are going to need that voice heard and our will exercised in the coming years.
We need to stop undermining our governments, we need to get money out of politics, and we need to sort out our democracies.
In other words: The European Commission is the autocratic reservoir for conservative politicians that were to extremistic for national audiences.
Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming.
Or Israel.
This pushing, forever persistent, accretes ever greater power to departments and their bureaucrats until the people have no say, and the highest elected offices have no say. Of course, the EU was initially designed this way, so you're fucked any way you frame it.
GDPR achieved nothing notable for data security and privacy, except by spamming cookie prompts and training users to accept anything.
The EU is an incompetent, lumbering, bureaucratic hellscape. It expanded FAR beyond its original remit of a customs union, and in turn created horrific legislation and usurped the power of national governments to centralize power in Brussels.
The EU used its newly seized power to crush all free speech, freedom of expression and dissent, along with explicitly campaigning for censorship. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-ha...
As far as I'm concerned, GDPR is great.
Large scale surveillance while abusive and harmful has historically been limited in scale by the ability of those in control to trawl through data.
Automated "moderation" of dragnet communications collection with modern AI holds the potential for a scale of abusive privacy invasion at unprecedented scales.
My personal ability to generate millions of real-looking messages has now exploded and I wonder how these proposed structures will function if everyone sends each other 1k suspicious messages every minute of every day ?
Maybe attach a zip-bomb to every message just for good measure?
Remember "Hacking Team" that got busted a few years back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team One of the services they sold was the ability to plant incriminating data on a victim's computer.
She is appointed and vetted by the parliament, who is elected directly by the people.
So the commissioners do not come from Mars, they are emissaries of the elected parliament.
[0]: https://www.thorn.org/about-our-fight-against-sexual-exploit...
We all know who these people are.
It's a public discussion.
> and help with anything that gets them far from public and government
It simply means winning the elections at the EU parliament, which, unfortunately for Mullvad, it's not something they will ever be able to do.
Mullvad posts might be popular here on HN, maybe, but they move no more than a few thousands votes in the EU (we are 450 million people).
Show me another place where 27 countries live peacefully together and jointly govern an entire sub continent, by collaborating together and discussing publicly about their political proposals.
Of course it has its problems, of course it takes a lot of effort to bring 27 countries together on a subject, of course there will be controversial opinions among its members, depending on the POV (a lot more people in EU agree with the chat control proposal than those who disagree), but that's the price of democracy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
If I'm reading [1] correctly, we're just picking up momentum down a decades-long slippery slope.
1. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/FIW_202...
It is discussed by Charlie Munger as part of what he calls the "reciprocation tendency", after the studies from Robert Cialdini in the practice of "«ask for a lot and back off»".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
...but yes, this is why in the US republicans are constantly floating all sorts of batshit regressive policies on social welfare programs, LGBTQ people, voting rights, immigration - it shifts the ultimate compromise closer to their desired outcome, and even if it doesn't, it still is virtue signaling to their base, something to shout about at campaign rallies.
"See what I tried to do for you? But those evil liberals shot me down! I need your support!"
That, sadly, is a uniquely American concept. I fully agree that these truths are self-evident and universal.
But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want these freedoms (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.
Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0].
So it does seem these ideals are appealing to the young, educated and smart people in Europe. Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic.
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
I don't think there's a real argument that, somewhere in our DNA, exists a list of personal freedoms every human being ought to have. Feels like an ad absurdum more than a genuine engagement, tbh...
You can say that for most moral statements.
The last 8 or so years has taught me otherwise.
Switzerland and Costa Rica might be candidates, but I don't know enough to be sure.
LatAm there are a good few places left where you have a paradisiac nature/weather and no psychopaths trying to control your every move.
This allows to propose conditions that "Men" would never accept. It is the very idea that is fading.
...In fact, for a number of today's common practices we suggest the proposer to think whether [prominent figure] would have ever accepted it.
====
Which language are you speaking? Before something "«comes across»" to you, do you have your duly interposed cold-minded understanding modules on?
-- A "Man" is that entity which has a mind superior to that of e.g. monkeys. (In the context, the nuance is that of Dignity.)
-- A "person" is that entity which expresses a particular side of the possible expressions of being.
...Your proposal would be translated as "People with their own special ideas and leaning would etc." - it is not only hardly relevant to what was communicated, but possibly even stating the opposite. The original post, like in general the rest we post, was not meant to be written in demotic.
====
And again to another reply, now hidden, if the above still needed:
'Man' has the same root of "mind", it means "having a mind", but so many things have it, so it must be a special one, must it not?
'Person' is a mask - that thing in which the voice "per-sonat". It means the mask, the specific one - crying, laughing, irate, whatever.
No, you cannot use 'person' if you do not mean "that with a personality" - because that is what it means.
====
Edit: Oh, and incidentally - "why not just sticking to invented groupspeak?"
Well, paradoxically, also because it is not inclusive, is it, if some demand the normalcy of speaking actual Language, or maybe just when dealing with individuals from other groups! A convention is limited to convention adherents; this public is varied!
From the start of the proposal itself:
"At least one in five children falls victim to sexual violence during childhood 3 . A 2021 global study found that more than one in three respondents had been asked to do something sexually explicit online during their childhood, and over half had experienced a form of child sexual abuse online"
I am (obviously) against child sexual abuse. I can also say, with very high certainty, that those numbers are being blown completely out-of-proportion, with the widest definition possible used.
To justify such a wide-reaching proposal behind this thin veneer of justification is absolutely nuts to me.
Don’t tell me, it’s to “protect the children”, the excuse under which all draconian citizen monitoring laws are introduced.
“To protect the children”….. no one can argue with it without sounding like a pedophile.
And it always comes with an assurance that the dramatic power overreach will never be used for anything else but hunting pedophiles.
But it’s never too long until they’re using it to hunt copyright breakers and all sorts or ordinary crime.
Besides that, how about educating people on how to do exactly that: Set up their own chat service.
That would put control in the hands of those people who are not only responsible for protecting children but also have the most leverage to do that: The parents.
It won't.
I can only conclude that some utterly dystopian tech needs to be developed to uphold this law.
Why is everybody so focused on the "Oh this is so bad!"... What if this law passes? It's completely impossible right?
And if I do use encryption, am I a criminal now? Will they come after me, hit me with a $5 wrench [0] to force me to give up my keys? Only to find me telling my wife I love her with that special feeling of nobody else listening in? You know, like from my mouth to her ear. As we can do at home? Will they soon start to listen in on my home to prevent key exchange parties with my friends? I find the (imagined) consequences of enforcing this law insane. I just don't see it happening in this society. And if it does happen, society will be very different.
Although I've seen enough HN comments in recent years willing to gamble on giving their kind an inch as if they won't take the whole field given the chance. History's only reliable lesson here is humans having a short memory of trusting these systems to do what they initially promised they would do, for longer than the well-intentioned's term in office.
> The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and Article 24(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (‘the Charter’) 1 enshrine as rights the protection and care of children’s best interests and well-being. In 2021, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child underlined that these rights must be equally protected in the digital environment 2 . The protection of children, both offline and online, is a Union priority.
Literally, "it's for the children". I don't need to read any more. Get fucked, big brother.
The system is used to hide content, change content, shadow ban and the like.
Even by its own standards it's typically used incorrectly, but most users have no workable way to appeal.
The content reviewed is often visible to low paid workers in various countries. Similar systems have been infiltrated by hostile governments. (Twitter is a case in point.)
(If you use FB you can sometimes probe the system and better establish the details.)
The system is also used to prevent one user informing another that they've been squelched.
My guess, this would give rise to even less competent implementations and actual elimination of political opponents and the like.
Also freedom of speech it's about the possibility to express your opinions, not that the opinions would receive no post-expression control nor that the people expressing them should bear no responsibility for what they say.
Monitoring and auditing have always been integral to democratic systems, they are called law enforcement and as such they have broader access to information that must be authorized, it is by design.
In the end it's all about different ideas supported by different parties here, that are discussing a proposal, which is the essence of democracy.
It will resolve in a compromise, as usual.
Those who are discussing it as "evil" VS "good" are missing the point of the democratic process IMO.
Mullvad is in fact urging politicians in the EU to vote no, they are not proposing to attack the EU institutions with guns and those supporting the chat control are not saying that Mullvad "supports online pedophilia".
In liberal theory, the tyranny of the majority[1] was supposedly solved with rights (encoded in constitutions.) The problem here, according to the theory, is that we don't have a right to privacy.
If anyone comes up with such a solution, he will achieve two goods:
- protect children
- remove a motive for surveilence
1. Honeypots. Special agents sit online pretending to be children. The abusers found captured immediately, real time. This requires very quick legal aid channels between countries and organizations. To prevent the abusers from anonymizing (e.g. Tor), strong identification is needed in chats and communication systems - ID card or passport. That's a strong requirement, but better than surveillance, probably.
2. Strong identification of children. At least, children should be reliably identified by chat systems, and all communication with them should require the other party to be strongly identified. Or even full recording of communication, but only when communicating with children. By default chat system assumes user is a child, and to be off the record, user has to prove very reliably he is not a child (and the other side of the communication is a proven grown up as well).
3. AI-generated child abuse videos. Real children not harmed, perverts are satisfied. Although, people enjoying child abuse content deserve punishment anyway, probably. Also, encouraging production of such content increases the danger for normal people (including children) to be exposed to this content. However, the exposure possibility problem exists anyway.
Consider the logic that a government has an ever-greater interest in promoting its Nation as quintessentially democratic the more antidemocratic that it becomes.
In this case, superficial public participation and the government's elusive visible validity scale together.
Whereas in the archetype of a truly democratic society (I say archetype because it may not exist), the government arguably has a motivation to discourage the promotional image of and participation in democracy.
Because in this case, democratic participation is an actual threat to power.
This theory only holds for nations that have any democratic pretense. Which likely has more to do with foreign policy than anything else.
How many Western Nations fall over themselves to align themselves with democracy?
People are elected sure, but they are all pretty much socialists, it’s not like you can really choose.
Candidates who have different worldview don’t have access to media.
Oh, and last time we got a say about whether we wanted to wanted to abide by the European constitution we said « no » at 55%
Apparently it did not make any difference whatsoever.
European countries should be treated like anything else.
A bunch of people who seized power and use democracy as a way decentralised power so it’s harder to overturn
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...
* 10 countries being: Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden and Ireland
Of course the reason is because god or X or Y or national security or Z but they'll do it and we'll believe their reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/pgp_at_30/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
[4] https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-the-cyphe...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094627
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31329368
Everyone has rights or no one has rights
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:13e33abf-...
When you are for free speech, you have to actively protect that with which you disagree. That’s the only way it works.
If you don’t, someone will eventually come for what you think should be protected…and there will be nobody left to defend it.