Comment by CGamesPlay
1 day ago
I am always curious when I see these kinds of movement. It seems abundantly clear that the options on any vote in any legislature for a proposed bill are always “yes” and “ask me later”. So when I see things like Fight Chat Control, it feels like the call is “we must tell our legislators to press the ask later button!”
Why? Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward? Genuinely curious. I understand that finding and pressing the “don’t ask again” button is always harder, but I don’t understand why “we punted on this decision!” is a celebratory moment.
Because we can barely stop new legislation we don't like, let alone pass new ones we do. You're out-monied by lobbyists at all levels.
Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.
> You're out-monied by lobbyists at all levels.
What does industry gain from new laws here?
You can always find something. There's always someone profiteering from anything and everything that politicians could possibly do.
Politicians demanding total surveillance and population control? Of course there's an industry or two for that. Are they lobbying for this stuff? Absolutely.
But what's the causality? That's the ideological question.
In my view, it's a bit too convenient to blame all political evils on capitalism. Power is its own aphrodisiac. Bigotry has no prerequisits. Neither does stupidity.
Better advertisement. Like for example this new bill pushed by Facebook in US about age verification by PC. It will create a universally available API of sorts, which any ad corpo can poll and get more private information about PC user.
Same with this Stazi 2.0 shit by EU. I'm sure the data produced will be either directly processed by some corpo having ad interests, or freely gifted to such corpos.
Less industry, more small coalitions or special interest groups. Any number of things. To name a few factors
- ideaological. They truly believe this is the best choice, or are fixated only on this choice and nothing else. They are putting their money where their mouths are
- financial. Straightforward one. If they need a service to collect ID's and you can get a government contract, that's big, safe, money. Or a politician is bribed and doesn't care either way. Companies find loopholes to sell data and make even more money.
- power. You get a law passed, you get more leverage to being voted into politics, or maintaining your incumbency. You show you can "get things done"
> Maybe a movement could match a lobbyist in terms of money. I hope so.
That's just more lobbying. Politics needs less money involved, not more.
> we can barely stop new legislation we don't like, let alone pass new ones we do
These are literally the same process.
Is it? Stopping is a matter of ground swell support contacting representatives and saying "please don't". Enough people do it to enough receptive reps and they'll vote no.
Passing new ones that "you like" requires lawyers to write laws, get those laws in front of reps, get them to agree to try and pass it, stake some of their reputation on pushing it, get the ground swell to support it -- which might be difficult when the current law is "dont scan messages", you can easily say "hey dont scan anything! support that!" vs "hey scan somethings sometimes", cause many people will call that a slippery slope. I don't see how they are at all the same process.
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> toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
That's not something the "legislators" in the EU parliament can do. It's effectively a consultative body which can either approve or send back the legislation provided to them so the council and commision can find sufficient workarounds...
What would actually help is if a government of a country where this type of Stasi/KGB style surveillance is constitutionally illegal like Germany to speak out and tell the EU (and Denmark which keeps pushing this) that they can go fuck themselves and that they will prosecute any company which is trying to comply with these regulations. (which would be perfectly legal since constitution/basic laws still supersede any type of EU treaty obligations in most countries.
Passing legislation is harder. It should absolutely be the goal but it can't be passed if there is already legislation allowing the abuse.
>Why has your approach not been toward passing active legislation that protects these rights going forward?
Maybe because the Commission holds the true power and the commissioners aren't directly elected by the people so you don't have any leverage against the commissioners. You can't just say "behave nicely or we won't support you at the next elections".
That's not true. The commission do the bidding of the Council or other elected national ministers. Re-posting my comment: ---
They're just like the civil service in the UK, or any other country. They do the bidding of our nationally elected governments. Nearly all proposals coming from the commission originate from the national governments.
So a law:
Starts with member states directly elected ministers pushing and agenda or the council (again elected) agreeing to push an agenda -> Commissioners take this agenda and work with it to propose law (using EU civil service like any other country does) -> The law then gets voted on by the EU directly elected ministers, who are meant to (and do) represent the people of the states more directly.
Everything in that step is as democratic as any other nation (or nearly).
Most people really don't understand the EU - and yes, it is confusing. This unfortunately makes it easy for certain interests to weaponise this misunderstanding. I've spent years (and years) explaining these concepts, but ultimately like any other argument, this is not a debate from logic, everyone has already made up their minds on emotion or ideology and nothing will make a difference.
It is true though. He said "directly elected by the people" and they are obviously not. If we are being honest, the system where privileged few select other privileged few among themselves is called oligarchy.
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You kind of can, but you get to only vote for the full package i.e. the party which wins the national elections will get to appoint its own commissioner. Most people obviously only care about the domestic issues and likely will not change their vote regardless of what the appointed commissioner thinks or does.
The European """Parliament""" can only reject laws, but not propose new ones.
Also curious, as much as the American amendments are problematic, they do at lease create a hard position on things. We are devolving into a space where I’m genuinely scared that the future will become entirely controlled by big money, and it will be too late to change it.
From my understanding Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is somewhat similar to US Constitution & amendments. Both do still allow government to restrict the freedoms granted by those in some situations though I do think the US Constitution does tend to set higher bar on the interference.
There have been EU laws which get struck down because they violated the Charter (e.g. Data Retention Directive).
Hopefully even if the worst comes to pass and the EU ends up enacting this law there are still the courts on the EU level and then the national governments and courts in countries where this type of surveillance is illegal can still decide to do whatever the want (i.e. national constitutions general take precedence over EU treaty obligations)
The future you fear is already here, sorry.