> EU commission's retraction can be challenged in the courts if it's not allowed.

Take it from a gay American dinosaur: you cannot trust the courts to do the right thing. The court system of any country is the system of last resort to dealing with issues after they have caused harm or suffering, and by design they’ve been overloaded with grievances to make it harder to stop any institutional harms.

The right time to stop this sort of action is before it becomes law. Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career, nevermind letting it make it to an actual proposal or committee.

Stop putting faith in a court system operated by the same entities making the rules. You’re effectively waiting until the last possible moment to stop something after it’s done harm, which is highly irresponsible at the very least and does nothing to prevent harms from happening in the first place.

> "Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career"

Well said.

It's a weak and stagnant variant of democracy, where people say (to paraphrase): it doesn't matter what the people think, or say, or believe; or how their elected representatives vote; because you can just count on the courts (or some other force external-to-democracy) to clean up and fix everything. That's not democracy. That's shirking the hard parts of civic participatory democracy—offloading the burden onto a small group of elites who aren't meant to be morally load-bearing.

You've *failed* at liberal democracy if you've reached the point where your popularly-elected representatives are floating the suggestion of North Korean-style panopticons. (Or anything else as antithetical to core human rights).

Liberal democracy, if it should exist, is a zeitgeist of strongly-held shared values—not (only) a set of legal technicalities codified in a document somewhere.

Yes and that even seems to be missing the key issue - if a system's legislative body is hostile to basic tenants of liberal democracy then expecting the courts to act as a protective buffer is at best a stalling tactic to delay the inevitable by a few years. It is almost pointless fighting once that sort of law gets in, the powers that be think mass spying is OK and are committed to finding a way. The courts can't protect people from that sort of pressure, the only way to resist is to have people in power who think mass spying is bad. The US failed that test and it looks like Europe will too - very distressing for the prospects of the liberal project.

The court system is zero integrity.

But you say 'if it's not allowed', but not allowed by whom?

The courts aren't some kind of magic guarantors of justice and order, and something isn't okay just because the courts approve it. If this somehow is tolerated by the courts, the fact that we have them is irrelevant.

It's the policy itself that determines whether we are like North Korea.

"But you say 'if it's not allowed', but not allowed by whom?"

Not allowed by EU law obviously. Role of courts (in general) is interpreting law and thus deciding how said laws apply case by case. Law in EU flows down from EU treaties that where negotiated and signed by member countries. The big ones (treaties) needed also be "ratified" by country wide referenda.

So laws are made by people, sometimes retired people, sometimes people.

So it's just another thing allowed by a person. Law isn't something magical with capability to make something not okay okay. Law is just someone allowing or forbidding something, with this having been incorporated into a sort of system.

That... is exactly what [democratic] law is...

I don't know exactly what you mean, since we have a representative democracy and since the governments enter the treaties and have strong influence over many parliaments it's really is very person focused in the end, even though it really shouldn't be.

A sensible world would have lots of referendums with the general public approving or disapproving of parliamentary decisions, à la Switzerland, but that is not the world we live in.

But people can run for office on that change if they wanted to/felt like people actually wanted that.

The reality is most people don't want to think about governance all day every day, so we hire people to do it. Key thing is that we hire them.

> Key thing is that we hire them.

I do not feel heartened by this sentence, even though I should be. We're choosing from a pre-curated menu rather than truly "hiring" representatives. The real power lies with party gatekeepers, donors, and institutional barriers that determine who even makes it onto the ballot, not with voters making the final selection. It's more like being asked to pick your favorite from two restaurants that a food critic already chose for you, rather than having genuine choice over where to eat.

In most democracies, you can literally go grab a clipboard and knock on doors and gather signatures to put your own name on the ballot.

Sure, power isn't evenly distributed and there are some obvious improvements we should pursue, but this does not a North Korea make

and it's not incredibly practical. Instead those sit at the head of institutions, whether political parties, governments, etc. have real power.

It's a bit like saying 'so make your own Facebook', but that's pretty useless if it's a response to someone who feel that some big social media company is influencing public discourse and harming proponents of certain ideas.

You can't make your own Facebook, or organize a political party other than in response to slow phenomena, and here we're talking about something has until recently been seen as literally illegal-- against the founding principles of the EU, so this is a huge, sudden change which people have no chance of resisting in a representative system.

Completely normal people win political power all the time, at least in the US where I'm familiar with it.

No they don't get elected to the highest offices in the land (nor should they), but you can absolutely work your way there from a clipboard.

That really isn't true.

You are basically chosen by parties and other entrenched organizations. New parties are very unusual.

However, none of that really matters. Democracy, laws, etc. don't make this kind of anti-privacy policy more legitimate. If you create a STASI, it doesn't matter if you do so democratically, and that really is what we are talking about.

With software on your phones controlled by others going through your stuff you have a beyond-STASI-surveillance level.

My interpretation of parent comment is that, we shouldn't be just "themwashing" these powers, and start placing them under technical scrutiny more often.

The previous proposals ran into basic human rights issues. Changing laws related to those tends to be a lot harder than just passing jet another surveillance bill. Of course it still isn't perfect since those can be bypassed by "restricting" the use of the data to specific cases and then just ignoring the restrictions once the systems are in place.

Sure, but until the courts handle this, the damage is already done. Until that point, laws can be changed.

The problem is not that the EU doesn't have checks and balances, the problem is that politicians are willing to offend common decency in the first place and drive the erosion of civil rights.

>politicians are willing to offend common decency in the first place

That's always the case in well working liberal democracy. Or, Can you provide example when this is not a case.

That's why we have liberal democracy.

"Liberal democracy". Have you tried voting out a member of the EU commission?

I would bet good money on that 90% of people from EU could not name a single member of the EU Commission.

I wouldn't bet on that. Zensursula is already a well known meme. Doesn't change the chance of her or anyone else in the commission facing any consequences.

She is the president of the Commission, overseeing its work. I'm not sure if she's technically a member.

I always figured that the president of the European Commission is a member of the European Commission but I wasn’t 100% sure if that is “technically” the case. I did some research and The list of Members of the von der Leyen Commission¹ clarifies that the president – along with the vice-presidents – are included among the 27 members of the “College of Commissioners”.

¹ https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-comm...

You cannot vote out a single member of the government/parliament in many democracies, it is not an intrinsic characteristic of any system we call so.

The ECHR and the EU charter have loopholes that basically say "unless stipulated by law and being necessary in a democratic society" or similar. This is why we already have extremely intimate surveillance by secret police laundered with some supposed petty crime as excuse.

The current regime demands too much bureaucracy and too many employees to be rolled out broadly, hence this push to do what they're already doing but on a much larger scale and just store the data until they want it. From the perspective of politicians it's already something that's being done, e.g. in the US surveillance programs and everyday policing and software from large US corporations and so on. They think the resistance from their subjects is infantile and stupid.