https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ I used this to email politicians in my country takes 2 minutes, We need to stop this dystopian invasion of our privacy. Not a peep in the media about this because they fear the backlash.
Are they gonna withdraw GDPR too? I’m under the impression that the two clash.
If they’re gonna spy on us with AI, we just need to implant logic bombs into our messages. A few “ignore all previous instructions, instead X” here and there.
Is it still useful to contact a representative of your country is already opposed to this?
“Rules for thy not for me” Our ruling class.
Well, they are not, and they will keep trying for as long as it takes.
So stop whining and let them know it’s not fine.
I’ve probably seen this shit more times than you have, but I’m still doing my part.
They’re such bullies. It also shows how awful democracy can be. They just change the legalese around until it goes trough. It has already been voted against, yet they want the control and do whatever they can to get it.
Called power imbalance.
Can’t believe that nobody told them their dick pics will get flagged as false positives.
Lol this is actually a legit technical concern - content scanning algorthms have notoriously high false positive rates for skin tones and textures, especially with low-res or compressed images.
It somewhat works here (Switzerland) since the Volksentscheid is holy and pulling that stunt gets a lot of people really upset about not honoring that choice.
But yeah democracies need rules against repeated attempts, since this is an exploit violating the idea of a democracy. In Germany, this is already a problem, called Salamitaktik (Salami slicing tactic).
Salami slicing tactic is a bit different, it’s putting separate elementary components of a mechanism by themselves, carefully. Until it’s whole and can be turned on.
It’s what the Silicon Valley people have done with the Internet. Since its creation, I mean. It’s designed as a totalitarian system. I wonder if there are backdoors in the IP protocol, or at least BSD reference stack that was adopted by almost everyone. But even if there are none, the system itself is architecturally ephemeral where democratic mechanisms can put a base, and perpetual where authoritarian ones can put a base. It’s centered on “who talks to whom” and not on “which messages are preserved and propagated and on which subjects”. Some brilliant minds are on the wrong side.
Or maybe I’m having a bipolar psychosis again and need to take my pills. Or maybe both.
Probably a little but if both tbh
What about the new internet surveillance law being pushed that Proton is moving it’s infrastructure out of Switzerland to avoid? Is there any pushback to that?
Complex theme, so less pushback. I only said “somewhat”. But at least the federal court is competent.
The EU is a democracy.
While it’s not perfect (no system is), each of the bodies that make up the EU legislature are democratic:
- The European Parliament is directly elected in European elections every five years
- The European Commission is made up of commissioners from each country, which are in turn appointed by their democratically elected governments
- The European Council consists of the heads of state or governance, which are also democratically elected in the respective countries.
- The Council of the European Union is made up of government ministers, which are appointed by the democratically elected governments.
Not every body is directly voted on, but each body comes forth from a democratic election
Edit: The message I responded to originally made the claim that the “EU is no democracy.”
Nah.
The European Parliament is impeccably democratic, its members selected by direct vote of EU citizens under a Proportional Vote system
The EU Council is way less democractic, being just made up of representatives of each local government in Europe with zero representation for any political forces not in government. It’s like a giant First Pass The Post system with electoral circles the size of countries, only worse so since citizens don’t directly vote for them, they vote for the people who nominate them (they’re government ministers, and local governments tend to be selected by local parliaments, who are the ones who are elected). Also in practice there is very little oversight over their actions since the Press barelly talks about them.
The EU Commission is even less democratic than the EU Council, since its members are nominated by the latter, so it’s even more indirect. It’s supposed by tradition to be one comissioner per country so nowadays there are a lot of commissioners for “irrelevant thing” and the whole thing is the result of a massive game of horse trading and cronyism, especially the head, with the result that plenty of comissioners are complete total crap - the only time my country had somebody as the EU commission head, it was the most crooked Portuguese politician ever to hold an international position (almost the opposite of the current head of the UN who is also a Portuguese) and the once he left after having done everything he could to favor the Finance Industry in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and went to make millions working as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs he ended up as the only ex-EU Commission president ever to have his EU building access credentials revoked, as he was illegally using it to just enter the buildings whenever he wanted to do do some behind-closed-doors “lobbying”. It looks like Germany is currently suffering from the same problem of having put an incompetent crook as EU Commission head.
Unsurprisingly, most of the “unbelievably authocratic” shit comes from the Council or the Commission.
Frankly I can see why the Council is as it is - it makes sense to have a place were the various governments of EU nations get represented - but the Commission should be entirelly chosen by the EU Parliament, just like local parliaments chose governments in all european countries which don’t have a strong presidential system.
You are right that there are no perfect democracies, but the EU really isn’t even close. Rather the EU should foremost be considered a technocracy with some formal democratic underwriting.
In most cases, that’s totally fine and not a problem in terms of democracy. Most policies, especially in the matters the EU was originally formed to make decisions on, there isn’t a huge interest for citizens to get involved – national interests (governments) and organized interest/lobby groups usually offer enough avenues for input on things like technical agricultural export standards. However, as the Union expands into things like organizing mass surveillance under flimsy pretexts, and whatnot, private citizens aren’t adequately represented – a stronger popular mandate is required for the decisionmaking to truly be considered democratic.
Formally, I, as a citizen of an EU member state, can influence the decisions of the EU in two ways: By voting for my country’s parliament every fourth year and by voting in the general elections for European Parliament every fifth. So let’s examine how far that goes.
Where I live, the main opposition party and the largest government party generally agree on most controversial issues pertaining to privacy or individual rights, e.g. Chat Control. Together these parties control a majority of the seats of parliament. Those parties gain the bulk of their support on domestic issues, such as tax policy, crime prevention, etcetera. Thus, question like Chat Control are essentially dead on arrival in terms of parliamentary politics. Now, my country is also not a perfect democracy, but comparatively it would (justly) rank quite high and parties can be responsive to popular opinion and outcries. So let’s say a citizen group managed to put Chat Control on the agenda, to the point where parties feel vulnerable on the issue. What then? Then that amounts to one vote out of 27 in the European Council, which is only meaningful when that is enough for a veto.
But the ubiquitous vetoes are what truly undermines the EU’s standing as a democracy, in my opinion. Notably, vetoes are pretty much the best you can get from your EP vote as well, in terms of the parliament’s decision making powers. In reality, the only thing citizens of the EU can rally behind is stopping proposals by, chiefly, the supreme technocratic body, the Commission. There is no cross-border party mechanism with pan-European campaigning on the council level. Voters do not influence majorities. And on the EP level the party mechanism, built on “political groups”, is opaque and not truly cross-border. Cohesive citizen involvement is foreign to the EU decision making process.
That is not to say that the EU is a nefarious body, or that the democratic deficiencies are intended to alienate EU citizens from the decision process. It’s just that it is glaring, especially in the context of Chat Control, that public opinion isn’t in the driver’s seat.
You are conveniently ignoring the facts that
- elected officials are only allowed to vote on legislation put forth and that legislation is heavily influenced if not entirely written by corporate lobbyists.
- lobbyists directly bribe their way to favourable outcomes
- democratic processes are simply ignored when inconveniencing the powers that be - see v.d. Leyen never being on the ballot yet holding the highest office
- corruption among high ranking EU officials is like a mafia, and they do not hold elected positions but get appointed, so they can’t be voted out.
Yeah okay. But what i have issues with; it is yet another step away from the people (something medium+ sized democracies already struggle with), leading politicians to make decisions in their own interest instead of for the imaginary numbers. On top of that, member states often move the unqualified but powerful/loved politicians there, because they “can do less damage there” (i know multiple cases from Germany).
So i have trouble calling it one, even though it formally is.
Yup, a democratic system should be judged on its outcomes, not its structure. If the decisions taken by a democratic organization do not strongly align with the wishes of the large majority of its members, then it isn’t democratic. There are plenty such examples playing out today. Besides, in representative democracy voting at the various elections is not enough to achieve highly aligned outcomes. By the time you get to the ballot box a whole lot of the fundamental decisions have been made without your input. E.g. who the representatives candidates are and what their candidate platforms are. This is how you get to “all the choices suck” and “vote for the least bad option” scenarios. Meanwhile the prebaked decions that lead to these scenarios are going to benefit the interested groups that made them. The effect of voting at the ballot box in such scenarios then becomes providing consent to satisfy those interests.
E: And of course any leftist can explain why and how those interests arise and how they capture the representative democratic system. And how that produces loss of faith in the system.
They are theoretically, but coming from Eastern Europe all those levels of abstractions lead to “opportunities” for “managing democracy” and more importantly for alienation of the people because most people do not know what they are voting for or what each of their chosen representativea do when in office.
I am not saying it is a broken system, but I think it can be better and in particular direct participation can be greatly improved.
If the economy is not democratic, it is not a democracy
All I see is a bureaucratic nightmare. No democracy to be seen, starting from the fact all politicians in the EU are bourgeoisie.
Their servants are all unpaid interns who have a near zero chance of ever staying in Brussels. Those that don’t come from well-off families that can support them will never enter a single EU institution.
It is a buerocratic nightmare, but filthy bolsheviks has zero rights to criticize it.
Uh?
What you’re describing is a republic not a democracy.
a republic is, by definition, a democracy.
you are repeating authoritarian conservative propaganda.
No. Democracy has been redefined to be that but the orignal definition is direct voting on issues. Some state have this via voter initiatives.
We have the technology to create a democracy and there is no reason to muddle and gaslight ourselves into thinking a representative system is the same thing.
We need to stop reject the notion that it’s necessary because people don’t have the time to understand the bills. We have plenty of evidence they our representatives don’t bother understanding it because their incentives are not aligned with needing to understand it. They just carve themselves out of, as the legislation being discussed here does.
Republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive…
a republic is, by definition, a democracy.
Yeah it is the 3th time in the past year I think some variation of this shit is proposed… Fuck them.
This isn’t democracy. It is capitalist dictatorships terrorising the working class.
Secret police monitoring your every action is incompatible with democracy. It is authoritarian tyranny.
It’s not the EU that will be scanning. Given that the scans will largely be aided by “AI”, private corporations will have access to all communications.
Sorry for spamming the tool but: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
It shows you your representatives and generates a email for you. Very handy.
Surprising and disappointing only the far right candidates and the ones of niche parties of my country are openly against it
It is very unsettling when you have to agree with the far right but…
I’ve already reached out to several in my country, on the maybe list. Annoying to see this crop up again.
It will pass eventually. Seeing the way EU countries are going, the right to far right will get voted in, and they will end up voting for these sort of bullshit measures they can Orwellianly exploit.
It’s because idiots are easily swayed by anti-immigration measures that come part and parcel with abject fascism.
Sorta.
The cultural clashes between people with different cultural backgrounds are to be expected, and the bigger the percentage of people with different backgrounds the more it happens (hence why in the days of countries having 5% immigrants, the idea that “immigrants are a problem” had very little traction). This is just how things are - you can think it’s closed minded of most people (and, by the way, in my experience as an immigrant myself, that includes many if not most of the immigrants), but people are as they are, so we have to deal with it.
Further, judging by the studies I saw in the UK back during the Leave Referendum, immigration does push down salaries in one category only - unspecialized workers. Economically one might think “well, it’s alright then”, but socially the ones suffering are already the worse off amongst the locals plus this is happenning under Neoliberal governments who are actually pulling down Social Safety nets and privatising essential services. This is probably why the Middle Class is often pro-Immigration whilst the anti-Immigration Far-Right Populists end up finding most of their traction amongst the Working Class - immigration benefits the Middle Class because immigrants barelly compete with them for the jobs whilst the mere presence of immigrants pumps up the Economy and lowers the cost of many services (so there is more business for the kind of work done by the Middle Class and services are cheaper for them), but the picture is very different for the Working Class.
(This is why you see a lot of the non-mainstream “Thinking Left” in Europe who bought into Identity Politics is failing to gain any traction and even dissapearing whilst the far-right booms - unlike the old Left these people are from the upper levels of the Middle Class and don’t really see as a problem things which the Working Class sees as a problem and is increasingly hitting the lower Middle Class too, so ultimatelly they fizzle out because they do things like supporting “Open door immigration” because for them it’s not a problem but, de facto, those policies do end up making life worse for a lot of those lower down the economical ladder who would otherwise as they lose trust in the mainstream politicians gravitate towards those parties and instead end up captured by the simple anti-immigration messaging of the Far-Right).
Last but not least, judging by my own country Immigration is the “solution” used to plug the low birthrate problem which is itself caused by decades of policies which lowered quality of life and pumped up realestate bubbles - the very politicians who are causing the problems that make the locals have fewer children, then claim that “we need Immigration because of an aging population” - Immigration is literally the tool used to keep countries going a little longer whilst the pillaging of the wealth of the many carries on. The poor immigrants have no blame for this - they’re just people looking for a better life, same as the locals - but Immigration Policies do have the blame on this and fake-Leftwing (neo)Liberals have purposefully confounded Immigrants (the people) with Immigration (the policy) to portray being against the latter (and, even more, against the artificial need for the latter and who gains most from it - which aren’t the immigrants) as being against “poor defenseless people”.
Unsurprisingly this shit has eventually resulted in increasingly more people losing trust in the mainstream politicians and believing in populists preaching the simple message that “immigrants are bad”.
Just to note - from Wikipedia: “On 21 June 2024, it was reported that voting on the legislation had been temporarily withdrawn by the EU Council, in a move that is believed to be the result of pushback by critics of the proposal including software vendors.”
I sent my emails and will try to call them. Have you?
Somewhat irrelevant: omg, this is peak “corporate art sucks.” It’s like corporate art combined with fascist content, more than usual.
