The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies. They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for.

We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.

> do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.

>many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to (total surveillance)

It's not about the malicious elites. These societal problems surveillance keeps being pushed for never get fixed in either China or Russia. Yet people (not just politicians) keep pushing for it or at the very least ignoring the push. A decade+ after the push, things like KYC/AML regulations are not even controversial anymore, and never even were for most people. Oh, these are banks! Of course they need the info on your entire life because how else would you stop money laundering, child molesters, or shudders those North Koreans? What, are you a criminal?

And of course you somehow manage to blame the usual bad guys for something that happens in your society, because of course they're inherently evil and are always the reason for your problems. Guess what, the same often happens there and they copy your practices. Don't you have your own agency?

The reality is that the majority in any place in the world doesn't see privacy, or most of their or others' rights for that matter, worth fighting for. Having the abundancy and convenience is enough.

This is the downside of public education: the state isn't incentivised to teach you things that could undermine its power.

Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?

But they aren't thinking of our interests, they are thinking of theirs which is what I think that the parent comment wanted to share that their and our interests are fundamentally conflicting and so we must fight for our right I suppose as well.

They are doing this to prevent tide turn and personally, I feel like if both/many political parties agree to something like chat-control and agree that they make it a bi-partisan issue, then they can fundamentally do it and the "they" would be constant

Also the "they" here also refers to lobbying efforts. The billionaires/millionaires/rich people might like these things solely because it increases the influence of govt. and thus the rich people as well

As an example, Let me present to you the UK censorship act which tries to threaten any and every website with a very large price which is very scary to many people who have thus shut down their services / websites to UK at large if they were a niche project/couldn't do it

Internet as we speak, would continue on to become more centralized. I feel like the idea here is that make internet so centralized that you can control the flow of information itself(I mean it already is but there are still some spots left like hackernews as an example)

Its also one step towards authoritarianism. This could be a stepping stone for something even larger which could have a more constant "they" as well but I have already provided some reasonings as to why they do that, simply because they can and chat control gives them a way to do mass surveillance which is something which to me increases the infleunece of both parties or the whole system massively in a way which feels very threatening to freedom/democracy making it thus dystopian.

That is preposterous.

We dismiss the suggestion of removing the right to privacy precisely because it doesn’t stop these crimes but it does support political repression.

The crimes go on, only criticism of the government for failing to address them is stopped.

EDIT: the more I reread your post the more I suspect this might be exactly the point you are making. Sorry, too subtle for me first thing in the morning. Need more coffee.

"They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for."

That reads like just stating government perspective.

"We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."

But this says something different to me. Because yes, I do see it as a inherent flaw if governments focus is on things that are mainly good for the government. Government's job should be focusing on what is good for the people.

Allegedly, Spanish police is a great supporter of Chat Control, not because of CP, but because of them wanting to spy on Catalan and Basque separatists more effectively.

Several Catalan politicians were prosecuted for holding an "illegal referendum" and had to hide in Belgium for some time.

This is not because I support their mass surveillance proposal, I am strongly against it. I think that the politicians are naive (maybe even to the point of warranting the label stupid) and ignore the huge risks that exists of future governments to start using the mass surveillance platform, once it is in place, to start doing actual censorship. I am also extremely worried about the slow scope creep that will inevitably result from this; today it starts with CSAM and terrorism, next year it is about detecting recruiting of gang members, and in a couple of years it is about detecting small-scale drug transactions.

I know that. The problem it is evil, not that it is stupid and silly.

The whole point is that I do not want to give government power over me like it happened in China and Russia.

With "think about children" as smokescreen.

I guess this is what we need in the West too. Lets just cement the current ruling class in for decades.

What is your sales pitch? "Hey, you guys should try having a less stable government, in exchange you'll get some abstract platitudes about freedom and privacy."

Your comment is precisely what I mean when I said people end up fixating on #1 to the exclusion of #2.

I didn't claim "there are no problems that can be solved or goals achieved by means of mass/total surveillance". My topic was societal problems. The political dilemma "how do I retain power and curtail disagreement?" isn't in this category.

"The issue is that there is a place where this model ~is working. It's in China and Russia. The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.

The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies. They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for.

We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."

I stand by my comment that these technologies are doing exactly what they are intended for.

Also, Russian and especially Chinese leadership doesn't go unchallenged. Chinese leadership has had many transitions. While Putin has squatted on the leadership of Russia for a very long time now, it isn't because he's not popular, and he's forced to do a lot of things he'd rather not do because of pressure on his leadership.

How do the neoliberal rulers in the West stay on top with extreme minorities of popular support, like in France or the UK? Why does popular opinion have no effect on the politics of the US*, and why are its politics completely run by two private clubs with the same billionaire financial supporters (that also finance politics all over the rest of the West)? How do they do it without massive surveillance, censorship and information control? Or a better question: how can we be given the evidence of massive surveillance efforts and huge operations dedicated to censorship and information control, over and over again, and still point to the East when we talk about the subject? Isn't that "whataboutism"?

* "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

I agree, it's a great, proven tool to do away with political enemies, and to selectively enforce the law, for whatever motivation.

I just don't understand what you mean by

>We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it.

We (as in, "the people") don't do any disservice for us by opposing such an effort. Specifically because we are also looking at what goes on in Russia and China to name a few. Authoritarian regimes do "work", but don't, generally, want that kind of working over here in Europe for example.

The inherent flaw is: It is despotic and only serves despots and their minions, at the cost of oppressing the majority of people.

But the ISPs couldn't implement it in a practical way and essentially refused until they were given something doable. That ended up, in some cases, being "register every 500th TCP package" (or similar; it might've been DNS lookup).

At the same time, if the police wanted actual digital surveillance, they'd just contact the ISP and say "Hey, can we get ALL the traffic for this one person who is under suspicion?" and the ISPs would, in some cases I'm familiar with, comply without a court order. So there was a clear path of execution for actual surveillance while at the same time this political circus made no sense.

Imagine you're surveilling a place for criminal activity and you're recording one second of audio every 8 minutes. Surely gold nuggets are gonna leak out of that.

Well that's kind of the thing. With AI it is. In theory, they can now monitor all of us at the same time on a scale never before thought possible. The time of "big brother has better things to do than monitor you specifically" is over.

I have always felt like what these services would do is to push towards things like matrix/signal etc. and matrix is decentralized as an example so they can't really do chat control there but my idea of chat control was always similar to UK in the sense that they are gonna scare a lot of people to host services like this which bypass intentionally or unintentionally this because if they bypass it, they would have to pay some hefty fees and that possibility itself scares people similar to what is happening in the UK itself.

VPN's are a good model maybe except that once they get on the chopping block, they might break the internet even further similar to chinese censorship really. Maybe even fragmenting the internet but it would definitely both scare and scar the internet for sure.

Eh, no?

Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."

"Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy."

There were less social problems back then. Better times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

Now we just do the same, more efficiently, with AI spies.

Have you ever heard of the Red Scare "McCarthyism" or the Patriot Act? The EU is the opposite of East Germany, nothing was inherited; they were robbed and left behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_wars

Just last year, France used similar argument of "exporting illegal encryption against Telegram" to get the master keys to decrypt all end-to-end encrypted messages:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41359745

The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did. The secret legacy police is still going strong in countries like Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, as we have seen from the cases where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.

Patriot Act was in 2001, you dont have to break encryption when the NSA can sniff at the source, but let's not just stop there have a look at this:

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeli...

>The other EU countries have not seen similar proper purge like East Germany did.

And what has that to do with "socialist heritage"? IF East Germany had a proper purge then nothing was inherited into the EU right?

>where these governments are using Pegasus spyware against their own political opposition.

Yes and then there was Watergate...but again what has Nixon in common with socialism? And maybe have a look at "Merkelphone" when "Friends spy on Friends"

https://theconversation.com/merkelphone-scandal-shocks-europ...

You contradict yourself.

That's not how end-to-end encryption works.

Are there for example cases where NSA is sniffing Signal app, or even WhatsApp "at source"?

>That's not how end-to-end encryption works.

Hell even the German police can "access" Whats-Up/Facebook.

>>German security forces can access personal Whatsapp messages of any user even without installing spyware, several German media institutions reported.

>>attains the information of suspects via "Whatsapp Web."

https://www.dailysabah.com/world/europe/german-police-can-ac...

And btw the NSA for example is "at first" more interested in metadata, if interesting, cracking of data will begin sometimes talk with big business.

I stop here have a good day.

They specifically state in the introduction of Chat Control act that the reason for the banning end-to-end encrypted communications is that criminals use WhatsApp and police cannot crack the message, hence the Chat Control act. The police cannot crack these messages and they want to read everyone's messages and that's the whole point of making encryption illegal.

If you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can read more about Chat Control and encryption here:

https://edri.org/our-work/chat-control-what-is-actually-goin...

but this is still somehow breaking encryption.

More IT people in politics.

The mass-surveillance proponents will always exist in small numbers, but it gets revived every other month because the number of ignorant politicians receptive to the idea is a function of their ignorance and malformed understanding of reality.

But that isn't their fault.

It's the magic tech companies are selling - and it's knowledgeable individuals who have to effectively communicate and explain bullshit.

Luckily people who spend all day looking at screens make for notoriously bad politicians.

Most people can pretty clearly relate to one of these perspectives over the other, and it’s pretty clear what actions follow from that.

Humans are inherently flawed and they're inherently kind. We're evolutionarily primed for competition and cooperation. Antisocial behaviour can be both inherent and environmental. I feel you might be setting up a false dichotomy when the motivations for political beliefs are often pretty complex and varied.

It is common for "liberal" governments, as in the UK at the moment, who are inclined to pass censorship, surveillance and control (of people's lives) laws. It is also common for "conservative" governments to do the same.

What is very common is for people to think themselves and people like themselves to be naturally kind and people unlike themselves as fundamentally flawed.

> I think I represented the ideology of conservatism and liberalism correctly here, so call out the social sciences over that.

If you are saying that you there is a correct definition within the social sciences, can you cite an authoritative source for that?

In any case you were talking about "the world view people have" and I think your definition correlates very poorly with those of people one would normally describe as "liberal" or "conservative". I am not even sure which mindset you associate with the "monitor and control" mentality. I think you mean its a conservative mindset, but a lot of the people I know who most strongly oppose it are conservative or Conservative (as in members of the party that has the word in its name).

This might be a US vs UK difference, of course. These are not words that are really used very consistently within societies, let alone between them.

> so call out the social sciences over that.

Happy to do so if that is what they say!

You can start at Wikipedia, for example, which quotes Thomas Hobbes:

> the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralized authority with royal sovereignty to guarantee law and order.

And further:

> Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by political scientist Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative view of human nature and pessimism of the potential to improve it through 'utopian' schemes.

I don’t mean to insinuate "conservatives are evil and want to spy on citizens", but merely that they are generally more inclined to believe people are inherently incapable of behaving well, so they need to be nudged towards the right thing. Really believing this makes it far more likely to view government monitoring as a plausible solution to the problem they see. And again, I’m saying this without implying any judgement.

Conservatives generally see people as capable of self-direction and argue for minimal interference because virtue needs room to act.

Progressives also tend to see people as capable of good, but assume outcomes depend on systems, so they push for more state involvement to improve those conditions.

Neither thinks humans are irredeemable. Both generally believe humans are inherently kind. The difference is whether you trust individuals or bureaucracies to manage human weakness.

> Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general.

I’m neither American nor using US partisan definitions. I’m using the terms as they’re broadly understood in political theory and history.

> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them.

That’s a paternalist or technocratic premise, not a conservative one. Classical conservatism accepts human fallibility but trusts evolved social norms not bureaucracy to contain it. The belief that people must be centrally guided is the antithesis of that tradition.

> So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.

You might try the same. Hobbes wasn’t a conservative - he was an absolutist. Quoting him to define conservatism is like citing Marx to define capitalism.

I say it should be kept in the university library under lock and key, something philosophy professors can sit and debate in their spare time behind closed doors. /s

Who made this definition, left wing scholars? I doubt many conservative persons would say this.

You could just as well say that this is the central pillar of communism, that people need to be controlled since they are too evil if they are free to form companies and structure themselves. Or that this is the central pillar of social democracy, that without big taxes and central institutions to spend peoples money on things that benefits them they will make bad choices and not get the things they need.

Every government is about taking control from the people, I don't get what you mean that conservatives would do this more than any other group.

It is also this mindset of wanting to micromanage things/people in hope for better performance. Those are the usually the ones pushing for scanning people's private messages. People like Stalin and Mao would love stuff like that. The urge to micro-manage is a very band-aid type of solution and not dealing with complexity of the situation.

I have.

> will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures

I do.

> that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path

No. When people are misguided that will even more apply to those in power and with weapons. The fact that I view everyone as likely misguided means nobody should have any say over the other.

The modern trend to frame conservatism and authoritarianism as "the same thing" is very bad and leads to the normalization of authoritarianism.

.. and stored! Which is the worst part, IMO, because once you have a record it's only a matter of time until it reaches the wrong hands.

"Ideas are bulletproof, Mr Creedy". It's valid for good and bad ideas.

People refuse to think ahead, or simply can't.

But the reality is that there will always be a scumbag dad who decides to molest his daughter.

HN assumes evil but this is a "road paved with good intentions" kind of deal.

They are the same picture. Every evil person thinks they have good intentions. The Nazis were literally thinking and saying they resurrect the German nation and lead Germany to the eternal, "thousand year long" empire.