“As negotiator for my group, many of the organisations mentioned in the report, which call themselves child protection organisations or victims’ associations, also contacted me. But I had no idea that the pro-chat control campaign was being orchestrated and funded by a network of organisations linked to the tech industry and security services, drawing millions in funding from a US-led foundation and paying foreign consulting agencies to create lobbying strategies. I had previously only expected corporations to use such methods of ‘capturing legislation’.
Q. Do you know what the difference is between reality and a conspiracy theory is?
A. About six months
P.S. And before anyone gets all angry at me, if you had told any random person on the street that the Tech and Security Industrial complex were secretly funding activists groups to try and be able to spy on all European data you would've been considered to be daft and people would look at you like your crazy. If it doesn't sound crazy to you it's only because you're familiar with how the sausage is made in this area. So what could be going on in places where you don't know how the sausage is made?
Evidence is the difference.
> if you had told any random person on the street that the Tech and Security Industrial complex were secretly funding activists groups to try and be able to spy on all European data you would've been considered to be daft and people would look at you like your crazy
This reasoning is hindsight. People come up with lots of conspiracy theories, 99% of which are false. The difference is evidence.
True conspiracy theory backed by evidence: Criminal prosecutors present a theory about a gang of bank robbers conspiring to rob a bank. They have a lot of phone records and surveillance footage as evidence.
True conspiracy theories with no evidence: Crimes with two or more participants which have successfully evaded discovery. Somebody smells a rat but has nothing but their gut to go off of. Distinguishing these from false conspiracy theories is impossible (so no example), but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Sometimes people get away with it.
False conspiracy theory with no evidence: wolverine876 is in league with Martians to take over Earth.
False conspiracy theory with some evidence: To understand how this could happen, you must understand that evidence is not the same as proof. Circumstantial evidence and eye witness testimony can often point in the direction of something that isn't actually true. In the case of the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident, radar and sonar evidence lead the Navy to believe that it was under attack from the North Vietnamese. Turns out they were almost certainly shooting at shadows. They believed something that the evidence then available to them supported, but it turned out to be wrong.
For example, almost literally every war the US has gotten into after WWII has ended in disaster, with no useful goals achieved and lots of money wasted. There is a consistent pattern where they start off optimistic with an obvious bad guy to get, then over 4-8 years the grey reality sets in and the costs become obvious.
There has to be something I would recognise as a conspiracy going on there, hard evidence or no. It doesn't make sense to be that stupid unless there is a group of people making bank from the spending and organising to push the mad agenda. The decision makers have full visibility into the disasters they are pushing.
When law enforcement publish a bulletin about how they've thwarted a terrorist plot, they act before there is complete evidence, instead judging the intentions of bad actors and the likelihood that they'll act on those intentions. We have to do the same with all bad actors, while realizing there will usually never be any evidence accessible.
What if you didn't find any evidence of something that indeed happen? What category does it fall into? Even courts will sometimes forgo the need to present evidence if they can establish means, motive and opportunity.
Also, of course parent didn't mean it literally. They were referring to a different aspect of how such evidence may be discovered... well, now I feel like I'm explaining a joke.
> Evidence is the difference.
Evidence is obviously not the difference between reality and a conspiracy theory. Were that the case, it would be impossible for a conspiracy theory to be correct.
Evidence isn't even the difference between admitting that a conspiracy happened and not making that admission, but that's the best case.
It’s law enforcement companies trying to lobby for increased chat control. They’re doing it via a scummy way of NGO fronts.
That is not really a conspiracy in the classic sense of something crazy. Lobbying via front organizations happens all the time. I don’t condone it. We should stop this effort. But it ain’t anything special.
I think you might mean that it doesn’t involve blackmail, assassinations, etc?*
Notably, a conspiracy doesn’t require those things - but some do. And they’re pretty bad too.
* that we are currently aware of anyway.
This is your hypothesis, and I agree it's a likely one. But frankly nobody knows because it's all being done with dark money. It could also be US national security contractors looking to maliciously exploit EU data networks, or even private data brokers looking for new revenue opportunities. In every case, these possibilities significantly change the tenor of the debate away from "it's just to protect children."
I'm not familiar with the way that EU governance works, but my impression is that dark-money-based lobbying is less common over there. Which is why there seem to be so few defenses against it. Here in the US such lobbying would be less effective, since our structures are more distributed and lobbying would be countered with corresponding lobbying from civil society organizations and the tech industry -- in some sense (and here I only half-jest) we US folks can be more cynical about this because our corruption is more mature.
These don't exist in Europe for as far as I know, and should not exist anywhere else either. As soon as basic functions like this are outsourced, the state loses its monopoly on violence and a large part of its legitimacy.
"Something crazy" is not the classic sense of a conspiracy. That's the modern corrupt meaning.
> A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement
There. It's a secret plan. But the word has been twisted into meaning crazy.
"A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between people (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder, treason, or corruption, especially with political motivation,[1] while keeping their agreement secret from the public or from other people affected by it."
Gotta play the game.
‘Your winnings sir’
If you went back 10-15 years everyone was talking about how electric cars are being suppressed.
Now similar people are talking about how electric cars part of some vast conspiracy to limit travel.. oddly most of the people posting this kind of stuff don't really travel at all.
Another is UFOs, conspiracy theorists used to mostly say they are real. Now you are as likely to find conspiracy theories that say UFOs are a conspiracy to unify humanity against an outside threat.
It's popular to dismiss conspiracy theorists as reactionaries (re: lazide's comment), but here you have a case where the people who allege a conspiracy occurred were looking forward to something new and were allegedly stymied by a reactionary conspiracy.
The Illuminati deep state WAS suppressing electric cars until their puppet Elon agreed to normalize the extremely connected and remotely controllable car.
This way, the bioweapon defense mode built into the Tesla can be remotely inverted to invite bioweapon agents into the car remotely incapacitating the ones who know too much.
/s, maybe.
It’s rarely going to be something completely unrelated to what is in the news or on people’s minds.
But who is going to arrest those involved and prosecute?
This should be a massive scandal that should lead to closure of security services and creation of new ones from scratch as these people are compromised.
We need integrity and civic duty to protect ourselves from the next totaliterian regimes.
Security apparatus power trips and the erosion of privacy is the wet dream of the Stasi.
I think asking the question what would the Stasi do with this legislation helps warn every day people about the privacy risks.
On the other hand it's clear that many large US and European corporations has a huge amount of influence in specific legislation being passed. Forbidding certain types of goods (like e.g. incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws and much, much more) and forcing the use of certain alternatives. This type of random acts of lobby legislation is seen a lot less often in national legislation around the world.
Seriously? Have you bothered to loom around the world, in which countries are large multinationals seeing pushbacks and competition?
Where does google have less than 50% market share? China, Russia. And In russia they had stiff competition from way back, like 2005 days, with Yandex and others.
Where does pharma industry get held to account? India.
Where does big tech get fined for privacy violations? EU.
Boeing has crushed all competitors, in large part through law suits and shady dealing, except Airbus which is unconditionally backed by EU.
Small nations can't seem to hold corporations to account even for blatant crimes.
When UK parliament required Zukerberg to testify, he didnt even bother showing up.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/27/facebook-...
> It's way harder for an alliance of US tech companies to influence small countries than a big block
Overall it leaves a much larger attack surface to lobbying of this kind.
But much more valuable.
Probably easier as well.
I can write to my national member of parliament, but not to the EU MP, since they’re too far from citizen to care, and too close to corporations to reject a lobby’s proposal.
We’ve cornered Europe into a honey trap that will make us as badly governed as the US in a very short time. I’m constantly wondering where I should flee to.
I mean the infamous quote by Jean Claude Juncker says it all: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”
The EU very well knows that if most of their policies were up for vote, including each and every job of theirs, they would be out of office within a year.
The USA and the EU have comparable size. Is Washington DC too far away for the USA to work?
> too diverse
The USA is widely regarded as a cultural melting point, and it's ability to attract immigrants from all corners of the world part of the reason for its economic success. I would argue that the EU is less diverse than the USA.
> too big to be trusted
Brussels bureaucracy is in fact relatively small when compared to the national bureaucracies of western countries. This claim was repeatedly made during the Brexit referendum campaign. Interestingly enough, the UK's civil service is aprox 10x the size of Brussels (350k vs. 40k, resp.)
These are claims that are repeated ad nauseam by people who have antipathy towards the EU, but they have very little substance indeed.
It was supposed to be a community to facilitate trade between countries. Instead they want to make it a new country with its own flag, its own parliament, it's own army, it's own laws that supersede the laws of the member states.
The British knew it and that is why they left. This was not supposed to be the plan.
However nowadays criticizing the EU is like asking 2020 where COVID came from, you shouldn't talk about it because otherwise you may be labelled as a conspiracy theorist or even worse a populist.
I assume the next step is you explaining how and in what respects the EU is like the USSR. Because for now it’s not really convincing. For example, how the current decision process could lead to something like the Holodomor. In which way is the European Parliament like the supreme Soviet. How the political systems works to reinforce the power of the biggest member over its satellites. How the EU could do something like the invasion of Afghanistan. How it could bleed itself dry with a pointless arms race. You know, the sort of reasons why the USSR actually collapsed.
> It was supposed to be a community to facilitate trade between countries.
Sigh. It never was. From the beginning it was a union to prevent war between members. You can read on the Schuman declaration (1950) or the treaties of Paris (1951) and Rome (1957), for a start.
> Instead they want to make it a new country with its own flag
It’s not a new country, and it’s not a country at all.
> its own parliament
The common assembly, which became the European Parliament was created with the treaty of Paris in 1951, it cannot have come as a surprise to any member who joined afterwards.
> it's own army
It does not have an army.
> it's own laws that supersede the laws of the member states.
Again, this has been the case since the very beginning, when it was an alliance of 6 countries. How is this any new? Where is the deception?
> The British knew it and that is why they left. This was not supposed to be the plan.
The British left over internal politics and the dysfunction of their main political parties. One side did use the arguments you mentioned. It was bullshit then, and it is stil bullshit now.
> However nowadays criticizing the EU is like asking 2020 where COVID came from, you shouldn't talk about it because otherwise you may be labelled as a conspiracy theorist or even worse a populist.
You can. We’re living in democracies and we can criticise anything we want. The kind of blatant dishonesty and bad faith in your arguments is why you get those labels.
Mainstream political parties criticise the EU all the time, both from left- and right-wing perspectives. If you’re from the UK, I am sorry but your problems come from your own government.
As any dictatorship, corporate dictatorships want to understand our behaviour and manipulate it. And as any dictatorship there is a not insignificant portion of society that supports and facilitates it - see people that bootlick apple, amazon, microsoft, google and so on. When will people understand that fighting back is crucial? And it doesnt have to be violent. Low rate their services, report them whenever possible to local customer protection agencies (where you even have them), avoid using their products, advice others not to use them, spread knowledge about their doings and starve them of your skills.
Time to take capitalism back. Refuse and resist corporate communism.
This is capitalism, or what it inevitably devolves into. No need to bring communism into it.
Capitalism means small and medium sized businesses.
Furthermore these corporations want us to live in massive communes controlled by them where they dictate how we dress eat think and live. This is communism disguised as capitalism.
But this is capitalism.
Oxymoron.
It's just the sad reality of real life capitalism.
(In properly-functioning capitalism, the means of production are split between many independent, competing corporations, and the state uses its monopoly on violence to preserve that competition.)
Cartels and anticompetitive agreements are part and parcel of a devolved capitalism where the government provides no rules (or provides rules but no enforcement) to restrain capital.
Obviously, the gang that has seized all the means of production claims that in fact those means of production now belong to the entire population, but nevertheless the members of the gang are the only ones who manage all those means of production, supposedly because they are the most competent of all people and not because they are the servants or relatives of those who have seized the power by force, with foreign support.
So, by that definition, all publicly traded corporations are communist :) I mean, significant part of their shares is traded on stock exchanges and owned by anonymous members of proletariat :)
EDIT: Also, think about all those Silicon Valley companies that pay their employees in stock options. Marx would be proud :)
It is always a shame when governments get corrupted, but the European view is usually not "welp, the experiment failed, let's get rid of the government completely", but rather "we need to make the government stronger, to have it resist interference harder".
US constitution has "We the people", but Americans don't really see their government as "We", but rather as some incompetent entity they're forced to live under.
Europeans more strongly see governments as their representation. The government is seen as people banding together, through their representatives. Governments exist to resist undesirable forces, like exploitation of people by commercial entities.
This is also the reason why Europeans like regulations, a thing unfathomable in the US. It's not "oh no, those dumb politicians stifle our precious job-creating businesses", but rather "we're the labor force, we're the consumers, and the businesses depend on us, so we won't let them fuck with us". So US firms fucking with us is a terrible thing, but the reaction will probably be to make more regulations to resist US tech even harder.
I think you misunderstand. I'm an American, so I should probably clarify a typical American perspective. Caveat: you probably can't find any statement all Americans agree on :-) ).
The US Constitution does begin with the phrase "We the people", but I think you misunderstand its context. It never says the US government and its people are the same. I can quote that sentence from memory. The text follows with the goals for creating a federal government (e.g., "establish justice" and "provide for the common defense"). It ends by saying that We the People "... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America". In other words, it's clearly stated that the government is not the people. The US federal government is instead an organization established by the people under rules defined by the Constitution.
So Americans would generally agree that the US government is NOT the people. The US government is instead an organization set up by the people, in order to accomplish certain goals. If we don't like how its current leadership runs things, the intent is that We the People can change the leadership via an election (as established by the Constitution).
> but rather as some incompetent entity they're forced to live under.
You'll find lots of claims about incompetence, especially at political rallies where someone is trying to convince everyone to vote for them. But while many people want someone or other voted in, and there are always proposals for changes, few call for the elimination of the US government. They just want "their side" voted in.
> Europeans more strongly see governments as their representation. The government is seen as people banding together, through their representatives. Governments exist to resist undesirable forces, like exploitation of people by commercial entities.
Americans also view their government as necessary to resist undesirable forces. Per that sentence, the government exists to "provide for the common defense" and "promote the general welfare".
However, the American view is that governments can also be the source of tyranny. This is not a crazy view; see the various dictatorships around the world. Governments can be powerful entities. Therefore, there needs to be a way to ensure that they are (1) representative and (2) constrained so they don't become tyrannical.
> This is also the reason why Europeans like regulations, a thing unfathomable in the US.
The US has lots of regulations, so it's not that the US doesn't have any. However, Americans are generally more skeptical of regulation than Europeans. All regulations have unintended consequences; if the regulation is not carefully crafted, the regulation can be worse than the problem.
For example: I would instinctively ignore the goal of any proposed law or regulation. I don't really care what its goal is. That is mostly irrelevant. What is the actual impact of the law or regulation? If it does something good, but overall makes things worse, then it should be rejected even if it has a good goal.
> In 2008, the eurozone and the US had equivalent gross domestic products (GDP) at current prices of $14.2 trillion and $14.8 trillion respectively (€13.1 trillion and €13.6 trillion). Fifteen years on, the eurozone's GDP is just over $15 trillion, while US GDP has soared to $26.9 trillion.
Seems like they are not protecting their citizens interests nearly so well as they believe they are.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp...
I think part of the problem is that the EU can't work in the same way the US federal government does or ever did. Culturally the countries are too dissimilar. There are many friction points that make a closer union very difficult to swing without trying to pull a fast one over the population (like they did with the vote over the EU constitution).
One friction point is the "liking of regulations" you mention. Some European countries seem to like that but others don't. People absolutely laugh at the ridiculous German bureaucracy, how dated the way is that the French run things (cheques!!!) or how naive the Swedes are. And they usually do not want that in their own country.
You mean when Brexit compaign was financed by dark money, broke electoral law, they were fined wopping £50,000, the parliament has asked Zukerberg to testify and he simply refused to come to uk?
Or how the failure of brexit is good pro-eu propaganda?
There are things where you can't trust "the EU" (whatever this is supposed to be, the Parliament? The Commission? The countries?) and there are things where you can and absolutely should.
Generalizations are propaganda, and this is what you do here.
There is a picture titled "The Action Day promoted by Brave Movement in front of the EP". You know how one can immediately tell whether a demonstration is a genuine effort that comes from people, or is organized by some shady institution? Look at the signs they have. Genuine demonstrations have home-made signs on pieces of carton, all looking different. Astroturfing operations have signs that all look the same and are professionally printed.
Also, when somebody says "think of the children", I think of billionaires, it's usually closer to the intended meaning. :-)
But all of them looking the same, on high-quality paper with glossy finish, yeah, that implies somebody is organizing it.
this is no longer true. protests in europe have pre printed signs which are distributed by the organisers to protesters before the march starts.
It seems strange to me to require small demonstrations to pretend to not be organised. I think better heuristics should be found.
Source:I've participated to 12 demonstration this year (I missed two :/).
The EU commissioners are the biggest fault with the EU and it's disheartening how no one addresses that. Even after Brexit, when every EU politician asked how they can make the EU more attractive - they mentioned everything, but a reform that makes it more democratic was out of question.
It's time to let the EU know that we need change, because times are tough. The problem is: there is no mechanism for the people of the EU to petition the commission. Only lobbying groups
This worked fine while socialist parties held majorities in the EP; that's not the case anymore, and it shows: the Commission-Council axis has been excessively strengthened by conservative parties.
> but a reform that makes it more democratic was out of question.
Because the existence of commissioners, and their strange position in the EU is both very deliberate, and incredibly important to the continued existence of the EU.
The EU isn’t a federal government, it’s a super state entity that exists in an uneasy balance with governments of each member state. The consequence is that “more democracy” doesn’t help the EU, or make it more attractive (at least not to national governments, and they’re the ones that sign treaties).
Balancing the powers of the individual EU states, with their elected governments and different democratic processes, with the powers of the EU as a super state entity is hard. No national government wants to hand off their own sovereign power to an external entity they have little direct influence over, so the EU commissioners exist. Their explicit purpose is to allow national governments to place a heavy thumb on the democratic scales in Brussels, to provide assurances to those national governments that their own state can’t be dictated to by other states within the EU who may hold different cultural values.
The result of all this mess isn’t perfect, and is hard to understand as a random citizen. But simply getting rid of commissioners, and introducing “more democracy” which implicitly reduces the power of national governments, doesn’t provide a practical solution for the EU. The real solutions will be convoluted, nuanced, and slow to develop, that’s just the consequence of trying to get 27 very independent nation states to get along.
You might be thinking about the council and not the commission? While commissioners are appointed by national governments they "control" a fairly narrow area, e.g. if you get to appoint the commissioner for fisheries and agriculture he won't be able to influence healthcare policy that much.
For some reason, I feel like my sonars are detecting too much of submarines lately. Lots ot messaging on hypothetical dangers without much to show.
To my knowledge, Apple, Google, Facebook and others absolutely do not want breaking encryption to happen and lobby strongly against it, so who is "tech" really referring to here?
They could easily include secret instructions in the model to mark as malicious content that isn't or use it to build profiles (but respecting your privacy of course). Sky is the limit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130420162917/http://www.wearet...
Rules for thee not for me.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
This is too on-the-nose. Incredible.
> Star of That ‘70s Show and a host of Hollywood hits, 45-year-old Kutcher resigned as chairman of the Thorn board in mid-September amid uproar over a letter he wrote to a judge in support of convicted rapist and fellow That ‘70s Show actor Danny Masterson, prior to his sentencing.
Here is their About page, but of course that is their self-published statement:
What if they become big enough (and own multiple companies in many industries) to lobby hard for draconian laws forcing seemingly innocuous competitors to buy their services or who knows get fined/arrested because arent "thinking of the children".
I'm all for fighting csam, but do it right and proper in a liberal democracy, not with authoritarian means.