The only reason Hungary is currently associated with the "Chat control" draft is because Hungary currently holds the EU presidency and as part of their mandate they are free to set goals and negotiate with other countries in order to come up with future laws.
First, these drafts mostly originate from the EU commission, so Hungary is not the one who came out with it in the first place. Secondly, Belgium which had the presidency a couple of months ago also tried (and failed) to get this draft across the line.
So yes, Hungary, which may or may not be on it's way to become a dictatorship is very happy to keep pushing for these negotiations to happen but let's also take a moment and remember that Sweden, France, Spain and many more countries are also happy with it.
So to me, the question is how can we take EU countries seriously when they talk about privacy when so many of them are ready to create a system of blanket surveillance on all their citizens?
Well I guess they draw a distinction between allowing state-level actors to access information in the name of stopping crimes and/or national security concerns and allowing the same sort of access to commercial entities.
I'm not saying that justifies it, but it's a different threat model - accessing data about your own citizens for state reasons, rather than collecting data about everyone for commercial gain.
Let's hope it gets knocked back again.
Secondly, this piece of legislation is not only a threat to the people of Europe, it is actually a gift to the autocracies of the world like China, Russia and Iran and more who as soon as it is implemented will deploy tremendous amounts of efforts to break into it.
By going forward with this law, we are advertising to the world, hey we got a backdoor here, come and use it! Instead of making it harder for foreign powers to break into our system, we are creating multiple points of failures where the data could be intercepted.
That seems a little, well, binary.
I don't have (nor want) a lot of privacy from my partner. I have a lot more from my boss, who clearly doesn't need to know about the pimple on my ass. He also doesn't need to know my car registration, which the government does, or parts of the government. You need to look at your threat model and understand what it is you want to protect and from whom. "Privacy" is a bit more complex than on/off.
I agree, the backdoor is a poorly thought out idea, it's an authoritarian fantasy which (like many authoritarian fantasies) doesn't take into account the practicality of the idea or the second order consequences. That back door will indeed be a target, so the people of the EU have to worry about not only their own governments misusing the data but (as you say) other powers finding ways in as well.
On the corporate side, the threat model is different - companies don't want the expense of doing security well and they have a profit motive of being able to sell data. This treasure trove could also be useful to foreign actors, or those (like Cambridge Analytica) who would use it for domestic political aims. EU citizens are relatively well protected from this type of threat at the moment, US citizens not so much.
Should weakness in one mean you don't listen to anything out of the EU when it comes to privacy? Again I think that's too binary. The EU has some great ideas and laws about protecting us from the excesses of corporate data hoarding, those should be celebrated, just as we excoriate them on attempts to create a state panopticon.
The wide acknowledgement is only wide in a particular EU bubble.
That's a bad place to start when looking at autocracies which distort the democratic system to provide an illusion of legitimacy. But you knew that.
I don’t see how that’s worse than the French people voting Macron out and France still being governed by Macron and his people.
Throwing around words like autocracy is by now lame and tired, just like those crying racism all the time.
Oh, is it still? OK, maybe... But just barely, ad not for long.
> the elections “were well ... marred by the absence of a level playing field”.
Yeah, that's what should'a tolja it's not much of a democracy any more.
> I don’t see how that’s worse than the French people voting Macron out and France still being governed by Macron and his people.
That's probably mostly because the French people have done nothing like voting Macron out. France hasn't had a presidential election this year, not last yar IIRC.
> Throwing around words like autocracy is by now lame and tired
Yeah, you're right, it is. When it's unwarranted. But do you know what's even more lame and tired? Defending autocrats.
Especially if it's done as badly as your attempt here.
I'm Hungarian, I hate Orban [1], but your comment is not accurate. It's not "widely acknowledged" and nobody is seriously using the word "dictatorship" to describe Hungary or Orban's regime, including Orban's fiercest opponents [in Hungary]. We have had various forms of dictatorships in Hungary, and this isn't one of them.
What we have today is most commonly referred to as an authoritarian form of democracy. But we have elections every 4 years, and if people were to vote against Orban, he'd be gone. The last one, in 2022, there were 20k opposition observers in the voting offices and they certified that everything was legit. Having said that there are multiple aspects that make the elections unfair. As we say in Hungary, the "football field is tilted to favor one side". For example, the election map is heavily optimized to favor Orban. Or, state media and 100% of state funds has been captured by Orban to run his misinformation campaigns, which does mean that by the time elections come, a significant % of the population has been indoctrinated and brainwashed. And so on.. But still, it's not a dictatorship. It's just that people are stupid, just as in every country, and unfortunately in 2010 Orban received a 2/3 majority which he used to accomplish the initial "tilt", and he's masterfully kept it up ever since.
Why is Hungary not a dictatorship? Your personal freedoms are not in danger, nobody has ever been killed or even hurt for political reasons in Hungary (unlike Russia). We have freedom of speech, you can go in front of the parliament building and say the nastiest things about Orban, and you'll be fine (unlike in Russia). We have opposition parties, who according to their seats in parliament receive state funding. We have fairly conducted and counted elections (unlike in Russia). We have tons of opposition media and they are free to operate, eg. the biggest Hungarian language political Youtube channels are opposition.
However, Hungary is definitely not a healthy democracy. We have widespread corruption wrt state funds. We have a significant imbalance in media reach in favor Orban. Orban is more than willing to run toxis misinformation campaigns and seed division and hatred that will take many years, possibly generations, to weed out. And, for still unknown reasons, Orban is in bed with Putin and runs Russian misinformation campaigns in Hungary. And so on..
Related to the OP, I can tell you that Orban and his cronies run a variety of misinformation campaigns [in Hungary], but nothing related to cryptography.
From what I can see out there on the internet, it's more than just the media - Orban's cronies seem to have captured the judiciary as well, which helps shield them from investigation. He also seems to be trying various tactics to suppress political opposition - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/23/orban-accused-...
I think I'm going to stick by my evaluation of 'nascent dictatorship', though perhaps 'nascent autocracy' is more accurate if it's not all about the one man. And it does seem to be widely acknowledged that democracy has been undermined there, to the point it doesn't function.
> I can tell you that Orban and his cronies run a variety of misinformation campaigns [in Hungary], but nothing related to cryptography.
Yeah fair enough, it seems that a lot of other governments are all in on this sort of thing, and the headline is particularly misleading.
Yes, this is true unfortunately. On the other hand, most of our political opposition [1] was so lame that Orban's baseline tactic was pretty much to just let them do their thing, and that repeatedly led to these parties to self-destruct.
To be clear, the situation in Hungary is shit, but it's not a dictatorship..
[1] between 2010 to 2023, before the new 2024 wave with Peter Magyar and his new Tisza party
Yeah, exactly: in Hungary. The rest of the world is bigger than Hungary, so the terms used in the rest of the world are more wide-spread than those used in Hungary.
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[1]: And Hungarians in general as right-wing nutjobs for keeping re-electing him. The only thing the rest of us Europeans don't get is: Why don't you get rid of him while it's still legally possible to do so?
Having said that, Hungary is still not a dictatorship, inside or outside Hungary, per the Democracy_Index [1]. Your country, Finland, with 9.3, has one of the highest scores! Congrats, you have come a long way since the Cold War ended. Hungary has a significantly lower score at 6.7, which makes it a "Flawed democracy". If you check this list, you will find lots of other european countries in the "Flawed democracy" bucket, and with a lower score than Hungary.
"And Hungarians in general as right-wing nutjobs for keeping re-electing him" - I'm not offended by this, but surely you know that no country is a homogeneous set of people. Very roughly, Hungary has about 9.6M people, 8.2M in the voting age, in the 2022 election 5.7M voted, and about 3M of those voted for Orban, unfortunately [2]. (Among them was much of my family I'm afraid.) But you see, there are 5.2M people in the voting pool who did not vote for Orban, so it's not true that hungarians in general are "right-wing nutjobs".
Having said that I have a pretty low opinion of a significant portion of my Hungarian countrymen, but not specifically because they're all "right-wing nutjobs". I would say the root problem is that they (like Trump voters in the US) have access to an infinite stream of information on the Internet, some of it high-quality, some of it low-quality and misleading, and they should be smart enough to tell signal from the noise, inform themselves and have reasonable opinions.
"Why don't you get rid of him while it's still legally possible to do so?" - Naturally you don't follow Hungarian politics, but the way 2024 has been going so far, I strongly suspect that Orban will at a minimum lose his 2/3 majority in 2026, possibly the election. He and his cronies are making a lot of mistakes, there are scandals happening almost every week now. There is now a singular opposition party called "Tisza" which has about the same ~40% support as Orban today (so both are at roughly 40%). The only problem is, this new opposition party is so far a one-man show by a guy [3] who used to be in Orban's Fidesz party. So although he probably wouldn't be as bad as Orban, esp. at the beginning, he would still be right-wing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
[2] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022-es_magyarorsz%C3%A1gi_ors...
[3] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_P%C3%A9ter_(jog%C3%A1sz...
He has a 2/3 majority?!? And won't (possibly) lose it until 2026? How long has it been known that he's a raging nutjob and asshole -- one decade, or several? Possibly losing his huge majority in over a year from now... That's far too little, far too late.
> But you see, there are 5.2M people in the voting pool who did not vote for Orban, so it's not true that hungarians in general are "right-wing nutjobs".
Enough of them are indifferent enough to right-wing nutjobbery not to vote against Orban's right-wing nutjobbery, which makes them enablers of him and it.
Over time I've come to think that all peoples are in the end responsible for their own leadership: If a majority of the people is against oppression, then they should vote against it. If they can't vote, they should rise in revolution. If they don't, they're not sufficiently against it to warrant being called civilised.
That's why Germans carried (and to some extent still carry?) a collective responsibility for Nazism (and anew do so for the AfD and BSW nutjobs they're voting into power nowadays); why Russians carry a collective responsibility for Putin (and before him, for Stalin. And Ivan IV); and why Hungarians carry a collective responsibility for Orban.
IMO.
I don’t think it really works to call out a potential slippery slope when the country is already overtly on that pathway. Those in power there can already operate with relative impunity.
(This is the reason that when Trump says “Orban likes me!” it’s not actually a flex)