Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
> A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy
People think that, but once you tell them they will lose their drivers license since they chatted to their spouse about bad eyesight they bark differently. Or shrug it off with "that will never happen to me" and you can start the "and then they came for the [next group], but I did nothing" line of talk.
Everyone has something to hide, they might just not know yet what it is but they will when the option to hide it has gone away. There is a reason my country stopped recording religion since 1946 in the citizen records, it was fine to do so decades before.
Censorship and killing people who were too "out of line" were staples of human civilization ever since we started figuring out governance. What's unique about China is that it was a pioneer in capturing this new technology and using it to their state's advantage. Never before in human history could you monitor all the things people said to one another, all the money that got exchanged, all data that's uploaded and downloaded, and have automation that ensures that everyone's information is looked at. The internet had become a tool of centralized control, China just was successful at realizing it first.
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.
I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.
I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?
The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
> I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
Were you and I reading the same thing? The post I was replying to was a pithy one sentence sentiment, which was a reply to another pithy one-sentence sentiment.
If anything, I wanted to elevate the conversation thread beyond that, and based on the size of the replies I got, I succeeded.
I was saying their domestic mass surveillance is not directly tied to them becoming a preeminent world power. That their rise could've just as well happened without it.
No, people don't like this.
Most ordinary people don't but they still vote for authoritarian politicians who like it.
Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
> A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy
People think that, but once you tell them they will lose their drivers license since they chatted to their spouse about bad eyesight they bark differently. Or shrug it off with "that will never happen to me" and you can start the "and then they came for the [next group], but I did nothing" line of talk.
Everyone has something to hide, they might just not know yet what it is but they will when the option to hide it has gone away. There is a reason my country stopped recording religion since 1946 in the citizen records, it was fine to do so decades before.
People don't but those with power (i.e. the people who matter) do.
Chinese ppl don't like this either.
It's teleco vendors, ISPs and govn't agencies are advocating this.
lmao, like every other major power has been a bastion of free speech until China came up. McCarthyism, what? Politkovskaya, who?
Censorship and killing people who were too "out of line" were staples of human civilization ever since we started figuring out governance. What's unique about China is that it was a pioneer in capturing this new technology and using it to their state's advantage. Never before in human history could you monitor all the things people said to one another, all the money that got exchanged, all data that's uploaded and downloaded, and have automation that ensures that everyone's information is looked at. The internet had become a tool of centralized control, China just was successful at realizing it first.
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.
I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.
I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?
The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
> I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
Were you and I reading the same thing? The post I was replying to was a pithy one sentence sentiment, which was a reply to another pithy one-sentence sentiment.
If anything, I wanted to elevate the conversation thread beyond that, and based on the size of the replies I got, I succeeded.
I was saying their domestic mass surveillance is not directly tied to them becoming a preeminent world power. That their rise could've just as well happened without it.
You and I are in complete agreement on that front.
> pulled millions out of poverty
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine