I'm going to slightly modify and repeat comment of mine I wrote here on another post for the same topic:
According to the DKSB (Deutscher Kinderschutzbund) [1], encryption barely plays a role when it comes to the distribution of CSAM [2]. In short: DKSB is not in favour of this. You know, the people that probably know what they are talking about when it comes to the protection of children, unlike the politicians who are trying to force this through.
The politicians which only really talked to salesmen of surveillance software [3] about this and never really consulted any independent people with expertise in tech, privacy or the protection of children [4].
Because this was never, at any moment, about protecting children.
You got it right. Lots of people here think this is some sort of big conspiracy by lizards to build a surveillance state. In truth, it is simply software companies that have surveillance products to sell lobbying the government.
Source: at my German uni there are many recruitment drives from these entities
You're probably right that this is mostly software companies looking for revenue in the form of a forced purchase of a product through legislation.
But, keep in mind: the government is actively selling out its constituents and creating an environment that enables a surveillance state, even when that may not be the original goal. Slippery slope and all, first it's child pornography - but where does it stop? It won't, because that data set is rich to mine - rich to sell into. We can make up entire product lines that can be sold, via FUD, into our ignorant government friends and force people to buy it even when it's been shown to provide little to no value to the masses.
So, no - not a lizard conspiracy. More like "Dumb and Dumber: Government Edition".
Surveillance capitalism erodes expectations of privacy. Eroded expectations of privacy in turn normalize government surveillance. Normalized government surveillance erodes expectations of privacy, which in turn normalizes surveillance capitalism.
Incentives are aligned, each party acts in their own self interest and this is the outcome. Conspiracy isn't needed to explain it.
So, yes she's misrepresenting things to her electorate, in order to bring in a load of surveillance. But please don't think she wants to spy on everyone, totalitarian style - no, no she's just being bribed (sorry, I meant "lobbied").
I mean she probably doesn’t think about it that way, she’s probably never stepped back and noticed “we dont have the technology to either protect children or find CSAM” she probably never thought that and said “but I dont care!” and she definitely never thought “because it fulfills the totalitarian prophecy of The Order! >hissss<”
its not about bribery, its about being led on by the nearest grifter because everyone actually working on technology isnt in the same circles as the politicians
Isn't that just a matter of interpretation and perspective? If surveillance wasn't attractive to governments and law enforcement, why would it be such an attractive market? Governments have massive need for software in general, but it's also no coincidence that they're consistently excited about surveillance, and particularly indiscriminate mass surveillance.
So you think Zensursula is pushing surveillance state only so she can then buy surveillance products of US tech companies because ... what? Money going to her pocket?
I think that's much more of a conspiracy theory than the notion that politicians want control.
As a German minister of defence, she is known as a person who paid half a billion euros to PwC consultants. Also, she renovated a sailing wooden training ship for more than 200 million euros.
And she is accused of removing proofs by deleting data from her phone and “not remembering” anything.
I would trust that person every evil and corrupt thing one can imagine.
Of course, she wants Control, although not for control's sake, but because she will get more of what she really wants (money, power, more money, ...)
It's sad that our EU doesn't let any hope that they do something because they believe it's the right thing to do. It's always big business and foreign government interests before interests of Europeans.
History is chock full of people in positions of power pissing away all sources of resources and closing the door to all sorts of prosperity for both themselves and for the people subject to their actions in order to further consolidate power.
She is riding the lobbying wave without giving much critical thinking to what happens. After all, she is just a humble public servant, she thinks. What harm can this possibly make?
Also, governments are used to being able listen into whatever they wanted to in the past, and now their capability is eroding, and they don't want to lose their apparatus.
The fact that said lizards are not actually conspiring amongst themselves does not mean the lizards do not see furthering of the surveillance states as a convenient ancillary benefit.
People ascribe to government officials way too much competence and way too little desire to consolidate power and rule absolutely
> big conspiracy by lizards to build a surveillance state. In truth, it is simply software companies that have surveillance products to sell lobbying the government.
The lizards may be behind the software companies though
Thinking about this from a more technical perspective. CSAM scanning will only catch the dumbest of abusers. One with even a remote level of sophistication will just spin up their own servers, there is plenty of OSS software out there to do such a thing, and thus would completely bypass any measures that are being proposed.
With services like Digital Ocean, you can spin up a chat server with pretty much only the most basic of technical knowledge, hell you likely won't even have to touch a command line.
Sure the EU could move to require OSS software developers operating in the EU to backdoor their software but that will be moot too as it will get caught on to in a heartbeat and a fork (sans backdoor) will be made available.
With the high-likelihood of false positives, this is just another Child Benefits scandal waiting to happen if the system were to be completely unsupervised.
What's so worrying about this is that these stock images were added there in the first place. Clearly the process is completely broken, if there was any kind of human oversight this would have been caught right there.
Right now it was clear because it was an often-used package. What if it's something more niche next time?
It uses the MD5 of the image, no surprise there that there were collisions with ordinary files. I've run into MD5 hash collisions causing mayhem several times in my life (usually between unrelated email addresses, IIRC).
You found 2 actual emails with the same md5? That sounds very unlikely. MD5 is weak against attack, but you're not going to be hitting collisions with "normal" data and especially not short strings.
Just looked over my notes. It was not email addresses, but a collision of two separate UPC codes concatenated with a timestamp. We never figured out which UPC codes it was or the timestamp (this was picking/sorting software for a warehouse in 2012). I wasn't there when it happened, and only heard about it after the fact (I was on my honeymoon). It crashed the software pretty hard.
That would be interesting since that would be likely the shortest known MD5 collisions. The shortest ones known are 512 bits differing by 2 bits.
If I had to guess, you might have been hitting collisions in a truncated MD5 hash. It's not uncommon to do something like take only the first 64 bits of the hash. Doing this you are quite vulnerable to birthday problem issues.
It was in php using the built-in md5 function. I’m actually reaching out to a friend that still has the code to see what the exact string is that got hashed.
I have no idea if the database is still somewhere, if so, we can look at the git commit and figure out what the possible UPCs are and narrow it down to a couple of hours worth of time stamps. I have a feeling it would probably be more than 512 bits though. UPCs are can be longish, plus a time stamp with each digit being a byte…
I highly doubt the database exists in any meaningful way though, since the product was shut down years ago.
You're right! I think, to protect the children, maybe we should require licensing to run servers?
Here's how it works. By law, all machines will require networking, or will refuse to boot.
Network stacks will require a key / license. Licence will be verified by an online server, continually, and any OS without this will be fined, and the devs implementing a bypass jailed.
Stop complaining/pointing out flaws, or you must hate children! Or... are you one of them?
Surely you jest but truth be told this is the direction I have been watching companies move albeit slowly and carefully.
Microsoft are slowly baking in this concept into Windows 10/11 to become more like an XBox at least for the home version. I envision a future version of windows will operate very closely to the method you described. I suspect all of the OS vendors want an app store in front of everyone whenever possible and telemetry to see what needs tuning to keep interaction with the app store as high as attainable. I do not believe it would be a stretch to see a future home version of windows not allow login if their authentication servers can not be reached or if ones cached remote credentials expire.
I could even see this eventually happening with Linux. The latest version of the Fedora desktop F36 interacts heavily with admin.fedoraproject.org and they have an app store. AFAIK Redhat/IBM have not yet implemented any centralized authentication servers with corresponding default client configurations to utilize them and I do not know if they intend to.
Yeah iOS already doesn't let you activate if you have no network connection of any kind. As well as having a closed app store.
The desktop OSes are heading there too but they're still a bit afraid of pissing off their legacy users. Besides the lock-in they're all aiming at that sweet 30% app store commission.
> I could even see this eventually happening with Linux. The latest version of the Fedora desktop F36 interacts heavily with admin.fedoraproject.org and they have an app store. AFAIK Redhat/IBM have not yet implemented any centralized authentication servers with corresponding default client configurations to utilize them and I do not know if they intend to.
I disagree. It might happen to some flavors of Linux like Fedora, Ubuntu and others that are backed by companies. But because the source is open, there will always be distributions that do not have such a restriction.
Governments might make it illegal to run these "dangerous" unsupervised OSes though. Or what could happen is that your bank, government website etc fails to work "for your protection" because your machine fails attestation. This is something that's already being done on Android with SafetyNet, albeit with apps instead of websites.
In addition the EU is also working on an online ID so a website can request your real identity and verify it. This would link in with that, validate the user as well as their hardware.
Right now? No. But I could see it happen in 10 years. Especially once CSAM is no longer the scapegoat and they have admitted they want the data for a lot more surveillance. I can already see the posts of people that think they have nothing to hide.
I agree with you. My personal hope is that the smaller distributions do not garner enough attention and the big companies leave them alone while at the same time having enough community developers keeping them alive and not infiltrated by developers that want to drive people to the corporate distros.
I know that HN policy is to take the best faith interpretation, but I'm really struggling here. The ramifications of what you suggested are boggling to consider- any developer of any system must implement and require a network at the lowest of levels... That would be impossible to enforce, and a nightmare to implement. Secondly, theres still nothing to prevent dark networks from emerging. Once its out there, its out there. Key/license servers would be even more of a target for corruption, exploits, and circumvention than encryption servers, with all of the same problems we see currently. In no world is this possible, never mind livable. It would be Orwellian to even imagine.
If only it caught abusers, it would be great. Just think about what kids do while teenagers, throw in some poor judgement. Kids being kids. Is it a good thing that there should be a system in place to "catch" this? To involve strangers in their most intimate and vulnerable private communique?
That's just one argument on "even if everything works exactly as intended, it's still a terrible idea".
Then add malicious use of such a system once in place. We know such systems are misused ALL the time. So I would bet good money that someone, somewhere, will instead use it to neatly collect CSAM material.
Not to mention other malicious use of surveillance whereby you just add some hashes for files completely unrelated to CSAM. I'm not talking about the slippery-slope of "let's include some gay porn in the mix", but rather stuff related to political opponents, and what not.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest the trade-off is "catch some abusers" vs "catch no abusers". It's a "catch some abusers" vs "violate privacy of minors | remove e2e encrypted communication | etc"
These measures are only likely to lead to the arrest of a small portion of abusers, while opening a massive avenue for government overreach across the entire population.
I would assume that very few to none of us on here are pedophiles, and we're aware this is going on. It stands to reason that the pedophiles are also aware that this is going on, and the vast majority of them are going to adjust their behavior to avoid this scanning. Doubly so once a few arrests are made.
The balance of those issues is subjective, though.
Exactly. A handful of actual abusers will be caught and the rest will change their methods. The rest of us will have a system looking over our shoulder for the rest of our lives with an ever-expanding scope of uses. Not exactly a great trade-off.
I'm usually on the fence between gross incompetence and straight out deception as the cause for these proposals, but in this case I'm convinced of the latter.
Really makes me wonder how many millions Ashton Kutcher would make pushing for this, he seems to have found the best regulatory capture since SawStop to push for this
But I agree with the parent comment, the vast, vast majority of distributors doesn't know how to work with encryption. The audience here knows, but compared to the average user, the audience here has much more technical knowledge.
Generally I agree with everything you said. There is a subtle and important distinction here though. Encryption rarely plays a role in the distribution of CSAM, yes, but a more concerning part in my mind is the role encryption plays in the active abuse of children.
To be very clear, I think there are ways to design applications around encryption to prevent the active abuse on platforms. For example, disabling encryption on minors accounts, limiting messages from people outside of your social circle, allowing opt-in so parents can read messages from their kids, AI models to display a prompt to the child that something may be harmful and they should seek their parents etc.
The biggest disappointment I had with Apple about this CSAM scanning business, is that they were not talking about or taking steps in preventing the active abuse of children. I would love to see regulation put in for the design of apps when a minor uses them. A small part of me is worried about poor regulations, but then we have things like Kik.
You don't understand how CSAM scanning works. This requires well known hashes of pedophiliac content - meaning it will do nothing for a novel exploitation of a child.
You can also just have your kid not use encrypted apps or not allow them to message internet strangers. That is probably the wrong thing to do - blanket bans are a bad way to teach life skills - bit you as a parent can do so. You don't need government help.
Some of what you are suggesting is exactly what Apple has said that they are implementing in iMessage for child accounts. In particular, the AI notifications to children that the message that they are receiving or sending may contain csam and that they should reconsider.
Living in France, the lie is also obvious for a very sad reason : we aldready don't do anything significant in case of a majority of 'obvious' child abuses (sex related or not, that's not even the point).
I know a fair amount of social worker whom sadly report that in a lot of child education place they know about A LOT of abuse, and a non negligible (and mental burden inducing) part of the work is to do triage, because they know they get (the number are made up) 50 report per week, but they only can 'investigate' about 20, and even if the 20 are really worrying, they can only launch action for 3 to 5, any more would overflow the dedicated services.
And that's not they are lazy, investigating is really complicated (and often not even worth, the main goal is to help the victim, no chasing culprits) and acting worse. You are pretty sure some girl in bad social context is being abused ? with whom do you send her living ? the maybe abusing father ? The probably violent alcoolic uncle or the nice but drug dealing older brother (who maybe is not ready to support her education even with a little financial help) ? That can seems parodic but I've seen real conversations like that.
The idea public services who cannot aldready read all the professionally redacted reports will suddently became omniscient because they can read my discord server private channel is funny.
Hope some representative will jump on the occasion to request more social worker founds to treat the case we aldready know about.
The UK was even worse in this regard, with asian sex gangs grooming kids while the police knew about it and choose to ignore it to not look racist for targeting minorities with dark skin.
This move is all about surveillance and has nothing to do with keeping kids safe.
Abuse by pakistani origin men was happening in many towns for years (e.g. Huddersfield, Oxford, Rochdale, Newcastle, Derby ones all have wikipedia pages) and sadly the only people willing to speak up about it were English nationalist types like "muslamic ray guns" guy.
"muslamic ray guns" is a reference to a famous video from some very drunk working class guy, which was lampooned by almost everybody with a nice side of class snobbery.
Since then the scandals regarding islamic rape gangs have become public, and it has since become clear that he was trying to say "islamic rape gangs", not "muslamic ray guns". It was an issue which exclusively affected deprived areas and working class people. They knew what was happening but could not articulate it in a way which could be taken seriously by the establishment. He is owed an apology.
> They knew what was happening but could not articulate it in a way which could be taken seriously by the establishment.
Plenty of others could and did articulate it better. But it's so much easier to pick out and debunk the most inept of the disfavored side, and pretend they are representative of the rest, while highlighting only the most sympathetic of the favored side.
A very basic and very effective propaganda technique.
When the existance of your problems makes the people who make up the beurocracy uncomfortable or would violate their dearly held beliefs about how the world works they can ignore your problems for a very long time indeed.
Might be worth noting that the word "Asian" in the UK refers to what in the US would be called Indians. (And, in the details, the people in question here would actually be Pakistanis.)
At probably around the same rate Americans and Canadians are lumped together in India, that is, until you get to know them or they give some clear indication (flag, etc.)
That happens everywhere, this is why Canadians so often wear flags abroad, they don't like being confused for Americans. I originally thought they were really patriottic or something but the ones I met told me they were just sick of having to explain constantly.
I think Australians and New Zealanders get the same, confused for each other. And us Dutch are confused a lot with Germans too. Not that I wear a flag for it though :)
Source: Shared a house with a bunch of Canadians :)
This is never going to catch on, except in Latin America and with trollish Europeans baiting for responses online. Said outloud it sounds like "U.S. Asians", which is just going to make people confused. Nobody actually uses this demonym in America.
American only refers to someone from the US in English. The correct demonym for someone from "the Americas" in English would be "Americanian". (Just as Bahamas -> Bahmanian)
The other definition of American is a common confusion from Spanish and has never been in regular usage in the English language. That's because English doesn't have the concept of "America" to refer to both North and South America. Historically English defined the continents differently from Spanish, and never treated them as one.
It's not equivalent because while "American" can mean "somebody from the Americas" it also has a common usage specifically to mean "someone from the USA". Hardly anyone says USAians, and the phrase "are you Canadian or American" is one readily understood by any anglophone. "Asian" has no corresponding usage in relation to India.
The police chose to ignore it, but when we consider the full history of the police and wider institutions choosing to ignore children being abused in a variety of ways by a variety of people, the reason “not to look racist” is patently absurd.
This is a very well written article that justifies its criticism of the EC's proposal with facts and numbers. Based on this, it really does look like child abuse is merely used as an excuse for more general surveillance.
This is thanks to the woman (Ursula von der Leyen) who accepted the spread of child pornography (blocking CSAM results, *no* rule whatsoever to have the content deleted which was easily possible) while lying about almost everything, to push her surveillance agenda while she was in Germany. It’s just more of the same in the EU.
Isn't it a poor reflection on our institutions when somebody like this can fail so much but be promoted into such important positions? I'm not super familiar with EU or German politics, but literally everything I've heard about von der Leyen's efforts in past positions has been extremely negative and make it seem like she's demonstrated little but extreme incompetence...
Well, the position she holds is not democratically elected, she is a representative of representatives, so we (the EU citizens) have to bear with her (and any other EC leader) for [*5*] (edit) years just because our "governments" chose her. This essentially means that Germany & France (after Brexit) get to have a common opinion and then it is spread out so that somebody is elected.
That is a simplification but it mostly works like that.
So, the European Commission is not a democracy, it strictly speaking an oligarchy.
The European Parliament is different. But the BIG money is managed by the EC.
European Parliament is mostly a toothless tiger though. Little legislative power (most legislation comes from EU Commission), so they mainly vote yes or no on legislation.
And if parliament votes no, the EU Commission can always reintroduce the legislation, perhaps dressed slightly different, until the parliament votes yes. Which is the modus operandi of the Commission as described by Juncker in the past:
> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.
Unfortunately the European Parliament doesn't have enough power to check the European Commission. They can't approve or reject specific members of the commission, because the commission as a whole is a done deal between the national governments, and they'd have to reject the entire commission as a whole, which they're a lot more reluctant to do (because there are also always some good people in the commission).
In many parliamentary republics the parliament accepts and rejects the government as a whole though, there isn't always a specific power to pass a no confidence motion against a specific minister. In practice it still can be done (and it has done by the EU parliament) by threatening to pull confidence on the whole government if a specific member is not removed.
Still I'm wholly in favor of giving more power to the parliament.
This is complicated by the threshold required for censure being 2/3 instead of simple majority
However the real problem is political capital, if parliament wanted to they could just refuse to adopt any law or budget etc unless X member of the commission resigns or Y bill is proposed by the commission. The power is there, and this is essentially how parliaments evolved over history, wrestling power away from the monarchs (or in this case they'd be wrestling power from the heads of government in the European Concil)
But because the EP lacks visibility and people are generally uneducated in how the EU works the MEPs won't take the risk even if they felt it was needed and they will hardly be punished for not taking it because people vote MEPs in based on national politics and not their positions in the EU
There aren't really more powers to be given to the parliament, you could make censure of the commission being 50%+1 instead of 2/3 and letting them officially initiate legislation, but those are minor changes and won't change the underlying awareness problem
Even in this thread on a platform on which you'd expect people to be reasonably educated and capable of googling before commenting half of the comments about what the EU and institutions can do are completely uninformed
Even the article in the submission is attacking the European Commission by discussing claims made by an organization entirely distinct from the EU
(The EC draft is deserving of many attacks but it has enough wrong in it not to require bringing in something entirely unrelated)
I think this needs to change, yes. The European Parliament is the only democratic body on the EU level, and as such needs to have more power to at least check the Commission.
Mind you, there's plenty about the European Parliament itself that could also use some improvement. They're still moving between Brussels and Strasbourg every month, for example.
Even if the EU Parliament gains more power, what difference will it make? The MEPs are from the same parties that the national governments are formed by. They're just grouped together slightly differently.
The difference is that they're directly elected, in proportion to the electorate. Well, almost; small countries are overrepresented in the EP, I believe.
>>Well, the position she holds is not democratically elected, she is a representative of representatives, so we (the EU citizens) have to bear with her (and any other EC leader) for 6 years just because our "governments" chose her.
So would you say that for example....prime minister of UK is not democratically elected? After all, you never vote for them - you vote for the party in parlimentary elections, then the party selects a representative to be the prime minister. How is that different?
No, it is not the same at all because nobody has any idea what party/what person/what ideology the next EC leader will have.
There is no citizen vote to form a parliament which then will vote for the EC leader. At all. Not even near. It has nothing to do with a representative parliament, really.
We do not know who, why, from where the next EC leader will be. At all.
At least when you vote for a party (in UK, Spain, whatever), you have some idea what person they will vote for Prime Minister.
But EU citizens do vote for an EU parliment - sure, they don't vote for the European Comission, but again, there are all kinds of comissions operating alongside all EU governments, and those are practically never elected democratically. They either form by the institutions that need them, or the government picks them arbitrarily. And anything the EC proposes has to go through the EU parliment to be approved - so in the end your representatives who were democratically elected have a say. EC only proposes laws, it doesn't pass them.
Again, such mechanism exists in nearly all EU countries - you have comissions proposing laws, then parliments pass(or reject) them. The comissions don't need to be voted in by the populace, because the final say is given to people who were voted in.
I still do not understand your point. As stated earlier, in parliamentary republics the government is never elected and while it is often made mostly by members of the winning party, it is not necessarily so (often being member of the parliament is not even required).
In the case of the EU the government is usually (always?) composed by members of the winning EU party, which are politically aligned coalitions of national parties.
In parliamentary democracies[0], the government is formed by a majority of the elected parties in parliament. In the EU, the EC is not formed by a majority of the EP, but by backroom negotiations between the national governments, each of which is really a coalition of parties, the largest of which generally has a prominent party member that they want to push forward as their country's candidate for the EC. It is significantly less direct than in a normal parliamentary democracy. It's more like your national government would be formed by all mayors pushing forward a former city councillor from their party to form the national government.
[0] Not just republics, also constitutional monarchies
Turns out our system, while based on the same basic principles evolved in a very different way from the UK/Germany etc
For the UK the main difference is that most of their governments are majority governments, due to their electoral system either labour or the tories are going to have (in 90% of cases) an outright majority, so the government (at least the PM) is going to be pretty much known as soon as the election is over
In germany/the netherlands they have more often coalitions so you don't know until after the parties have negotiated post-election. This is closer to what we have in italy, however there are two differences:
1. There are strong conventions about the larger party taking the head of government position, something like what happened with the Conte I government where two parties agreed on a government but had to bring in a "neutral" PM does not happen abroad
2. Governments are more likely to last the length of the mandate, specifically it's quite rare to have governments fall and bring in a "governo tecnico" headed by a neutral PM
So turns out that other countries are much less used to have the PM be someone that hasn't campaigned at all
A third difference, in which italy is quite unique amongst parliamentary systems, is that both chambers have to give their confidence, almost everywhere else it's just the lower house, while in italy also the Senate must agree to a government.
This is similar to how the European Council also has to agree on the EU commission members but very unlike other countries, where the upper houses are at worst symbolical and at best very constrained in their powers
Certainly FPTP voting system lead to different dynamics, but even in UK, for example after Brexit, there have been prime minister changes without voting. Cabinet reshuffles are also not unheard of after power balance changes in the ruling party. But yes, 'technical governments' are certainly an Italian quirk.
Regarding the Council (assuming you are referring to the council of the EU), that's certainly an institution I would like to see reformed as it is a body with legislative powers composed by executive members.
There have been, but it's quite rare and not something they spend a whole lot of time thinking about
> Council (assuming you are referring to the council of the EU)
I was actually referring to the European Council, since it's the organ that is involved in the election of the Commission
But agreed on the national executive branches legislating at the EU. That is at the same time the most undemocratic thing about the EU and the least common criticism, which I find baffling
Personally I'd rather the council operated as a parliamentary assembly made up of delegations from national parliaments / national parliamentary committees
I just don't want it to be directly elected too, the US made that mistake with the 17th amendment and I always get the feeling they're worse off for it
there have been prime minister changes without voting.
As mentioned elsewhere, that's not the case. The PM has always won at least two votes, one in their constituency (winning a local election) and another from their party membership.
What you really mean is, there has been no universal vote on the choice of PM themselves, which is correct. It's not a presidential system. However, that doesn't mean they never won a vote.
In contrast, the EU is run by people who have never actually won a vote. Or, well, technically von der Leyen won a "vote" in the EU Parliament but she was the only candidate who was on the list, so "winning" only meant reaching the quorum threshold.
He meant there have been changes without a general election. And it wasn't a comment on the UK being a presidential system but (likely) rather a comment on my second point in the comment above, that point being that in Italy we're more used to having governments change without having to contend a general election
I do want to say however that this argument about the double election you make doesn't really hold much water in my opinion. It is obvious that the UK institutions have a more developed democratic tradition than the EU ones
But they do not lay in the PM having to be an MP nor in the parties using a primary to choose their leaders
An MP is elected on the basis of their constituents thinking they'll do a good job as their representative, not as a way to find the most capable person in the country to be PM, so it's not a relevant election to gain legitimacy as PM, in the same way UvdL being an MP in the bundestag for 10 years prior to becoming commission president doesn't improve her legitimacy as EC president
As for the party vote, that is a good system and I do wish they'd gone with the spitzenkandidaten (more so we could stop having this conversation than any practical reason or love for Weber), but in this case it'd have been more undemocratic, not less
Weber, much less Timmermans or the Renew people, had no outright majority in the parliament and no majority in the Council, and the council has its own legitimacy even if its made up of (mostly) indirectly elected individuals. Members of the EUCO have more visibility and their actions are under much greater expectations of representing popular will than any single MP or MEP
I fail to see the democratic appeal of a majority of voters (whose MEPs and leaders didn't think Weber was a good fit) having their voices ignored because Weber won a vote within a private organization
But that might also be because where I'm from the expectation is for government to represent a majority rather than a plurality
> "vote" in the EU Parliament but she was the only candidate who was on the list, so "winning" only meant reaching the quorum threshold.
I was under the impression you were from the UK, so I apologize if I assumed familiarity with the parliamentary system in my comments above
In parliamentary systems (which the EU kinda is with some differences) after an election the Head of State consults with the parties to find who would be able to form a government and then once it reaches a decision the individual in question asks Parliament for their confidence and if parliament gives it (so a majority votes yes) then they are "elected"
In the EU's case the only peculiarity is that instead of the Head of State being an individual it's the European Council acting by QMV
Even after reaching the quorum if a majority in parliament had voted No to UvdL she wouldn't be Comission president
"Even after reaching the quorum if a majority in parliament had voted No to UvdL she wouldn't be Comission president"
I'm not sure they were asked to vote yes/no. They were asked to vote for who should be Commission President, but there was only one name on the list. They could either vote for her or refuse to vote at all.
The relevant parts of Article 17 TEU (link below) are:
> the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the Commission
> This candidate shall be elected by the European Parliament by a majority of its component members
> If he does not obtain the required majority, the European Council, [...], shall within one month propose a new candidate who shall be elected by the European Parliament following the same procedure
There was only one name on the "list" because there was no list, the question was to approve or to send back for a different name (got relatively close actually if 10 more MEPs had abstained/voted against/not showed up she wouldn't have been elected)
Actually the Prime Minister got in by winning a vote, twice!
1. He had to get elected MP in his constituency.
2. He had to win a vote by the Conservative party membership (anyone can become a member).
Both the big parties in the UK have some degree of internal democracy for choosing their next leaders. It's true that it's not a presidential system, but it's not comparable to the Commission where the commissioners haven't won any votes ever (the GP post sort of implies there's a vote amongst national leaders but we honestly have no idea how vDL was selected - maybe there was no vote at all and it was all some sort of stitch-up).
>>Both the big parties in the UK have some degree of internal democracy for choosing their next leaders.
It is also my understanding that it's purely because they chose to do that. They only need to name a prime minister, how they decide on one isn't defined by law.
>>He had to win a vote by the Conservative party membership (anyone can become a member).
Again, the point is that the PM is chosen not by the general populace, they are selected within the winning party.
>>but it's not comparable to the Commission where the commissioners haven't won any votes ever
The commission is comparable to the House of Lords at best, where the people aren't elected either - both of them only advise the parliment though, neither the EC nor the house of lords can pass any laws by themselves. That's why it's "allowed" - the Comission has no real power because it relies on Parliment(which is democratically elected) to make the final decisions.
>> Again, the point is that the PM is chosen not by the general populace, they are selected within the winning party.
This is sort of true but misleading, the PM is the leader of the winning party, and the leader is always chosen before an election, so the electorate know exactly who will be PM when they vote.
Except when the leader gets kicked out (or resigns) part way though their term, as happened to Thatcher, Blair[0], Cameron, and May.
[0] although I’ll accept he doesn’t really count because both he and the Conservative party explicitly said prior to that election that if you vote for Blair you’ll get Brown soon after.
"It is also my understanding that it's purely because they chose to do that. They only need to name a prime minister, how they decide on one isn't defined by law."
No, but that's not relevant to the original point.
The two big parties are big and old because they are stable yet also able to change to reflect the changing electorate. They probably wouldn't have survived so long if they weren't internally democratic. The same is true in the US, the two big parties remain big because they're more like loose coalitions with a lot of internal democracy, hence why party elites are constantly getting upset about 'takeovers' by outsiders like Sanders, Trump, the tea party etc.
"The commission is comparable to the House of Lords at best ... the Comission has no real power because it relies on Parliment(which is democratically elected) to make the final decisions."
You've got it backwards. The EU Parliament is like the House of Lords. Both can propose amendments to legislation and slow things down, but they can't actually propose new law changes. In the UK only Parliament can initiate the process of changing the law, and in the EU only the Commission can. They call this the "right of initiation". The power to amend is also a lot less useful than it looks, because if the EU Parliament amends something in a way the Commission doesn't like, they can just revoke the law change completely and try again. The Commission is never required to accept an amendment.
In practice the EU Parliament usually amends laws to give the EU even more power than it was already writing in for itself. Because the EU Parliament isn't really a parliament, the sort of people who run for election are the sort of people who are content to either cheer or boo from the sidelines. That's why none of the EU level parties have any distinguishable policies beyond "support the EU in whatever it already wants to do" and "leave the EU/slow it down". Most of them are cheerleaders.
in the last election they had a load of debates all around Europe with the prospective leaders of the commission, with what their plans for their term were, what they wanted to achieve, etc
guess who ended up being appointed leader? someone who didn't take part and wasn't even part of the process
it's a complete farce, and the powerless parliament is only there to give the entire the thing the appearance of being democratic
>> and the powerless parliament is only there to give the entire the thing the appearance of being democratic
What makes you say it's powerless? I'm genuienly curious. In my opinion it's the comission that is completely powerless - it can't do anything without the parliment agreeing, and the parliment is under no obligation to agree with them.
Well that's a contradiction - if it can't legislate, then it's not a legislature, is it?
If you mean that the "laws"(they aren't laws technically) don't apply anywhere until actually accepted and adopted by the EU member states - then yes, that's very much by design.
> If it can't legislate, then it's not a legislature, is it?
The EU parliament votes on new EU 'laws' as a part of ordinary legislative procedure. It can reject laws or amend them. But contrast to national parliaments, it cannot propose new laws.
The truth is that even on national level, most laws are proposed to parliament by government, not by MPs.
> If you mean that the "laws"(they aren't laws technically) don't apply anywhere until actually accepted and adopted by the EU member states - then yes, that's very much by design.
That is not true, there are directives and regulations (as EU 'laws'). Regulations apply directly, without any adoption by members states. Directives have to be adopted, but member states are required to adopt them and in some border cases they apply even if not adopted.
I also didn’t participate in an election in every UK parliamentary constituency when I still lived there.
I’ll be happy to say the UK also doesn’t count as a “proper democracy”, but counting it as more democratic than the EU feels like arguments-as-soldiers.
My personal take is that the EU is a trade agreement that, unlike most trade agreements, has at least a modicum of democratic accountability. But the foundation of its democratic nature is the member states within the EU rather than the supernational coordination organisation itself, which is precisely as democratic as its members want it to be and no more nor less than that.
It enters into caretaker mode after the election of the parliament, so how long it stays might vary depending on how long it takes for the council and parliament to elect them. But the term is tied to that of the EP
For instance this last commission took office in december rather than September/October because there was a huge delay in picking the President and then parliament blocked two/three (don't remember exactly) commissioners so new candidates had to be chosen from those countries.
It is sadly quite common for our politicians who are untenable nationally, to send them to the EU. From what I’ve heard, it’s similar for at least some other countries.
Despite living in Berlin, my grasp of politics is also terrible.
However, while I can’t say either way if she’s good at other things or not, the headlines aren’t going to answer that either way — news only covers emotionally charged events, and outside science, tech, and weather forecasts, that in turn makes everyone look bad most of the time.
But the EU is super conservative - e.g. banning gene edited crops (now available in Brexit Britain at last - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61537610 ), the ridiculous cookie laws and GDPR restrictions, etc.
Go live in the south of Germany and see how conservative it is - no card payments, little online delivery, a huge amount of bureaucracy, etc. And the EU forces that sort of bureaucratic conservatism on the whole of Europe, even though some countries like the UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, etc. are much more liberal and technologically progressive.
While I would accept the EU is small-C conservative about GM, that was in response to public opinion — IIRC, every rule predating the Lisbon Treaty (2007) necessarily had unanimous (and not merely majority of both nations and people represented by those nations) support from the governments of the member states — and even then the EU doesn’t ban GM crops but rather it regulates them, and the UK had some such crops (and experiments) before leaving:
Indeed, the reason I as a vegetarian can have hard cheese is the use of GM bacterial rennet (not a crop, no idea how that changes the regulation rules).
As for card payments, even in Berlin they are less common than in the U.K. prior to Brexit, but that variance by itself (and the increasingly cashless orientation of Sweden) demonstrates the EU isn’t being held back by German skepticism of non-cash money.
Likewise in reverse (and to show this isn’t just an EU thing), when I visited California, I was shocked by how primitive and backward the payment systems were, especially given California has a reputation for being technologically progressive.
However, even if I were to accept all of your claims, this makes little difference in either direction to my opinion of specifically Ursula von der Leyen, as questions of competence are a separate axis to each of liberty-vs-rules and dynamic-vs-conservative and left-vs-right.
Edit: also, GDPR is in this context basically the same as the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998, it is just that nobody outside the U.K. paid any attention to the U.K. acting alone.
In an EU country elections are held for the national parliament. The winning party usually creates a coalition with another party to create a majority in parliament. This gives them legislative powers.
In a parliamentary system the legislature picks the prime minister (executive), therefore the coalition now controls the executive branch too.
Now the executive branch appoints someone to the EU commission. The EU commission holds legislative power in the EU.
EU parliamentary elections pick MEPs. The successful national parties are going to find now success in MEP elections, because they're already successful locally.
This same national party is part of an EU-wide along with other similar parties from other EU nations. The elected MEPs will have EU-party affiliations based on that.
Or in other words, it's the same groups of people in power on all of these levels.
It's not a particularly well argued piece. As an example, It's nitpicking numbers without showing how that nit picking fundamentally changes the argument. Like they point out that the EU Commission says 1/5 kids will be abused while the WHO says 1/10. But 1/10 is still an incredibly high number. So even if 1/5 is wrong and 1/10 is right nothing fundamentally changes.
When someone says they're doing this or that "for the children", you can be 100% sure they're not. Always. The children are the one truly universal excuse for being a horrible piece of shit. Even religion takes a second place.
"Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him"
I cannot emphasize enough that members of the tech policy community must abandon the "think of the children" line of rhetoric to weaken the internet.
I don't want to think about your children. I don't want to interact with your children.
I've met people who have. People who don't just go out onto the internet to be disagreeable, but truly believe what they are saying.
That context collapse of "oh, you're serious?" paired with my sincere view that those folks can get in the ground with Jeffrey Epstein, has been quite the journey.
(I crafted the above sentence after extensive therapy, to make it clear: I will not hurt someone just because of their "sexual preference".)
But there's a Breaking Bad episode that shows what happens when someone who is not your caregiver decides not to interact -- you will choke on your own vomit and die, or otherwise come to some end that wouldn't have if you hadn't been all alone.
(I'm on the autistic spectrum, and a huge prestige TV geek.)
You can engineer society to coerce folks, you can invent ever creative reasons to monitor folks who the data shows have always tried to give folks autonomy to make decisions paired with accurate data, but then... well turn on the news.
You will what you voted for. Power outages because your independent grid minus federal money rotten then got hit with a superstorm. Condos collapsing because no one did the checks. And the bridge the local tech savvy at risk youth called for help from under may literally fall down.
What "civil" society needs to do is believe victims.
Testimony is evidence. Value it as much as... computer stuff.
Or own that if you decide otherwise, there may be civil unrest.
Hi Greg, I'm sorry that you were abused. I assume because you put "Cub Scout Troop" by your signature, that you were abused in Cub Scouts?
I imagine there are a bunch of parents that read HN that have their kids in Scouts. So this never happens again to any other kid in Scouting: they should know that the BSA has Youth Protection Training (YPT) which has clear rules that state there should be no private one-on-one contact between adults and children.
If anyone's Pack, Troop, or Crew is not following that simple rule, they need to report it. First start at the unit committee, and if that doesn't work, contact the Council.
Of course if you suspect abuse and not just a violation of the rules, contact the authorities.
Anyone can take YPT (you don't have to be a member of the BSA), just create a "My Scouting" account and take the online training.
Additionally, if the unit is chartered by a church, make sure everyone is also taking that church's version of youth protection training as well (The Catholic Church calls it Safe Haven, the Episcopal Church calls it Safegaurding God's Children, etc).
As a parent, you should make sure every parent and adult volunteer in your unit is trained. When everyone knows the rules, then we can make sure they are being followed to prevent abuse from happening.
The sad fact is that ever since the BSA came out with YPT in the 1970s, children are more likely to be abused in churches and schools than in Scouting.
(I'm an adult volunteer in Scouting, and I take this issue very seriously. I want to help make the future a better place, and that starts with our children.)
That article about the athletic director is really bad. The BSA rules also state that adult volunteers cannot have relationships with the Scouts outside of Scouting where grooming could happen. Additionally, all communications (text messaging, emails, etc) have to follow the no private one-on-one rule.
I don't have any experience with any other youth organizations (as a youth or adult), but I hope they all have or adopt similar rules.
(I am Eagle Scout, and I still like to go camping and help others, and volunteering with my old Scout troop is a great way to do that.)
Governments have found that they can strip away any form of privacy from us just by saying they're doing it for the Children. No-one with nothing to hide would protest again Child Pornography laws, now would they?
Is there a way of fighting this trend, without exposing oneself to this very effective way of cancelling you and destroying your life? I feel we're powerless to stop this.
> No-one with nothing to hide would protest again Child Pornography laws, now would they?
There is lots of opposition to the recent proposal of the EU. This article being part of it. Even Nancy Faeser, the German minister of the interior opposes it[1].
But if you have nothing to hide it will save you from yourself...
"Think of the Children" has been the immoral rallying cry after it worked so well in the UK for passing several 5-eyes compatible laws into power will little resistance. The message poltically became that we will accuse you of putting childrens lives at risk if you object to this overly complex law that you as a politician likely don't understand.
It's so primitive that laws can be proposed without any proper numeric estimate of their possible impact. How many Europeans would be ok with a draconian surveillance mechanism if they knew we would be preventing only a handful of abuses?
The same happened with laws instituting vaccine passports (at least in France). They were not backed by any projection of the number of hospitalizations avoided or lives saved.
I don’t like this line of argument: it has weak knees for 3 reasons.
1. They question the “1 in 5 children are abused” figure. That is fair: it seems tremendous at first sight. But the real figure of 1 in 10 that they reveal is very close and similarly shocking…
2. They emphasize that children know their abusers. But then imply that scanning chat messages cannot help in this situation. There is an obvious retort: abusers can abuse children in their local community and share images of their abuse online. Catching that sharing can identify them and stop them. (I cannot see any statistics on how many, among abusers, actively share things about it online. Intuitively, it would be a low percentage, but that argument is not used.)
3. They calculate that police surveillance orders were only issued for 0.1% of abuse cases, implying that they do it so little because it is ineffective. But the obvious retort is that they do it so little because they have no grounds to do so. “A chat sent from this person’s phone tripped the detector” is a reasonable justification. (I expect there are some much more obvious ways to have that justification which are poorly tapped, like confidential school reporting. But that is not part of the argument.)
The fundamental argument should be that abusers are listening to the EU too. They will gear up. There is nothing anyone can detect in encrypted base64 sent by chat or other means.
Meanwhile, any weakness created by this system will be turned into abuse imparted on the innocents, like sharing to an unwitting victim a zipped adversarial image of a prairie whose pixels were flipped until it triggered the detection.
Overall, that, along with a possibly inadequate false positive rate given the rarity of real abusers 1) actively sharing and 2) doing so insecurely, it is possible that this system would cause more victims than it would help.
> “A chat sent from this person’s phone tripped the detector” is a reasonable justification.
A black box detector that similar to a trained drug dog will bark on command. Last time a secret internet block list pushed by von der Leyen was leaked it became clear that they wont limit this stuff to child protection and will do their best to keep the actual criteria used secret. Just mentioning the name von der Leyen in a chat might get you on a list. It is times like these where I would love to have the GDR back, a place where we could just drop of all the crazy Stasi wannabees.
> A black box detector that similar to a trained drug dog will bark on command.
Absolutely. There is never any description given of the required false positive rate, or the way it will be measured and enforced.
A false positive rate of 1% across ~450M people, to find 3M abusers (assuming each abuser averages two victims based on the article’s figures) of which only 1% exchange images insecurely, would mean that 0.8% of detections would be valid.
The police cannot chase 125 dead ends for a single arrest; they just don’t have that kind of budget. They already give up on finding bike thieves even when the bikes are GPS’ed within town, and that would have a much higher probability of success per investigation.
It's obvious to anyone that mass surveillance is not against crime BUT to commit larger crimes, like dictatorship and oppression, like homogenization of humans destroying the mechanism keep us evolving etc.
The point is: how many, understood that, decide that's about time to say STOP, pretending immediate arrest and trial for crimes against humanity, attempted coup, high treason, embezzlement etc to our formal politicians and their private-sector shoulder?
For what I see very few. At that point, missing Citizens, we can't have Democracy, so at that point it's perfectly legit morally consider certain level of ignorance like a sort of soft-crime and so pushing toward a new neofeudal society where the cohort of Citizens abuse the crowd of subjects, like our oppressors do, for Citizens interests. Of course it's not easy, but that's is.
The "abused children" are presented as an excuse to setup some "dangerous" technical systems which in the end will be used mostly by the music/movie industry for their own benefit.
I'm not sure how we get away from this. Something being illegal to possess (because 'possess' means something different back during the days of physical media than it does now with digital files) will always be used to justify these overbearing enforcement mechanisms. Perhaps we should downgrade these from criminal to civil issues except for extreme cases.
I disagree with the policy, but this article is far less well-thought than other commenters think.
* That child abuse is largely familial is irrelevant. It is precisely long-term child abuse which becomes CSAM.
* That 10% of children are abused is a large figure. That, now, c. 70% of CSAM is children generating their own material (using presumably scannable devices), provides a significant justification for scanning those devices.
* That police forces are ineffective at combating both abuse and CSAM is irrelevant. Government's ability to prioritise child abuse in policing is presumably sensitive to its effectiveness, and other policing priorities. If the EU could pass a tech regulation law to cut down a vast amount of online CSAM, then why wouldnt they?
* The government isnt a unified entity, like a person, with some coherent set of priorities. Speaking of it this way will always induce some paranoia. The police's priorities, EU's tech groups, EU states, EU police forces, etc. are all different orgs with different, incoherent, actions.
I think the issue of children now being the major generators of CSAM here is perhaps the key one.... I suspect there's a counter-proposal here which requires children's devices to have optional software on them.
Please correct me with links to corroborating evidence of I'm wrong.
AIUI the proposal is to check file hashes of content against a blacklist of known CSAM?
The linked website is calling this "total surveillance" and saying the EU are lying and exaggerating.
It's total surveillance in the way that looking at the postcode on all envelopes is total surveillance whereby of you send something to a postcode of a known terrorist then it's going to be noticed and may be investigated.
On the OP's serving point, a minor email provider not getting a lot of notifications on alerted child abuse investigations compared to the total numbers of children being abused is because there's not enough resources to investigate more cases. Reducing the resources needed per case by catching low-hanging fruit easily with automated and non-intrusive methods is positively indicated by the OP's evidence here.
So, laudable intent because some of the articles in the proposed regulation are dumb beyond measure
But it doesn't help their credibility that they made an entire article debunking the wrong entity
Of the three claims they "debunk" only the 90% of content being hosted in the EU was a claim made by the EU commission, specifically in 2020 by Johansson, the data seems to come from an NGO called Internet Watch Foundation [0] and it does seem unlikely (from a quick glance I think the 90% claim is about content reported within europe, which makes the statement more likely. But in any case it wouldn't matter because for the critical pieces of the legislation it's not a claim that would justify the measures anyway)
But in the other two points the website is constantly referring to this website:
and acting as if the Eu commission authored it. The issue is that this website is hosted and authored by the Council of Europe (hence the coe.int domain), an entity entirely disjointed from the EU, of which the EU institutions aren't even a member. This is confusing to people because there are two organizations (European Council and Council of the European Union) which are part of the EU
While the intent of the article is laudable and the scanning parts of the regulation have got to go the "Trumpiest" part of this whole thing is the fact that this website made a whole debunking article based on such thorough research that they didn't even notice they were getting the subject of the debunking wrong
(on the positive side it looks like the german government also agrees, so the chances of those parts going away in amendments increased significantly [1])
It's hard to expect honesty from the EU Commission when man looks who sit there. Almost all the EU heads have or had a court process running in their respective countries.
I would not believe Frau von der Layen even if she told me 2+2=4.
I just want to point out that lots of the sexual abuse of children are by the child's parent(s) (mostly the father, obviously). This is something that is not taken into account and for which any "communication surveillance" policy is useless.
But nobody tries to assess this because, yes, the aim is not the children. It is power.
Note that pfortuny said "mostly". Child abuse by mothers or other women absolutely does exist, but all evidence suggests it's less common than abuse by men.
Not to be crass, but a friend of mine was sexually abused by her grandmother; we heard that "someone" in the house was abusing the girls and the assumption was that it was the father.
Do you think that it's possible that we overlook female predators which assists in padding statistics causing this perception to be somewhat self-fulfilling?
Obviously my anecdote doesn't apply to all places, that's not how statistics work, but it was the case that the grandmother was overlooked, and even when caught did not go into the crime statistics as it was considered a social services matter.
Because a large percentage of abuse goes completely unreported, I would expect we overlook even more male predators. The balance of power inside families tends to generally incline in their favour, so they surely find it easier to cover up their tracks.
The question is: is gender even related to this? Or is a position of power simply that much less often taken by a woman in a family? Similarly with race, ethnicity, job, and so on.
I'm willing to believe there's a certain percentage of humans in general that simply enjoy hurting others - and that it's a much larger percentage than we'd expect. I also suspect that most of them are unaware of this fact about themselves, and so they don't actively, or consciously, seek to position themselves in a way that would allow them to hurt other without consequences. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of people who both know their nature and actively seek to express it via abuse of power to be vanishingly small[1].
If all of the above is true, then we're left with people who enjoy hurting others, but don't realize this or don't express it without being put in a position of power. When they are put in a position of power, they start expressing their desires. Whether they are men or women, white or not, rich or poor, etc. I think has little significance.
[1] If you understand yourself well enough to know about this, you're also generally intelligent enough not to try doing it on random, unwilling people.
It's difficult to answer. From my understanding, women are more sensitive towards social repercussions than men are. Which means even if men and women have an equal desire to be violent to get what they want or to derive pleasure from it, you'll always see less women than men do it on an equal playing field with noticeable catch rates and punishments.
If you give women (relative) safety to commit violence and give them the ability to do so, they end up doing so in about equal rates. If you give them less repercussions than men, they end up doing it more. Teen violence is one which is noticeably weighted "in favor" of boys. Not that difficult to understand why, when boys are taught not to hit girls, but girls aren't taught the same and face little consequence in doing so.
Not that it really matters. Truth is, both sexes are very much capable of violence, and both sexes have more than enough people willing to do so once the "benefits" outweigh the costs.
It's "male dominated" but not anywhere near the 90/10 split most people imagine when hearing the word "mostly". The actual numbers are still way out there with how many victims (especially male victims) are ridiculed, and how many perpetrators (especially female perpetrators) are left off the hook.
Haha, yeah right. It's probably higher than 90/10 by any metric, and the more violent sexual crimes are almost always men.
Men commit 97% of murders worldwide. Ironically though it is men that are most likely to find an ideology that deems other cohorts within society as collectively bad and representative of moral decay.
Sexual abuse against men is about 50/50 men and women alone. Even if sexual abuse against women was predominantly male perpetrators, you'd need a far, far higher number of female sexual abuse numbers to get over 90/10. Again, good luck trying to claim that when there are so many social issues masking the true numbers.
That's not to mention a large part of arguments rely on "men in charge", whereas most of the developed world is giving women increasingly more power, at least partially nullifying the former.
>Ironically though it is men that are most likely to find an ideology that deems other cohorts within society as collectively bad and representative of moral decay.
You want to articulate that at all and give people a chance to fight your stance?
From a historical point of view, and because males have less control over their sexual behaviour. I was distinguishing between father and mother, should have said so.
I was not referring to relatives living out of home, as they would need some form of communication to set up their encounters, probably.
This "biological fact" about men having less control over their sexual behavior is new to me. I hate to do the "citation needed" thing, but where are you getting this from? What's the empirical evidence? Do you mean because women pick their mates or something like that? The males have to attract them with displays of plumage?
I agree with your citation needed. There are many culture which wave away responsibility of men for choosing their actions since it "is in their nature". My guess is that it's modeled behavior by the society they live in (and thus can be changed) but I have no sources.
Does a male have a higher sex drive? Are they more likely to rape?
If yes, then women have, in the aggregate, more control over their sexual behaviour than men. And thus men have less control. This does not necesarily imply anything about what the punishment for rape or assault should be.
Note: I am eliding a lot of what the definition of a person is (e.g. everything contained in their skin? Just concious processes? Some form of "natural" baseline that excludes tumors/drugs/etc?) in the above so YMMV.
I recommend using "I agree with the denotation but disagree with connotation/affect" for situations like replying to the grandparent post.
There are parallels here to FBI Agent Ken Lanning's linking of Satanic Panic to X-Rays showing how prevalent child abuse was.[1][2] Nobody wants to talk about the real ugly side of the story here.
"Think of the children" seems to be the battle cry of people with bad ideas that won't work anyways.
Ultimately you can't outlaw math. Instead it'll wind up being just the criminals using actually secure encryption and none of this will matter anyway.
> I just want to point out that lots of the sexual abuse of children are by the child's parent
This seems to be the case in most crimes people freak the fuck out about. I believe, for example, kidnapping and abductions in general tend to be from someone the child knows.
The commission existed far longer and especially these policy decisions by UvdL and in general these surveillance ambitions. These lies were very well established long before any Trump. He is just the exaggerated parody of it. Also a reason why his followers don't care about when he lies. It is business as usual in politics and especially around security legislation.
I would hardly call this trumpficication. That is reading left/right politics on people's deamand for action on a complex issue to something irrelevent.
The closest you can even make a comparator here is that it's a loss of freedom from the whole vs from a very large "minority". Please don't view all politics through the same lense or else you end up worse than those you seek to condemn.
This is more akin to the fact that US military police the bases in the UK for internet tapping and UK military in the US to justify that we're both spying on each-others citizens which makes it "OK".
It's populism - "here's a terrible complex problem, but it's ok, we have a simple solution that you can understand!"
It doesn't matter that the complex problem doesn't actually have a simple solution, and that the simple solution won't solve it, and worse, will end up in overreach.
The EC is not a simple solution to a problem, neither is intercepting all internet traffic a simple, popular, or proven effective solution for anything. Other than invading people's privacy post arrest.
And to put this into perspective, the European Parliament doesn't even suggest/propose laws that will have any actual effect on the people that have voted for them (leaving aside for a moment the fact that almost no-one knows who he/she votes for when it comes to the European Elections), it's the un-elected European Commission and the European Council that does that, the European Parliament acts just like a rubber-stamp entity.
This came as a surprise to me because I have only learned about it recently (during the last year or so), even though I've been voting in the European elections ever since my country joined the EU (in 2007). And I liked to think of myself as reasonably well-versed when it comes to politics, and, as such, I'm pretty sure the majority of the European electorate doesn't know that basic thing either. I mean, it's the European Parliament, no? They're the ones who suggest and propose laws, no? That's why we elected them there, no?
I won't caracterise nigel farage in the UK as being entirely of sound mind but he was single minded in his political career. He highlighted this very strongly to the british people and several political lobies within the UK which is why there was background political support for a referrendum.
There was, and is, a feeling of being cut out of the loop with regard to the EP not having enough powers to override the EC which has only really grown in strength since it was founded, which is a shame. I'm guessing the point of this was to introduce checks/balances but instead it's been open to abuse and ended up with the EC weilding most of the power whilst jumping on planes and visiting most of the Euopean high-life travelling in limos through the slums. (And by that I encourage anyone to visit Brussles and walk around 5miles from where the EU decides to sit to see an example of a bit of an ivory tower)
I'm not for a moment saying voting in all countries is correct, I'm not saying first past the post is the only system. But there was little ability for EC members. It's the EP who broadly have their hands tied and are intended to be the ones who go back to their citizens and get voted out of position very quickly when things go wrong.
> This came as a surprise to me because I have only learned about it recently (during the last year or so), even though I've been voting in the European elections ever since my country joined the EU (in 2007). And I liked to think of myself as reasonably well-versed when it comes to politics, and, as such, I'm pretty sure the majority of the European electorate doesn't know that basic thing either. I mean, it's the European Parliament, no? They're the ones who suggest and propose laws, no? That's why we elected them there, no?
I don't know, i was taught this in high school (my country also joined in 2007), and I've never been left with the impression that people I've discussed EU laws with are unaware of how power is shared in the EU.
However, the EU parliament is not a rubber stamp. There's a wide variety of political leanings represented in it ( up until a few years ago 1/4 were from anti-EU parties). Proposals often get rejected or amended:
I’ve read a statistics that in 2016 it was approving 97% of the law proposals coming from the Commission.
In 2007 I was already employed, with no connection to school whatsoever, I’d say people like me still form the majority when it comes to European Ellections (i.e. people who think that the national parliament and the European one are pretty much the same when it comes to their nature)
Maybe the younger generations will be more knowledgeable when it comes to continent-wide political movements, even though I have major doubts about that (they’re less politically involved than we were, for example).
I saw it mentioned in this Perry Anderson book [1], I'll have to find the physical book that is hidden somewhere behind other books in a corner of my living room and find the exact page. I'll see what I can do but I don't promise anything :)
Oh the delicious irony, although up until recently they were willing to engage with erdogan right up until his own night of the long knives which ended up putting the silos on high alert.
Yep, and this is one of the major sticking points among the educated people in the UK who voted for brexit.
This may sit well with some, but not with others. It has almost certainly created a large political divide close to the philosphical lines of the role of govenment being either to rule or to govern.
> trumpification (i.e. lies upon lies and speaking as if you have a significant mental problem)
Why use both the term and explanation for it? Either the reader knows the term and has to skip the explanation, or skip the term and read just the explanation. When in doubt, using just the longer expression avoids useless noise
Because the term is widely used, but after I wrote it I realised not every single reader might know that it means "to speak as if you have brain damage". So I added some explanation, everyone can participate now and some folks might expand their vocabulary.
Byzantine is exactly the right word. Weak maybe not; a united EU would be the most powerful economic superpower in the world, and in some ways, the EU really does wield a lot of power, and often for good. But most of the time, the EU is very divided. And sometimes that's good, because it does justice to the diversity of opinion, and sometimes it's unbelievably impractical, because the EU fails to act or acts too slow on things that require more action.
But byzantine is absolutely right. It's in a very large part backroom politics. Between democratically elected national governments, but still very opaque, with insufficient checks and balances, with too much access by corporate lobbyists (there was a time when two different factions proposed literally the exact same law independently from each other, which was clearly written by lobbyists).
Every member state can veto every EU commission proposal. The member states are far more powerful than the commission. Also, the commission itself has a representative from each member state. The funny thing about the EU commission is that they get criticized for being dictators and toothless and weak at the same time. Often even by the same people.
The problem is the obfuscation. It's another layer of politics to allow political parties to do what they want. This proposal doesn't work locally? Make it an EU level thing.
Part of the problem is how a lot of EU countries work. A parliamentary system means that the parties that create the coalition in the national government have a majority in the legislature, therefore they will control the executive. The executive then appoints somebody to the EU commission. These parties then make up EU-level parties too in the EU parliament.
In essence, it's the same groups of people that push politics on both levels.
This is International Agreements 2.0, where politicians can use external methods to bypass local policymaking.
> Every member state can veto every EU commission proposal
This is just false
But the commission can't do much without the agreement of parliament and the member states as a collective (even though member states can be outvoted by other member states) and it can't do anything that parliament and the member states as a collective explicitly oppose
They sold us "liberty, fraternity, equality" and "peace on earth", and "development for all" and "freedom from totalitarism". That is how we got there.
Countries have resigned their power to mint coin *without questioning their citizenship*: this is so amazing and nobody complains.
And that is just one of many. Now we will have a military without even questioning whether we the people want to or not!
According to the DKSB (Deutscher Kinderschutzbund) [1], encryption barely plays a role when it comes to the distribution of CSAM [2]. In short: DKSB is not in favour of this. You know, the people that probably know what they are talking about when it comes to the protection of children, unlike the politicians who are trying to force this through.
The politicians which only really talked to salesmen of surveillance software [3] about this and never really consulted any independent people with expertise in tech, privacy or the protection of children [4].
Because this was never, at any moment, about protecting children.
[1]: https://www.dksb.de/en/home/
[2]: https://www.eu-info.de/dpa-europaticker/316232.html
[3]: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
[4]: https://edri.org/our-work/private-and-secure-communications-...