Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem.
Defeating one bad law isn't enough.
Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem.
Defeating one bad law isn't enough.
These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
> there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
Seconding "dismiss with prejudice", it's a concept in US legal proceedings to keep a prosecutor from continuing to pursue a case and it would make a lot of sense in the context of the EU. It seems like it's a common problem given the organizational structure, it seems like a very key missing mechanism.
People need to do a better job of voting out people who push such laws.
That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
Election cycles are unfortunately too long for that to work. Would need to reduce office terms to 2-3 months for "vote them out" to be viable.
Then again, some governing actually does need to get done. That’s not much time to do anything that requires patient coordination and thorough consideration—especially anything of any complexity—even when people broadly agree that it needs to happen.
It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.
It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
Good luck convincing people not to vote for anti-immigration measures and other populist ideas instead.
You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists.
Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
[dead]
People get all of their information about what's going on in the world from people who are pushing these laws. People who contradict this information are suppressed or actually prosecuted by people who are pushing these laws. That is what these laws are intended to support. There are too many people talking to too many other people.
You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.
If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.
I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.
If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.
Well the italian constitution says that freedom and secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are not to be violated.
Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.
like the Amercan Bil of Rights?
There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't.
Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
Text, phone calls and emails which are not encrypted are the equivalent of a postcard. They don't need to seize the effects, only observe them.
Encrypting, end to end, would be the equivalent of posting a letter. The contents are concealed and thus are protected.
Time to wiretap all of Congress and then have a bot post it all to mastodon...
Except, wiretapping was considered very illegal in the USA.
> all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law.
And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.
I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the law to distinguish between official acts taken in an honest attempt to benefit the nation, and those taken to corruptly and brazenly benefit oneself.
That'd be a massive break from tradition in the US. AFAIK the only formal mechanism they have to separate the official from the person behind the role is impeachment by Congress. Apart from that there isn't really a mechanism to handle brazen corruption.
And US presidents have a long history of corruptly and brazenly benefiting themselves. Sometimes you see those before-and-after charts showing how much money they make while in office in excess of the official salary. The typical modern US president makes at least 10 of million in office and it isn't from the salary. Nobody likes it, but there is an open question of what exactly can be done about it.
I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.
> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy
Which apply equally to the government?
Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them.
Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.
It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention
That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.
Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.
Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists.
I suppose you could be politically nihilistic enough to think there's no reason for this law to exist, or that it's primarily some authoritarian suppression agenda, but I find that preposterous. Bruxelles is a lot of things, but authoritarian is not one of them. Child sexual exploitation is a problem, and it does demand a solution. If you don't like this one, find a better one.
I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.
In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.
I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!
i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
And I find it exceedingly annoying how all this heated discussion about the dangers of chat control is held oh so far from the actual text of the proposals.
For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.
Which lobbying group?
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.
Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.
Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
But ProtectEU stuff is about organised crime, terrorism, cybersecurity, and countering Russian sabotage operations, not sure why you brought up CSAM.
Who do you think is doing the CSAM? It's the criminal organizations and the terrorists and the Russian hackers, obviously.
Nobody really cares what the excuse du jour is because everybody knows that's what it is. Authoritarians want to build a censorship apparatus to use against the public, but if they say "we want to spy on our political opponents and censor people who disagree with us" then nobody would support it, so instead they say "we have to get the pedos and Putin" even though that's 0.5% of what a system like this would actually be used for if implemented.
Don't forget the elite like Epstein et al.
That seems like a criminal organization.
(Can't reply directly): I know he was involved in it, I just didn't realize it was on the scale of a network.
Really? When I think criminal organization I think "Mafia."
Your argument is that, among other things, a human trafficking network isn't a criminal organization?
Its like govt banning bleach and when chemical companies protest, the govt tells them to fix problem of people mixing bleach and vinegar. Its a problem, it has to be solved. If you dont like this, find another solution govt says.
It's also a bit like when the government bans opioids because they're an addictive narcotic, but then allows their use in specific circumstances where the benefit outweighs the downsides, and then works with the industry to try and make it harder to abuse them.
It's like a lot of things.
But they aren't working with industry here.
We aren't at that part of the EU legislative process yet. First the commission agrees on a framework, then the working groups work with industry to fill out the details of the framework. That's standard EU process.
Okay? The framework being proposed here is designed to enable universal communications surveillance. No combination of "details" would make that acceptable.
This framing is extremely counterproductive, though.
Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.
(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.
> It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides.
This is that. What you are seeing, repeated attempts to discuss a proposal, is the process by which the EU bureaucracy weighs the downsides. When you see it being pushed, that's evidence that some member states do not find "the correct answer" to be "no further change". That will eventually necessitate a compromise, as all things do.
> (Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious
You are editorializing to a degree that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with you. You HAVE to assume the best in your political adversaries, otherwise you will fail to understand them. They are not abusing anything, and they don't think it's "surveillance overreach". They believe it to be just and fair, otherwise they wouldn't propose it.
The people proposing it believe it to be to their own personal advantage. They don't necessarily believe it to be just and fair.
The commissioners are porposing
> We will build resilience against hybrid threats by enhancing the protection of critical infrastructure, reinforcing cybersecurity, securing transport hubs and ports and combatting online threats.
for their own personal benefit? What? (Quote from the ProtectEU document)
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists.
Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.
The Epstein debacle seems to indicate that child sexual exploitation is a preferred method of entrapping, blackmailing, and controlling world political and science leaders and the wealthy. And implicates the same intelligence agencies calling for mass surveillance.
Intent is unimportant; the law itself is authoritarian. And if you think that there aren't nefarious actors waiting in the wings to take advantage of these kinds of laws, I got a bridge I'd like to sell you
I'm curious, what would you personally consider to be a step too far in the fight against CSAM?
Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer.
I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.
I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.
At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).
The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to.
yea I get a few companies have too much power. That doesn't really change the point except to argue that they too should be more restricted
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Bullshit. We are by far - by FAR - the most surveilled we have ever been in history, including under the worst of the Stasi, yet they lie to us about "going dark". The most minuscule scrap of privacy is a problem to be solved to them.
Yeah, the Irish really should step up their GDPR enforcements.
It's something that can't be fixed, so rather than trying to cure it through bad privacy invading laws we should be looking in how to mitigate the problem through good reporting, accountability laws, and therapy laws.
A few examples of how mitigate the problem
* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.
* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.
* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.
* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).
CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.
The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.
This is a way more sick proposal of authoritarianism than any law that would allow cops to read chat messages with a warrant.
Which part exactly?