Yesterday and early this morning there has luckily been a massive push from Belgian media. The proposal this time around came from the Belgian presidency, so it was up to them to withdraw the vote.
It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote was withdrawn, but it's probable that the situation became untenable for the political parties involved, one of which lost massively in the Belgian elections about two weeks ago.
In an short interview in De Tijd [1] with one of the Belgian MEPs pushing this (Hilde Vautmans, OpenVLD, liberal, lost big), and another short line in De Morgen [2] from outgoing Belgian Minister of the Interior who was part of the talks for this new version (Annelies Verlinden, CD&V, Christian democrats), both of them made it appear like they mostly just care about getting it done (because nobody else has succeeded yet). There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
This morning, after the press attention, high rank party officials across the spectrum (and from the parties mentioned above) publicly called the proposal dangerous, so it's likely the pressure worked this time.
Next time this can come up for the vote will likely be from Hungary. They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering the current political climate there I would assume they are more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less likely to succeed. Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
As mentioned, the shittiest part of the EU is that we don't ever get any insight. I wish we could launch some civil legal probe into EU institutions themselves, but that would probably end up being like staring at floating points of a tensor.
We don't get a lot of insight, but we do get some. For example, when it does come up for a vote in the Council, we'll know which countries voted in favour (something you can take into account in your next national elections).
Then the Parliament will have to agree as well, and we can see which parties there voted in favour, which you can take into account in the next European elections.
The Commission is toughest to hold accountable. The Commissioner pushing it (Ylva Johansson in this case) was nominated by a country's (Sweden, in this case) government, so Swedish voters could hold the parties in that government accountable in their next national election, I suppose, but that's a very weak signal.
We don't need this type of insight to act. For all its fualts, the EU does tend to have ample time between the time a law is drafted and made public, and the time it is voted on. And it's relatively clear who you need to try to influence in this period: your local government and/or president for EU Council proposals, your country's EU commissioner, and the government that proposed them for EU Commission proposals, and your MEPs for votes in Parliament, which is anyway the last line of defense.
Why and how exactly this proposed law came to exist in its current form is much harder to figure out, but that's not necessary to fully understand in order to oppose it successfully.
That is something you could say about almost any legislation, and it's correct to some extent. That said, politicians do seem to try and predict what they'll be held accountable for, and pre-empt that. So it's not so much the voting afterwards that potentially influences the behaviour, but the threat of doing so. I also assume that this is why contacting your representatives is important - that is, essentially, making the threat.
I'll give you that it's not a terribly strong signal.
I mean, that's how representative democracy works. You elect someone, see if they are a complete prick on a hundred different issues, and then at some point they might come up for re-election.
Another way that representative democracy works is that for many issues, you get a lot of heads-up on what will be discussed, and can influence your representative accordingly.
This generally requires coordinating your resources and efforts with other people. Lobby, protest, rabble-rouse, bribe.
I wonder why NGO advice does not correlate with decision directions at all. Remember the CCC talks by NGO lobbists, usually culminating for everything they do in a"anyway that was what we advised, they however would vote/do/the thing we advised against". Had a huge speakerscorner going nowhere vibe and europes youth kicked that play pretend democracy in the nuts last election.
I've been donating forever to Signal, and at this point, I'm resigned that it won't reach WhatsApp parity. Just hire some lobbyists to keep encrypted communications legal as a human right.
That wouldn’t help.
The proposal “got around” weakening encryption without outright removing it.
They “just” wanted anything you sent to be scanned before it was sent encrypted.
Stupid and dangerous, the even have sections in the proposal that talk about encryption being important, but somehow less important than thinking about the children and putting a cop looking over the shoulder of every single citizen.
National elections are dominated by the same parties that dominate European Parliamentary elections. It's the same voting system after all, except you have even less choice since there are fewer spots.
>and that vote actually, if I recall correctly, was to prevent Chat Control (i.e. the harmful provisions).
Your MEPs are likely part of a parliamentary group with foreign politicians and coordinate with them on policy.
If your commissioner and MEPs have been solidly opposed to a policy there might not be much you can do. But do you know that that’s a case? Many governments tend to blame unpopular proposals on the EU while the commissioner that they themselves chose vote in favour.
Ylva Johansson was proposed by the previous Swedish government though (a Social Democratic one), which (sort of) lost the last election. No idea why the current (right wing) government is keeping her in place.
In practise, that means she's supported by all except one of the relevant Swedish parties.
Commissioners are typically not replaced when a national government changes, which is a good thing from a stability perspective (countries can often have two or three different executives in a single year). In the end, a Commissioner is proposed by a country but is then meant to work in the interest of the entire Union, in what is largely an administrative role (Council and Parliament are the real political entities). They are supposed to be uncontroversial people, respected across the entire political spectrum, and typically will stay in post for the duration of their mandate unless embroiled in scandals.
The Commission is far more powerful than the Council and Parliament, since it is the only body that can actually propose legislation to be voted on by the other two. If the commission doesn't want something done, that thing doesn't get done - including changing older laws.
No, I disagree. The Commission cannot pass anything on its own, the agenda is set by the Council and directives are effectively drafted by Parliament bodies (since MEPs have the ultimate say). The Commission largely routes things back and forth between other bodies but has very little power in practice, and is technically required to be fundamentally apolitical.
Until a few years ago, nominations for Commissioner jobs were mostly handed to long-serving but lower-level politicians. This has changed a bit in recent times, but not fundamentally so. One of the critiques of the current constitutional setup is precisely that the executive, in practice, can execute very little without constantly going back to the Council.
The commissioner before her was Cecilia Malmström 2010-2019, a liberal party politician (right bloc) whose second term was wholly during a social democratic (left bloc) government because the nomination happened before the election.
Unfortunately, both Sweden’s most recent commissioners have been prominently advocating against encryption and for mass surveillance. I really hope our new commissioner for the 2024-2029 period ends up with a better track record on privacy advocacy.
Unless it's from the Greens/EFA or The Left there's little hope. And considering that the EPP and S&D still hold the majority of seats in the EP, less so.
When voting about the law in the swedish parlament, both the left and green parties voted for chat control despite having campaigned against the law in the EU election.
Both claim it was a misstake, but ironically leaked chat messages seems to indicate that the green party MP Rasmus Ling did vote for it intentionally.
I think this is what happens when you get an appointed council making decisions rather than a democratically elected one. It's a bad idea because it lets the appointees and appointers to point fingers and dilute blame, which is another weapon the 1% can use to get policies in their best interest (often the opposite of those for the 99%) passed.
>> which is another weapon the 1% can use to get policies in their best interest
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%. Rich or poor, we all use the same communication infrastructure. Rich people don't want their chats monitored either. People don't want this. Intelligence agencies want this. But ask the people working at those agencies, ask them as individuals, and they won't want this on their phones either.
Mass surveillance is one of the few areas where the 1% generally align with the other 99%
Ideally, yes. In practice, the 1% have resources the 99% don't which allow them to minimize their exposure to mass surveillance. Whether this means carving out exemptions for their own communications or conducting their meetings in person, in private, in other jurisdictions.
Yes, your family doctor is also likely part of the 1%. Unfortunately, the term 1% has shifted to basically mean "the people with most of the wealth and power in a country" which is a much smaller group of people, perhaps even less than 0.01%.
Quibbling over the mathematical inaccuracy of the term is tilting at windmills. You'd have better luck getting people to stop using the word "literally" to mean its opposite.
The top 1% are pretty close to having most of the wealth in the US. They have about a third of it. Then 90-99 have about a third, 50-90 have about a third, and 0-50 have a rounding error.
The top 0.1% have about 15-20% of the wealth, which is very concentrated but not a very big fraction of the entire pie. Meaningful cutoffs are tricky to assign.
I don't know how to measure power. You could probably assign a lot of power to the top 0.01%, but in the US they have a single digit percentage of wealth.
A better metric is "people who have N times the median wealth", since that accurately captures the power disparity that stems from access to more resources. The exact percentage will vary significantly depending on how unequal distribution of wealth is in any given society.
That wouldn't help anyway because most important things happen between national governments and the people they nominate. The EU institutions would work very differently if they were directly formed and managed by the European parliament. Alas the national governments know very well why they won't ever allow that.
This is trying to be a democratic process. There is no single "hero" to worship, but a number of things to consider.
The German Bundesregierung signalled a few days ago they would vote against Chatcontrol (IIRC, it is part of the Ampel coalitions founding contract to vote against surveillance enhancing measures on the EU level.) Nancy Faeser, Social Democrats, Germany's interior minister and usually not against surveillance, and Marco Buschmann, Liberal Democrats, Germany's justice minister, released statements that Chatcontrol is irreconcilable with liberal democratic states of law. The Greens were opposed anyhow and said so the last few weeks. So, unity of sorts.
France had said from the start they would vote against it (but apparently backtracking after the EU election) and with the two biggest countries in the EU against it now, the law had little chance to pass the informal council vote.
Add on top that around 30 MEPs from the Greens, Liberals and Social Democrats already wrote a letter stating that their fractions are opposed, thus ratification would have been unlikely. Add on top strong efforts by economic lobby groups, I guess the Belgian president of the council saw no reason to put the vote forward anymore.
Of course, all this could be wrong. I'm just puzzling things together I read over the last few days and weeks.
Yeah I think you're right, but it's a shame that we have to piece the puzzle together ourselves, and still don't have complete certainty. It's certainly a process where more transparency is possible, as a general point.
They did a soft reset, with Ncuti's new season being marked as the Season 1 of the 2023 version. It's still going strong, with this season being very strong, IMO.
This has been the strategy of every political party to hold office in the UK for as long as I've been alive.
There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different wording.
Indeed, this is the standard playbook worldwide for people in power, especially:
1. Politicians in power that want to do something that is unpopular.
2. Corporations that want to implement an unpopular policy.
The evil genius part of it is that it not only allows them to test the temperature of the water, but also to:
1. Claim they are hearing the people and withdrew it, and even claim it as a victory.
2. Shift the Overton window so next time it comes up, people are desensitized.
3. Try again basically forever until they're able to get it passed.
4. Time it better around elections to avoid consequences. Voters have the memory of a goldfish, and are so party/identity-driven that it isn't hard to manipulate them.
It's the standard playbook for anyone who wants to be successful. Persistence is frequently cited as a crucial factor in success, and frequently celebrated in the back stories of stars in business, tech, sports, media, the arts, etc.
Persistence is so important because other people you're competing against are also persistent.
This is not specific to "people in power" and there is no special legislative trick to defeat it. If you care about something, you have to stand up for it, persistently.
They mean any party that's had majority control of parliament, they don't mean it's been used as a strategy to get there but rather once they're ruling it's been introduced
It's not what the comment meant, but worth adding that the UK security forces have wanted this ever since they lost the ability to read everyone's mail and listen to our calls. They actively lobby every sitting government for this kind of bill, and (I have no doubt) promise all kinds of support for politicians who push their agenda.
It's similar in concept to 'in power'. The government holds office, rather than it being in power. It's more to say that the power isn't derived from the government itself, but the office they are elected into.
Every government to hold office = every previous party that was elected and formed a government
I thought about letting people take the issue to court and making politicians face actual consequences if a judge decides that politicians brought up the same law over and over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed laws.
In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into action, would be voted out.
And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And would not be elected in the first place when they operate on bad faith.
Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and probably never will be. When marketing, spinning, populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in the best interest of the politicians rather than the civis themselves.
There would be massive counter-productive effects the moment a significant enough fraction of the population is willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.
Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.
The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on.
I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion
> Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a defeated motion could not be brought back in the same form during the course of a parliamentary session.
There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.
Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better. There are always new people, new generations, prepared to fight for the same thing their parents did and they are not tired.
(I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even if those promoting this were to win, it does not necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change is "irreversible" ...
... so contrarian persistence might still be warranted).-
They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They can saturate the current generation's resiliency threshold until the proposal is passed.
That's a common misconception on how democracy (modern democracies at least) work.
Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament.
Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again?
I'm not sure I want that.
Democracy it's all about proposing the same things over and over again, with slight modifications, until the majority reaches a consensus on the matter.
At least that's what I understood about it.
BTW usually when a proposal is refused it won't be discussed again until the next legislature.
This is not a law per se, It"s a draft being discussed by a technical commission which is working to write a proposal for the parliament to vote.
> Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament.
> Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again?
Sure, put a cap on it of one parliamentary term if you're worried about it going to infinity.
Liberal democracies are relatively new, but the process of deciding norms that satisfy different groups with conflicting interests is as old as the human history.
In Italy, for example, it's already like that: legislative proposals that are not approved by the parliament lapse at the end of the legislative term.
Laws are not simply voted by the parliament, presenting them it's a process per se, with its specific rules.
Throughout history many tricks have also been developed to work around the limitations of the system, for example presenting the same law with slightly different wordings or use amendment bombing to block some proposal ad libitum (in Italy this happens a lot, there have been examples of software programs written specifically to do that: emit an infinite number of amendments so that they would never run out of them)
Of course if some group is really determined or bears enough power it can push its own agenda while smaller less powerful ones can have a very hard time to get attention, even if their proposals are good. It's not ideal, but democracy it's a process to find tradeoffs, usually not the best one, but the lower common denominator one.
New laws always overrule older laws. Most legal systems, including the EU, have a constitution, that is harder to change and that governs what laws are allowed or not (the UK is rather unique in not really having such a law, so that in principle Parliament is free to pass any law they want).
Enshrining a right to private communication and online anonimity into the EU constitution would probably prevent such laws from having any hope to go into effect, but that's a massive undertaking that I don't think would easily succeed.
You mean something like a charter of fundamental rights? Perhaps containing the text
> Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Admittedly that is part of a treaty rather than an actual constitution, though those amended treaties are the closest thing the EU has to a constitution.
That right already exists. These Acts are always struck down by the EU's Court of Justice along with all others that are in conflict with the founding legal documents of the Union.
The problem is that there isn't a mechanism to refer a proposed Act to that court before it's passed to prevent it hitting the books in the first place, and I think that's something that's easier to fix than (eg) trying to introduce new freedoms to the Bill of Rights when Hungary is able to block that.
Locally it'd be progress if member states stopped attempting to transpose new EU law when that law is clearly going to be struck down later on. National courts have that expertise but refuse to use it.
Generally speaking outside of constitutional questions, most legislatures cannot bind their successors. So yes, new laws can be written most of the time in most places.
Verlinden's remarks are pretty galling. She wanted to push it through because it would have made her (and Belgium) look good. What an absolutely insane reason to nibble away at people's freedoms.
Her tenure as minister had been pretty underwhelming, notable only for her ineptitude.
I am not German, but when I lived in Germany I got the impression they were very wary of political proposals that infringed on the privacy and liberties that the German people enjoyed.
Not that they didn't pass any shitty laws, but that the question "how can this be misused?" always was present.
This is one of the traits I admire the most about German culture; awareness that government can abuse its power.
In the US, by contrast, I see one political power eager to give powers to their candidates which they would hate to give to the rival party. It's like they've forgotten that they are giving power to the Government, not to a party, and if the other party gets power they get those powers.
I don't get that sense at all from Germans, since we're citing some stereotypes, my view on it was that Germans "love" the bureaucracy, and they continue to accumulate it.
The USA is anti-government and authority, fundamentally from the beginning all the way through modern times. Freedom is colloquially synonymous with America and that's in contrast with government, "Live free or die" is the motto of millions of Americans and in various capacities, sometimes alliterated to on state flags.
Germans don't love bureaucracy; in fact, we hate it. But everything must be very correct and thought through, which leads to complicated laws.
On top of that, we have some misplaced idea that everybody must have a lot of local laws. We call it federalism, and it has some benefits, but I think we use it for far too many things.
Both things together make it very hard to reduce bureaucracy or offer digital services. It is very embarrassing.
Only in the USA, for US citizens. Outside the USA; not so much.
Germans do love their bureaucracy, but I get the feeling that's seen as a brake on the politicians; it's hard to make the bureaucracy change, so radical politicians can't do too much damage.
"This is one of the traits I admire the most about German culture; awareness that government can abuse its power."
This trait can be found all over the former Soviet Bloc, because we have had enough experience with either one or two homicidal authoritarian regimes (the Nazis and the Communists). That experience was paid in a lot of pain and blood.
Places like Sweden, the UK, Canada, Australia or the US, where governments within living memory weren't as oppressive against their own population, have a lot of naive people, "well, they mean it well".
I agree but I fear this is now fading too. '89 was 35 years ago, and for all generations younger than mine (i'm 40) this part of history will be much more abstract and 'out of living memory'.
Yes, such is the nature of the world, that it buries horrors under layers of time.
In some ways, such healing is necessary, even though it comes with risk of repeating the same mistakes.
A week ago, I was in Zaragoza and there is a Goya Museum there. His prints of the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars are absolutely terrifying and ghastly. Today, the French and the Spanish people are on friendly terms. In a hypothetical world where the witnesses of such horrors still lived, those nations would probably be a lot less friendly and more resentful.
Australia is quietly incredibly authoritarian. The rules are really important, and government is encouraged to solve social problems by creating new laws.
You probably never lived in a communist (or any ultra authoritarian) state or never talked to somebody that did. The amount of horror that comes with it is beyond imagination, erosion of basic rights and threat of violent punishment for even the smallest infraction being on top of the list.
Everyone could be snitching on you and everything could be used against you.
Your phone scanning your images probably brings back memories to the older people that most of politicians are.
> They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering the current political climate there I would assume they are more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less likely to succeed.
Even if it does succeed, that would mean the Commission and the Council are in favour, but they'll still have to reach an agreement with Parliament as well. Parliament has already come out strongly against the proposal, but we just voted in a new, more conservative, Parliament, so I'm a bit anxious to see whether it'll stick to that stance.
I get the feeling most of those conservatives entering the parliament are of the libertarian and anti-establishment variety.
Within the European Parliament, The ID Party represents many of the rising rightwing national parties, such as AfD, RN, Lega, PVV. Among other things, the ID Party stands for "Defense of individual freedoms and protection of freedom of expression, in particular digital freedoms"
The concept of a centrally-managed surveillance apparatus in the EU runs contrary to the stated beliefs of the Euro-skeptic ID Party, which wants to reverse the centralisation of power within the EU.
There are definitely factions of both the extreme right and extreme left (outdated terms) that understand privacy and dislike mass surveillance.
Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.
I wonder if conservative/progressive and right/left were false dichotomies. At the extremes there are remarkably similar outcomes. Corruption is present at the extremes and the more moderate center. Some of the corruption is more explicit and illegal (pay me and I'll do this), other less so and legal (you did this while in office so now we hire you for big $ to do little.)
They are not false dichotomies, they're just not the only ones that matter. There's a separate scale of liberal/authoritarian that, while not entirely orthogonal to progressive/conservative, allows for a lot of leeway in practice.
It's easy to talk about freedom of speech and expression in the abstract. Practice shows that many political forces that do so adopt much less liberal positions on specific issues when it comes to the kind of speech that they don't like, or that they see as beneficial to target from an appeal-to-the-voter perspective.
So, given that this proposal is entirely framed as a way to combat child porn, and that "liberal pedophile elites" are part of the current far right zeitgeist, I wouldn't be so sure that they would be all that strongly opposed to it. Especially if they get to rewrite it in name (but not substance) to claim credit for it.
I'm not so much concerned about the rise of the ID party in this regard, but instead the growth of EPP and decline of the Greens. And possibly also Renew, though I'm not sure where they stood - if they were in favour then I guess their decline helps here.
Specifically this is being pushed by Ylva Johansson [1] from Sweden, who has (reportedly) financial connections to the organisation Thorn which is hoping to sell this chat monitoring software.
> Only the Commission can propose new legislation.
That is a technicality relying on a shallow look at the word "propose". The commission frequently takes direction from the council when deciding what to focus on which leads to them "proposing" legislation. In this case the push for this has come from the Council and certain national governments combined with a particular commissioner.
The Commission agenda and mandate is set by the Council that nominates it, and periodically reviewed by the same Council. Items are set in meetings, the agenda of such meetings is typically public.
If the Commission pushes, it's because the Council told it to push.
The Commission is formed by commissioners, each of which has been nominated by a different nation's government. The Council consists of actual members of the national governments.
The third party that can't propose legislation but has to approve it (and which strongly opposed this) is the Parliament, which is directly elected.
OK, this is probably some nuance of the English language that I'm missing as a non-native speaker, but I meant that the people that make up the Commission are not part of the national governments. The people that are part of national governments each get to nominate one commissioner though, in addition to being part of the Council.
The Council is as much part of the EU institution and as legitimate a part of them as the Parliament
There's no avatar of the EU manifesting out of thin air in brussels so it makes sense for the EU as a whole to bear the blame for the actions it takes, regardless of where it originated
I think the point is that the EU hasn’t actually taken any actions yet. This is just infighting between different arms of the EU governance structures, trying to figure out what actions should be taken.
So it is unfair to label rubbish coming out of the commission or council as something the EU has decided, when it’s only the first step of many for actually making a decision.
It would be like taking any random bit of legislation proposed by a member of congress, and labelling it as the collective stance of the entire U.S. government, completely ignoring the fact there’s a long road from proposal to enactment.
But commission and council aren't acting in a void (parliament neither), if there's appetite for a legislation amongst national governments the commission will work on a proposal
The same works to a lesser extent with the commission and parliament as well
> Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
I wanted to say. It will return.-
> There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
This is one of the things that irks me the most: The abusive, emotional "mislabeling". Children have nothing to do with this, and it is an abuse of public good faith to mislabel these sort of initiatives using "children" as leverage, preying upon a tech-lliterate public.-
In fact, that is also an issue here: The public needs to be brought up to speed (technically) and/or we should at least demand technical expertise from our politicians, when legislating or acting upon mainly technological issues.-
> I think most people don't realize the value of privacy
That is so true.
There is one point I like to use whenever I get into a privacy debate. If they'll say "But I have nothing to hide", then I'll ask "well then give me your email password".
Originally from a TED talk, possibly from Chris Anderson.
I never really understood this line of thought. Corporate interests _are_ citizen interests right? Those corporations are made up of (a lot) of people, and if those corporate systems thrive in a certain condition, then the people within these corporate systems will largely want to maintain or create those conditions. Those citizens do vote as well, and from personal experience, a lot of people vote in their own interest rather than national or moral interest. From research, I could not find conclusive numbers regarding altruistic [0] vs self-interested voting rates.
The more people are working for these corporations, the more we create and sustain the conditions that hold these systems in place. Whether that is 'good' is another debate.
I don't think it's correct to treat the interest of the corporation as manifestation of the combined interest of all its employees. It would be true for shareholders, although even there I think there's a vast difference between those who hold massive amounts of voting shares and minor investors. But employees are effectively trading with the corporation (their labor for wages), and are not meaningfully represented by it.
What's the difference? They "don't care" about it as long as they don't suffer any direct ill effects from their indifference.
Once things get to the point where every facet of our lives is actively under surveillance, and authoritarians in power start abusing their power in ways that affect those who "don't care", they'll start caring really quickly but by then it's going to be too late.
Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone why personal freedoms should be fought for instead of being taken for granted.
> Maybe we need a good fascism scare to remind everyone why personal freedoms should be fought for instead of being taken for granted.
Ironically since fascist (in the broader sense) parties and the likes don't seem to support Chat control (yet, I guess) the other parties have a harder time passing it to not lose votes to them.
It is strange how such an anti-democratic law is pushed so hard but there is still tip toeing around actually passing it.
Being a child from Portuguese revolution, and witness of how the Berlin wall went down, it is really bad that newer generations don't have any sense of what it meant to live during those days, and vote into such parties with protest votes nonsense.
The axiom has always been that People Don't Know, Wake Up Sheeple(tm), but after so much time it's hard to believe that lack of awareness is the problem anymore.
The retail service price of Gmail, Maps, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. together probably would exceed a couple hundred dollars a year. People would rather pocket that money, especially with how tight budgets are becoming.
> After like 2 decades of screaming at clouds, I think it's more that most people don't care about the value of privacy.
I think you've betrayed your own argument, because talking with people would have been more effective than screaming at clouds, to use your metaphor.
Just because you're putting something out there doesn't mean anyone else is receiving it. And if they're not receiving it, you can't judge whether or not they care.
Talking with people and screaming at clouds are the same thing if they hear and go about their day anyway because they don't care.
The axiom that the problem is a lack of awareness starts to defy logic because this has been going on for over 2 decades now. You bet your ass people are aware, they just don't care regardless.
Is this a good thing? Probably not. But the fact remains people don't care about privacy and specifically digital privacy. This isn't 2004 anymore, it's 2024.
I found it very frustrating that in the recent Belgian elections, because the EU and local elections were combined, there was very little debate on this subject and EU programs in general. Luckily it was finally brought up in the media (although way overdue IMO)
It's unlikely we'll see any admission on why exactly the vote was withdrawn, but it's probable that the situation became untenable for the political parties involved, one of which lost massively in the Belgian elections about two weeks ago.
In an short interview in De Tijd [1] with one of the Belgian MEPs pushing this (Hilde Vautmans, OpenVLD, liberal, lost big), and another short line in De Morgen [2] from outgoing Belgian Minister of the Interior who was part of the talks for this new version (Annelies Verlinden, CD&V, Christian democrats), both of them made it appear like they mostly just care about getting it done (because nobody else has succeeded yet). There is a lot of "but think of the children", and zero technical expertise.
This morning, after the press attention, high rank party officials across the spectrum (and from the parties mentioned above) publicly called the proposal dangerous, so it's likely the pressure worked this time.
Next time this can come up for the vote will likely be from Hungary. They are taking over the EU presidency in a few weeks, and have already said this is on the agenda for them. Considering the current political climate there I would assume they are more likely to bring it to a vote, but hopefully that vote is less likely to succeed. Still, there's no time to rest, the proposal isn't dead.
[1] https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/technologie/fel-privacyprotes...
[2] https://www.demorgen.be/snelnieuws/verlinden-buigt-voor-luid...