Dear citizens of the EU:
If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs.
What are you going to do when the government's interests inevitably drift out of alignment with yours? Start a political movement? You will have the police knocking on your door for criticizing the establishment.
Start a revolution? You have no weapons. You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.
You have neither the pen nor the sword. There is no longer an incentive for the government to serve you, and so it eventually won't.
No amount of protest will recover the freedom you once had. You're heading towards a society where everyone feels oppressed but no one can do anything about it.
>You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.
One of the awful things about this proposed legislation is that what I quoted you saying is not true. Software like PGP is easy to use, and criminals already do. The government has absolutely no possibility of breaking RSA the way things are now, and as such scanning all messages will do nothing other than prove more definitively that criminals are still beyond their gavel. In reality, the only individuals who will get spied on are regular people who don't open their terminal just to send a text; exactly the people who should not be spied on in the first place.
When the government realizes this invasive legislature is ineffective, they will probably crack down even harder. After all, what we are willing to accept from rulers has by the looks of it already increased dramatically. I wonder if it at some point it becomes illegal simply to posses encryption software on your personal devices, perhaps even possession of prime numbers that could theoretically be used in modern encryption. How far will the government go to take this illegal math from you?
> Software like PGP is easy to use
Criminalize encryption. Oh you're using cryptograhy? Well then clearly you are a child molesting, money laundering, drug trafficking terrorist. No need to actually decrypt anything when cryptography is incriminating evidence unto itself.
Computers are subversive. Cryptography alone can defeat police, judges, governments and militaries, and computers have democratized access to cryptography to the point even common citizens have it. They cannot tolerate it.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their silly laws. We make technologies that completely nullify those laws. They need to increase their overall tyranny just to maintain the exact same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable, ungovernable, unpoliceable population, or a totalitarian state that surveils, monitors and controls everything. There is no middle ground.
We are rapidly advancing towards this totalitarianism, and we are eventually going to find out if the people have what it takes to resist and become ungovernable.
One day we will need government signatures to run software on "our" computers. All the free software in the world won't help if we can't run it. The only way to resist that is to somehow develop the means to fabricate our own chips at home. Computer hardware fabrication must be made as easy as 3D printing random objects. Anything short of this and we're done for. Everything the word "hacker" stands for will be destroyed. Our privacy will be destroyed. Our freedom will be destroyed. It's over.
How do you define cryptography? Let's say my files are written in a format that only my software can read. Is it then illegal to distribute said files?
I define it as anything that even slightly inconveniences the so called "authorities".
I've seen local judges give interviews to television networks about high profile cases where they were nearly foaming at the mouth with rage over end-to-end encryption. Cryptography is whatever causes that.
A 75 year old EU judge will let you know.
That is so bleak, but doesn't seem unlikely
Both apple and android are teeing their infra up to support deleting apps they don’t like. Windows is moving towards e2e attestation, and Mac is basically already there. Once that’s all done, you just need to enforce hardware manufacturers boot only into ‘trusted’ operating systems. No more Linux. No more unsigned execution. No more encryption.
This is what I think too. There's a huge push around the world for 3 things right now; verified IDs, trusted or attested signatures for software distribution, and monitoring efforts like the one in the article.
The thing people don't seem to realize about the recent Android announcement that they're going to require digital signing for distribution is that it's not about moderating apps. The objective is to make sure developers are forced to disclose their identity when publishing apps because that allows rich companies and individuals to wield the justice system like a weapon. They won't ban something like ReVanced because all they need to do is make sure the system allows others to take legal action against the developers.
The other thing that people don't realize, like some of the sibling comments here, is that using older hardware and tools can only go so far. Normal people aren't going to do that and people that go out of their way to do it are going to be making themselves a target.
There's already a chilling effect in place. All of my teenage relatives were given a mini lecture to absolutely not post about the Charlie Kirk incident on social media and to avoid talking about it in private chat. I still haven't seen an explanation for how the messages in this incident [1] ended up in the hands of authorities.
But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress".
The only way to "protect the children" is through education, not by forcing them to have a digital paper trail for their whole life.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669
Won’t happen.
There is way too much existing deployed systems depending on alternative open source systems, and a mn incentive to use them to keep using old hardware.
And way too strong a strategic incentive not to depend on US tech alone.
What’s to stop attested open source systems, apart from pesky licence violations that I doubt would stop anyone powerful?
Attestation is simply incompatible with open source.
https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
Plausible, but then people will use old computers and/or fab their own and/or import from adversarial governments and accept the risk of hardware backdoors.
These people aren't rulers, they're public servants that have mistaken themselves for rulers.
If all of your messages can be read in plaintext, your going to have to transfer you keys some other way and it will be very detectable that you are sending encrypted messages which will be next on the chopping block.
It's already this dystopic, like any medium where people can talk freely gets eventually controlled by corrupt politicians etc.
Anyways, the control of speech isn't only in surveillance, it's ingrained deeply in culture, taboos, education, etc.
I have talked to religious people before, they all exhibited a certain characteristic, you could talk about somethings but you can't touch on other things, their mind won't accept it, so they bug and start saying nonsense.
I've noticed the same thing with most people when it comes to certain subjects, you'd be talking to an educated person with a relatively high IQ and a mind that is capable to think critically in certain domains, yet once you point out something their mind has been trained to deem anti cultural (like for example who controls what), they turn into Agent Smith and they stop listening to reason.
Anyways, this is HN so what I'm saying is that the control of the controllers is already absolute, it's been linearly increasing for years, they'd cause something then tighten their control of us for "our safety", until one day we get enough and some take out the guillotines and others the bald eagle etc. been happening for millenia, if we as a species were able to rebel on authority before s*it absolutely hit the fan, history would've been a lot cleaner.
> If this gets pushed through, you will gradually lose control of your government
A little bit off-topic but so called president of the EU is not elected, nor are the figures in so called EU commission :)
EU commission president isn’t directly elected, but neither is the US. President. Voter choose electors who then pick the US president. In EU: voters elect national parties that form groups in the Parliament, which then elects the Commission President.
The two are not comparable. In the US, the presidential candidate is known in advance and people vote mostly for the candidate they want, even if indirectly.
In the EU, no party runs with a candidate for the commission. Those are decided only after the election and are often people that would have lost a party votes if they were known in advance.
So they are both elected indirectly but US president candidates are more well known for a longer time. Got it.
some extra detail: comission president is a two-stage process: The European Council (representatives of the member states, either head of state or head of the government) proposes, the Parliament confirms or vetoes.
That's not true. They are elected but not directly by the population but by the representative of each state.
They are nominated, not elected. This may vary state by state but in our country there is not election process for them.
In many EU countries neither head of state/government are elected then.
In some (most?) EU countries the head of the state or government is not elected directly, but even then is elected in the parliament and without continuous parliament majority support is unable to effectively govern.
This is not the case for the EU institutions, where the EP is the least powerful body by far. While the EP 'elects' the head of the Commission and confirms the members, it does not choose them. It is not possible to be elected head of the Commission without being nominated by the European Council. This is so far removed from a democratic process we can't really call it an election.
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Brexit was an awful thing, BUT it will increase democracy for both parties.
EU needs to be made more democratic or we need to severely limit its power, as its original intent, because the current show is just a farce.
Brexit did not and will not 'increase democracy' in any way anywhere.
It will, in time. You basically cut the hierarchy in half. A citizen can now meet their politician in the supermarket.
The other parts necessary is transparency and democracy but those are on other orthogonal axis.
It won't, you haven't cut any hierarchy, that's not how the EU works (but the UK let themselves get disinformed about that for decades by certain Mr. Johnson and others). A citizen can meet the politician in the supermarket in the same way as before and it does not matter, because the politician lied to him, the citizen believed him and voted for the Brexit and nothing got better. Now the citizen does not believe in democracy in general. Trust is what has been lost.
I can meet my MEP in the supermarket. I can write to him an email and he will reply personally. This is a non-issue.
The "current show" is just because member states don't want to give up responsibilities to the EU, hence why we have the Commission. In a more federal EU the parliament would have more power.
The only good thing to come out of Brexit is setting an undeniable example for what a monumental failure it was. For those who are paying attention, anyway. And that group is not the majority of voters.
We'll still end up with a Reform government lead by Farage in the next election.
There is little hope if the AFD takes Germany. There might not be much of an EU left soon.
Instead of fighting this unmitigated march towards fascism, all the EU is concerned with is chat controls and further limiting the freedoms of its own population.
Ultimately, those with all the money and power will still have all the money and power, fascism or not. It's just that under fascism, they think their power is easier to maintain, so they will short-sightedly choose fascism.
That will lead to war, will lead to a big reset and then we'll repeat the exercise in 2120 when we've all forgotten, again, that concentrating power in the hands of the few has one inevitable outcome, taught by history again and again and again.
What the world will look like by then, who knows. Hotter, more hostile, digitalised to the point of humans and machines becoming nearly indistinguishable? Who knows.
I suppose there's a chance of this also being the precipice of the great filter and then there won't be anyone to quibble over these sorts of things.
Maybe a new civilisation of intelligent beings will pop up from the savagery of nature. But they will also apply 'survival of the fittest' to all strata of their society and here we go again.
All of the presidents are elected. The bodies electing them are always part of a democratic process. Just because it's indirect doesn't make it less democratic. the president of the commission is even covered twice at it gets nominated by the council and the elected by the parliament. The parliament we voted for, the council are the head of states who might also not come from a direct democratic process.
What is this Brexit talking point? The EU president is elected by the EU parliament/comission, whose members are directly elected by the people.
> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. (...) You have neither the pen nor the sword.
We still have Euros. As long as enough companies and rich folk are more on our side than theirs, the government still has some incentive to serve us.
I know, I know - money and politics, wealth and power, they go together at the high end. But there is the oft forgotten long tail, the rich and powerful at the scale of a city, a neighborhood, a niche market. Those tend to side with communities they live in, and in aggregate they still have plenty of pull with the rulers (which in stable times they use to block all kinds of potentially useful legislation, but still, good to have them come the hard times).
Weapons won't matter all that much anyway, for several reasons:
1) Life, especially in the EU, is not like in an American action movie;
2) Citizens here may be significantly less armed, but the same is true of government officials, and even law enforcement is significantly less armed. It kind of evens out, unless military gets involved, but at that point all bets are off - no different than in the US.
3) Firearms have a habit of magically appearing in bulk the moment a revolution starts. When it happens, it's a good indicator you should GTFO somewhere far away, as you're being played by whoever is supplying the weapons to your side.
>1) Life, especially in the EU, is not like in an American action movie;
Only because of the immense wealth, freedom and culture brought by generations of struggle and tenacity. If it isn't defended, it can go away quickly, but the current generation probably won't bear the costs. I doubt that Europeans in the 22nd c. will enjoy such a comfortable life, though.
Russians also had the money until government did not start to take away that from people who had lot of it. When government can confiscate all of the money of a rich person, only those on the side of government will remain rich.
> 2) Citizens here may be significantly less armed, but the same is true of government officials, and even law enforcement is significantly less armed. It kind of evens out, unless military gets involved, but at that point all bets are off - no different than in the US.
I don't think that's a correct comparison. If shit ever did hit the proverbial fan, you can bet that any US military walking around an American city would be constantly worried about getting a lead injection from any Tom, Dick or Harry who's got a firearm.
I don't think the same can be said for the vast majority of European cities (assuming the military gets involved).
> If shit ever did hit the proverbial fan, you can bet that any US military walking around an American city would be constantly worried about getting a lead injection from any Tom, Dick or Harry who's got a firearm.
And then in many scenarios, that Tom, Dick, or Harry gets returned the favor, except with a tank round or worse. If the military remained organized, or at least large factions of it did, it would considerably outclass the general population in both intelligence and firepower / strike capabilities.
Soldiers would be on edge and vulnerable, sure, just like in the conflicts of the past few decades, but overall the military would retain a significant advantage.
> And then in many scenarios, that Tom, Dick, or Harry gets returned the favor, except with a tank round or worse. If the military remained organized, or at least large factions of it did, it would considerably outclass the general population in both intelligence and firepower / strike capabilities.
Tanks are obsolete weapons - esp in urban areas. They would be taken out by cheap drones. And you are forgetting that for every active US soldier there are ~3x retired and opinionated soldiers. Many of them know tactics to take down armor. And how to train civilians.
> Tanks are obsolete weapons - esp in urban areas. They would be taken out by cheap drones. And you are forgetting that for every active US soldier there are ~3x retired and opinionated soldiers. Many of them know tactics to take down armor. And how to train civilians.
Arguing over irrelevant details; all that can be true, and the military can therefore respond not by firing tank shells but by drone strikes, which many of the retired soldiers don't know how to respond to because almost all knowledge of modern drone warfare is in the Russian and Ukranian militaries right now.
In this scenario, if the US civilians were very lucky, the US military have learned nothing from the was Russian and Ukranian forces battle today; likely real scenarios are much messier, internal splits within both military and civilians on Trump/not Trump (different to Dem/Rep) lines, militia with ??? training, criminal gangs taking advantage, reduced international trade (perhaps except for whover supplies drone parts who may prop up both sides at the same time to maximise reveue, perhaps not because that's China and they want factories not rubble piles made out of factories), etc.
To say nothing of equipping a guerilla force in the event of a civil war. (Something nobody sane should fantasise about, by the way.)
Euros? Fiat currency that can be taxed or diluted. Cash is becoming increasingly difficult to use in a lot of countries.
I watched a Dutch cop discharge his gun into a crowd in 2017 or 2018 and face no consequences, so don't give me that nonsense. The State will kill you if it wants to.
I cannot find such an incident.
I was there, and indeed I will never forget it.
https://www.nhnieuws.nl/nieuws/212970/om-waarschuwingsschot-...
Getting past the cookie banner was difficult on mobile (Firefox).
Thank you, that was interesting. And impossible to find for those who don't already know the details.
Betting your freedom on the idea that corporations and the wealthy will side with the little guy instead of the powerful because some of them happen to live in the same city as you is, frankly, insane.
Really? There is a reason why Europeans are jokingly called "Europoors".
Even the upper middle class in Europe is poor as hell with barely any savings.
When have companies and rich folk ever been on ANYONE's side but their own?
Your arguments are terribly naive.
>you will gradually lose control of your government much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs.
As a UK citizen, can you explain your reasoning here? We haven't implemented anything like the chat control proposal and while a few politicians have brought up similar ideas, there is a lot of pushback against it.
Two obvious ones come to mind, the UK age verification system laid the groundwork for internet IDs + ~12,000 people per year being arrested for online speech (a number that's grown exponentially) [1]. There's many other examples.
[1] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/uk-social-media-arr...
The UK doesn't have the exact equivalent of chat control yet, but it already arrests people for politically incorrect posts. They're doing things in smaller steps, which is more likely to succeed.
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You’re just proving his point.
Lazy.
The US believes the right of the individual to harass others based on their immutable characteristics is more important than the right of the individual to be free of harassment based on their immutable characteristics.
The UK doesn't, and that very much reflects UK vs US culture (US culture as we know being racist and divisive).
Meanwhile, the US seems to be flirting with a central idea of communism and fascism - that political criticism of the dear leader is off limits. Thus protecting the right of the (future) authoritarian (dictator) to be free of criticism.
I know which one of two actually reflects an important aspect of freedom of speech.
Rabble rousers will tell you otherwise, but the trick is to recognise they are rabble rousers.
If chat control gets passed it will also be a law, passed by legislation.
The point is that laws can be unjust.
Britain isn't in the EU - so, it won't. I'm responding to a point that was made.
"The point is that laws can be unjust."
That's not exactly profound.
Are you certain the person you just replied to is not in a marginalised group? If that person is, would you be running afoul of that law with "Don't be a moron."?
I'm going to say yes, and no.
Mens rea underpins the British legal system.
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Age verification, while trivial to bypass (for now), has brought you closer to further privacy-invading restrictions. Next, VPNs will be attacked. Then it will be unsigned apps on "untrusted" operating systems.
Anonymity is not privacy.
The mechanisms that attack one attack the other as well. The apparatuses which exist to de-anonymize communication also remove the ability to definitively keep the content of the communication private, and no government (UK or EU or US, etc) that has proposed a ChatControl-like scheme has ever used a method that did not allow them to do both.
If a porn site checks my ID against a gov database, the gov now knows I went to that porn site. That is a loss of both anonymity and privacy.
I'm completely against all infringements of privacy, but,
>If a porn site checks my ID against a gov database, the gov now knows I went to that porn site. That is a loss of both anonymity and privacy.
This is not necessarily true. It is possible to design systems much more like CRL than OCSP, including identity or even just age verification systems. Consider the FedGov sharing a list of public keys tied to identities of people over the age of 18, updated daily, while issuing corresponding private keys to citizens. The citizens could use their private key to sign a challenge issued by the adult media website, who would simply verify that the public key tied to the signed challenge response exists on the list of all public keys tied to identities of people over 18 issued by the fedgov.
With this system, adult websites would not need to send any identifying information to FedGov, nor would private citizens be disclosing any identifying information to the adult website - not their name, not their address, not even their date of birth, just cryptographic proof that they're in possession of a private key that corresponds to the identity of an adult.
Sure, kids could still conceivably obtain cryptographic private keys, just as they can obtain photographs of state-issued government ID that are currently used for age verification.
The real problem with schemes like these isn't the technical feasibility, but rather the capacity of the citizenry to understand and perform their own cryptographic key management.
Anonymity is eroding our democracies far faster than our privacy.
VPN is not only for anonymity
I'm not sure what point you are making, but isn't the one I was responding to.
How many surveillance cameras does your government operate again?
How much do you trust your current government with the extensive surveillance apparatus they have created?
How much do you trust the next government?
What about the government after that?
This is a very naive view of surveillance and government trust.
> you will gradually lose control of your government
Already happened. That this keeps getting put forward is the evidence. Representative democracy, is not a democracy at all.
Sic semper tyrannis.
> Start a revolution? You have no weapons.
LOL. People nowadays don't start revolutions not because of weapons or lack thereof. It's because they're thoroughly entertained and fed; even the entire political circus is a sort of morbid reality show: people tune in to the news to shake their head in disgust at today's latest antics, and will do so tomorrow, because it's all panem et circenses for grown-ups.
The Internet has become the greatest instrument of mass control ever created in the history of the world. It's done. As long people have their Doordash and Netflix, and are too busy working or scrolling instead of thinking deep thoughts, and reading anarchist philosophy, the kings has nothing to fear.
Also, no need to single out the EU. The entire government-as-reality-TV is well and truly an American creation, and your three-letter agencies don't even have to pass any laws to collect information about its citizens. We're all in the same shit, my brother/sister.
You are exactly right. But most people will call you crazy and that you are a tyrant against "democracy" or "rights".
> and reading anarchist philosophy
That's literally how we got here. People got a taste of unmitigated unprecedented freedom online for the last three decades, and found it so gross that they allowed things to swing the other way.
Even one decade ago, the threat of SOPA/PIPA rallied the internet successfully. Just over a decade later, we're at the point of allowing age verification, for morality's sake, without hardly a peep. The cypherpunks are losing, hard, and honestly, deserve failure for how well their utopia turned out.
What exactly did those people taste that it got them upset so much and who exactly those "people" are? Last time I checked these laws are pushed through as covertly and sneaky as possible and no "people" asked for them. I can't recall any demonstrations with protesters asking to violate their privacy to keep them safe for those evil internet trolls that want to have a sexual intercourse with their relatives.
You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab and desire to fully control the plebs as push from the society. This doesn't sound convincing.
> You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab
Half of US states now have age verification for pornography; three will be requiring age verification to even download apps soon. There is indeed a push from society to get the internet under control, even if the EU is not necessarily connected the same way.
This is a huge, unprecedented reversal of opinion over the last decade that has almost completely gone over HN's head. The EFF, TechDirt, HN, Reddit view of the world has been tried, found wanting, and is being rejected. The EFF which once rallied the internet against SOPA/PIPA... currently is yelling into a void. Nobody believes in a free internet anymore.
Public opinion means nothing in an age of mass manipulation and media control. People believe what the news, the government and the powerful tell them to believe. The first step to passing unpopular legislation is making a media campaign so it becomes popular, or simply just do it and distract us with nonsense for a couple of weeks until we forget.
The worst thing one can do nowadays is blame the masses for their ignorance, thus turning us against each other, while the powerful do whatever they want. Divide and conquer.
> Nobody believes in a free internet anymore.
Civil liberties, like elections and liberal principles in general, are unfortunately only popular when the right side (coincidentally one's own) is winning
You keep saying things that are completely unsubstantiated as though they were fact. "Nobody believes..." _all people_ this, _complete failure_ that...
You're either a shill, an ideologue or arguing dishonestly.
All three are bad equally.
Don't worry; HN makes such statements all the time, you can't accuse me of not grasping the format. On that note, not once did I use the words "complete failure" or "all people" despite your quotation in this thread, so please don't argue dishonestly yourself.
I cited a reality: We went from SOPA/PIPA over copyright, to no question about age verification on morality grounds. It shows a trend towards zero interest in free and open internet activism. Such a trend indicates something is severely wrong, and the idea of an open internet has become disconnected from popular belief, internationally, as something to strive for. Prove me wrong.
There's no utopia. The value of unmitigated speech is in replacing unmitigated violence.
The people you mention, whoever they are, are grossed out by human nature.
How we literally "got here" was Section 230. You can easily stifle free speech by holding Facebook and X accountable for every single post ever made on their platforms. But that would capsize the American investment economy, so we have to protect them just a little bit. It creates a perverse, bipartisan incentive to export the most reprehensible opinions that still qualify as legal.
European citizens (and soon, American ones too) are discovering that they never held the cards. When you ask your OEMs, cloud providers and DNS resolver who's side they're really on, it's not yours. You, the customer, hold no guillotine over their head.
> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.
Unlike which country? The US I presume? I see very much a lack of any revolutions in the US, and the most resistance done in the past few decades was done by people with no weapons.
I'd say most revolution-like movements of any kind in the US since the Civil War happened without weapons.
Even further, those who have traditionally been most vocal about second amendment rights are currently the biggest cheerleaders for the current authoritarian trend. Quite the plot twist.
> you will gradually lose control of your government
That happened the moment European countries surrendered their sovereignty to EU.
Which of course never happened, as each member country retains full sovereignty in every possible way you can think of, which is actually fully enshrined in the way EU works.
> Which of course never happened, as each member country retains full sovereignty in every possible way you can think of, which is actually fully enshrined in the way EU works.
Which of course is false.
> The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law
And if you read literally one paragraph from the bit that you quoted:
"The majority of national courts have generally recognized and accepted this principle, except for the part where European law outranks a member state's constitution. As a result, national constitutional courts have also reserved the right to review the conformity of EU law with national constitutional law"
And guess why and how they are able to do that - that's right, by retaining full sovereignty of their own justice systems. Even obeying rulings of the ECHR is purely a matter of courtesy more than anything, as neither EU nor ECHR have any enforcement mechanism beyond withholding funding, as many EU member states have proven time and time and time again.
I'm looking forward to seeing this in practice when Chat Control passes.
In what way? Most EU countries are for it, so of course they are going to implement it. Nothing to do with sovereignty.
except for some countries, the right to privacy is also written in the constitution, which would require changing said constitution, which is probably a lot harder than just implementing a law.
I can't say what it takes in every country, but in Denmark the procedure is as follows :
- The proposed change must pass a vote in parliament.
- There must then be an election to parliament.
- The new parliament must also vote in favor of the proposed change.
- Finally a popular vote must pass with at least 40% of all eligble voters voting for it. If less than 40% of eligble voters vote (regardless of where they cast their vote), the proposition fails.
It probably goes without saying that changing the Danish constitution is not a task taken lightly. The Danish constitution also explicitly forbids giving up soverenity.
Sounds like Danes have nothing to worry about then.
From my perspective it's just a way for activist lawyers and judges to force their agenda on their government. That also gives ineffective politicians a convenient excuse to why they can't do anything.
My impression is that the UK in particular has that problem. Other european countries take the more pragmatic and sane option of... simply ignoring the EU.
Except for regulations on commerce, control of their currency and a removal of democratic elections for leaders right?
>>regulations on commerce
Which ones exactly, and please be specific.
>>control of their currency
I mean, no one was forced to take the euro? The countries that did it agreed to it at their own state level first. And there are many countries that have agreed to it initially and then changed their minds and didn't do it. Yeah sounds like loss of sovereignty to me.
>>a removal of democratic elections for leaders
I'm sorry I think I must have been sleeping in the last 30 years - when did that happen, exactly?
To which citizens are you talking to exactly? There are a few very rich citizens that always had control of the government and clrealy want this bill to pass.
On the other hand there is a majority of other citizens which don't have the economic means, who are the victims of this bill, they never haf control of the government and don't want this bill to pass.
Classless "citizens" don't exist. This is capitalism working as usual. Oh, and get in touch with reality please, there is no country where "citizens" don't have guns, it's just not all the citizens.
Dear citizens of the US:
Please stop funding, allying with and protecting the manufacturers of surveillance tools. Stop exporting Palantir products and importing privacy-destroying devices from businesses like Greyshift and Cellebrite. Insist that the US government stop shielding hackers-for-hire like NSO Group who indiscriminately lease their products for discriminatory and illegal purposes. Stop defending "OEM" control that we have all known is a stand-in for federal steering since the Snowden leaks. Stop marketing E2EE while backdooring server and client hardware for "emergency" purposes.
Do that, and you'll never be accused of hypocrisy again. Signed, a US citizen.
Collective guilt projection is incredibly unfair. What is the average US citizen expected to do in this?
I hereby promise not to buy any weapons systems from Palantir or use Cellebrite if I forget my phone's PIN code. Am I one of the good ones now?
A bunch of people pursuing or considering careers at those companies are hanging out here. Changing their minds should count for something.
My point is to highlight the hypocrisy in HN casting stones from a glass house. I don't really believe you're beholden to fixing it (as I said, I'm a US citizen too). We just have to accept that the United States started this and is the only nation on Earth that can stop it. American surveillance technology is the role-model for abusive regimes and perfectly sensible governments around the world.
> Start a revolution? You have no weapons.
Always this cope from Americans. A broad revolutionary movement will have sympathisers in the military and police. They can raid the governments armouries. The IRA became infamous for arms raids.
"much like how the people of the UK already lost control of theirs"
What are you on about, mate?
Get your Bacofoil for this thread.
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