I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.
Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.
I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
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.
> 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.
Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?
You're responding to a completely different thing:
>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 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. Don't you have your own agency?
The reality is that the majority in "the rest of 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.
> The last chance for an agreement under Danish leadership is in December; the government in Copenhagen apparently preferred a compromise without chat control to no agreement at all. The current regulation, which allows the large platform providers to voluntarily and actively search for potential depictions of abuse, expires next spring after extension. It is precisely this voluntariness that Denmark's Minister of Justice now wants to codify within the framework of the future CSA regulation, which also contains a multitude of other, less controversial projects. [1]
Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
Wait, so people who maintain strong beliefs that disagree with you long enough to ‘win’ are acting in bad faith (brexit), but working for 10 years to re-enter the EU wouldn’t be?
It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.
An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.
When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.
This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.
And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
Well yeah, it's exploiting a problem in representative democracy. That doesn't work unless people become single issue voters on specifically that matter, and in that case, you can just screw over the public with something else.
The problem is that for government power expansions/individual rights reductions, "Yes" can in fact be taken to mean "Yes forever, without ever revisiting the question". (The mechanism needn't be that there is literally no formal revisiting; it can be sufficient that weakening government power is politically untenable because whoever proposed it will be held accountable for every subsequent bad event that could hypothetically have been prevented with some unknown additional amount of government power.)
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.
It was an allusion to the tech industry's disrespect for users, when they don't give an option to say no, and please stop asking me, because the company really really wants you to say yes, and what they care about is more important than what the user cares about.
I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.
Well yes but even a no forever would be revisited under the right circumstances.
But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.
What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
This doesn't fit at all with how governance and politics works in reality. Rapid changes to society or a crisis can suddenly make deeply unpopular ideas very popular.
Great. Now, define how we can determine if two bills are the same 'your law' (Who decides? Lifetime-appointed partisan judges? The old legislature? The new legislature? The executive god-king?).
... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.
Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
That's why sites like this are so powerful. They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time.
This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time
I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.
We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.
I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.
I know in the US, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is highly involved in Net Neutrality and tech. I once had a long conversation with his aid who specialized in tech issues and was quite happy with what they were trying to do. I'd recommend reaching out to his team. I'd expect that they would be happy to work with you all and help you navigate the space.
> This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)
It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.
The job of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution, not pass laws. "Interpreting" the Constitution and concluding that it contains a right to abortion, when the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion, was an absurdly "creative" interpretation. The left was undermining the constitution long before Donald Trump started to do so.
It's interesting that Peter Hummelgaard's former party comrade Henrik Sass Larsen recently got 4 months of prison for possession of child porn; 6200 pictures and 2200 videos.
So we are to believe Hummelgaard wants to protect children by enabling vast surveillance, so all the bad offenders out there can get ... 4 months in prison.
Its not really adding up. And he still hasn't presented any argument for the thing except that you are pro child abuse if you don't agree with him. I'm at the point where I hope he's corrupt and its not just all about power for him.
I’m not sure how punishments are calculated, but surely a former politician pedophile remains dangerous - even if they don’t abuse children directly they will have residual power that they can use to harm children. Or maybe the low sentence is because of his existing power.
Its just not that illegal in Denmark. Something I would think minister of justice Hummelgaard should spend his time working on first, before pushing mass surveillance at the european level.
I don’t trust Peter Hummelgaard at all. The way he is pushing for this law seems suspicious and I am wondering if there is a third party nudging him to pursue it. Maybe promising some position in the EU parlament.
Consideration of the proposal was moved to the 25th of November. So no it didn't reach a point where it could have any impact. I don't remember a single borgerforslag managing to have any impact though. Even if they made it to parliament in time.
Its like a ocean wave, crashing against the cliff, year in, year out, proposal after proposal, waiting for that final atrocity, justifying pushing it through.
The white cliffs of Dover, with no plan on how to regain one day that land, once the crisis subsides. And no mechanism to prevent a permanent crisis, because the controls justify the manufacturing of endless crisis.
Unfortunately the ECJ’s orders aren’t strictly followed and they recently pretty much indicated they could support an atrocious law like ProtectEU. Perhaps to save face.
Courts are always the last line of defense, there is no way of avoiding that. Rights are never absolute, but have to be balanced against each other, and the courts are the arbiter of that.
Aside from that, raising public awareness like the Chat Control initiative did is the way to go. And voting in the EU Parliament elections.
Yes it is the way to go but politicians get fatigued because they keep pushing the same thing so often. Also the lobbyists have big bags of money to throw at it.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I might think that the ruling class who so desperately want these kinds of powers are intentionally dividing nations and breaking down social cohesion so the populace must turn to the governments for protection. They're hoping to create societies where the people will beg them to scan private messages rather than to demand rights.
Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
> Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
I'm giving it 10 months or less. The rate at which things are worsening (in most aspects, not just this) seems to be rapidly climbing from my point of view.
a) wanting to soon expand this scheme to catch criminal gang communication (violent narco-related crime is exploding in e.g. some northern EU countries) [center-right goal]
b) wanting to make people more nervous about what they post online (immigration vs crime etc is a hot topic that many want to cool down). [center-left goal]
I suppose that there might also be some naive idealists that primarily care about the stated goal.
In practice it is entirely about wanting to expand the power of the state and cement its supremacy over the rights of the individual.
Those other things are a means to this end. They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.
What country is where the state's primary purpose is to perpetuate the power of the state, and where the ruling class desperately want to take more power and rights from the people? Lots of them. Denmark, for one.
Yes I am right. And now allow me to observe and suggest: It sounds like you're having a bad day. Why don't you try again tomorrow if you feel better then?
I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.
Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.
I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
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.
> 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.
Isn't this exactly the argument for never, ever doing it?
You're responding to a completely different thing:
>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 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. Don't you have your own agency?
The reality is that the majority in "the rest of 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.
How ~is it working there though? Is there less CSAM going around in these places?
> The last chance for an agreement under Danish leadership is in December; the government in Copenhagen apparently preferred a compromise without chat control to no agreement at all. The current regulation, which allows the large platform providers to voluntarily and actively search for potential depictions of abuse, expires next spring after extension. It is precisely this voluntariness that Denmark's Minister of Justice now wants to codify within the framework of the future CSA regulation, which also contains a multitude of other, less controversial projects. [1]
Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Denmark-surprisingly-abandons-p...
The "Yes"/"Maybe Later" school of governance.
Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
Wait, so people who maintain strong beliefs that disagree with you long enough to ‘win’ are acting in bad faith (brexit), but working for 10 years to re-enter the EU wouldn’t be?
That’s a tough bar to get past…
It does read the way you describe in your question. My interpretation of OPs example is more about the asymmetry in how much more (relatively) feasible it is for one party to re-introduce a vote for something than it is to rally political will en masse in a way that reflects what the electorate ultimately wants.
An example that comes to mind is the string of legislation like SOPA that despite having lost, the general goal continued to appear in new bills that were heavily lobbied for.
The issue was that support for "Brexit" was a bad-faith fabrication by Murdoch-owned media with a dash of foreign-funded interference.
When you put down any specific Brexit implementation and asked people to vote on it, you generally got supermajority opposition.
This is similar to, for example, the nitwits in Kentucky who fiercely opposed Obamacare but were vociferously supportive of Kynect and the ACA--all of which are the same thing.
That is the only way to run a government.
Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
We aren't at the end of history.
Nobody’s talking about a blood oath to promise never to revisit the issue. But there’s a different between leaving the door open to future reconsideration, versus pushing consistently against the wishes of the public and only backing off temporarily for tactical reasons.
And for some reason, once these things pass, it’s a one way door. When does the US public get a chance to reconsider the Patriot Act?
The US public reconsiders it every time it sends a new congress in. Congress can repeal it in any session, they don't need to wait for it to expire.
Like, that's just the nature of representative democracy.
Well yeah, it's exploiting a problem in representative democracy. That doesn't work unless people become single issue voters on specifically that matter, and in that case, you can just screw over the public with something else.
The practice deserves every bit of scorn it gets.
The problem is that for government power expansions/individual rights reductions, "Yes" can in fact be taken to mean "Yes forever, without ever revisiting the question". (The mechanism needn't be that there is literally no formal revisiting; it can be sufficient that weakening government power is politically untenable because whoever proposed it will be held accountable for every subsequent bad event that could hypothetically have been prevented with some unknown additional amount of government power.)
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.
It was an allusion to the tech industry's disrespect for users, when they don't give an option to say no, and please stop asking me, because the company really really wants you to say yes, and what they care about is more important than what the user cares about.
I'm not suggesting that they never reconsider things, just those in government really seem to want it to happen, despite it being unpopular with the electorate, and so they try on a regular basis to get it to happen, despite the public outcry each time.
Well yes but even a no forever would be revisited under the right circumstances.
But what we do need is a wider no. Not just "no this highly specific combination of stipulations is not ok, let's try it again next month with one or two little tweaks". That's what we have now. Whack a mole. The problem with that is that once it passes they will not have a vote every month to retract it again, then it will be there basically forever.
What we need is a "No this whole concept is out of bounds and we won't try it again unless something changes significantly".
Politics should follow the exponential backoff model xD
Every time your law fails to pass you cannot revisit it for a longer period of time.
1year 5years 10years Etc
Means that laws with enough political will get passed, but bad laws can be more easily blocked.
This doesn't fit at all with how governance and politics works in reality. Rapid changes to society or a crisis can suddenly make deeply unpopular ideas very popular.
Great. Now, define how we can determine if two bills are the same 'your law' (Who decides? Lifetime-appointed partisan judges? The old legislature? The new legislature? The executive god-king?).
... And then figure out how to prevent poison-pill sabotage, because the best way to prevent a legislature from ever passing becomes 'deliberately draft a really bad version of it, and have your party veto it'.
Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
> Giving a one-time majority in a legislature a way to constrain anything the next 10 years of legislatures try to do is a terrible idea.
There's no option to do that though. To block something for 10 years you'd have to stiff it at least 3 times, 1 and 5 years apart (which would mean doing it across at least two legislative terms).
>Consider for a moment what a government of "Yes"/"No Forever, without ever revisiting the question" would result in.
That's pretty much what the US constitution is. Once something's in it, it doesn't realistically get out of it.
The bar for adding something to it is the same bar for removing something from it. It's not 50%.
That's why sites like this are so powerful. They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time.
This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
> They can bring it back, and we can restart the email bombardment at any time
I'm one of the founders of Stop Killing Games. Me and a large group of other people have gotten annoyed at this cycle and have taken it upon ourselves to make such laws impossible to implement in the future. We're organizing the campaign now - this is fully separate from SKG, but a bunch of the same people who helped SKG succeed, and a plan that takes into accounts the learnings from SKG.
We're looking for people such as politicians, lawyers (EU/US/UK law), journalists, and donors who want to see Chat Control dead forever. If interested, email stopkillinggames+hn @ google's email service.
I think the value proposition for VCs and C-suite is pretty obvious here, you get to keep the government's hands off your communications and internal systems, which is directly where Chat Control is headed. Even avoiding the cost of Chat Control compliance (dev work, devops, legal, ...) can easily run into 7 figures for a larger corporation, and 8-9 figures for the top players.
I know in the US, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is highly involved in Net Neutrality and tech. I once had a long conversation with his aid who specialized in tech issues and was quite happy with what they were trying to do. I'd recommend reaching out to his team. I'd expect that they would be happy to work with you all and help you navigate the space.
> This is such a hugely superior approach to the traditional single signer petition or mailing campaign. I think to should be studied by citizens groups worldwide.
Why would mass-emailing be effective, though? This one instance strikes me as the exception, not the rule, especially in a world where I see calls to write to your local government all the time (and basically none of it results in anything)
It costs them nothing to ignore emails. There's nothing on your end of the argument to use as leverage. It doesn't put any barriers to just right click->deleting the emails, or answering with something akin to "Thanks for your concern, but this isn't about you and we know better than you, so please stay out of it", just worded in a vaguer and more polite way.
Mass emailing is effective because it's en masse. Hence the success in this situation. The things you're citing are the opposite of this approach.
> Doesn't sound like it is over yet - only delayed.
Politicians never step back. They only pause.
As always...
Nothing's ever over. Just ask women in the American South.
Or the UK, or Saudi Arabia, or…
The job of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution, not pass laws. "Interpreting" the Constitution and concluding that it contains a right to abortion, when the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion, was an absurdly "creative" interpretation. The left was undermining the constitution long before Donald Trump started to do so.
It's interesting that Peter Hummelgaard's former party comrade Henrik Sass Larsen recently got 4 months of prison for possession of child porn; 6200 pictures and 2200 videos.
So we are to believe Hummelgaard wants to protect children by enabling vast surveillance, so all the bad offenders out there can get ... 4 months in prison.
Its not really adding up. And he still hasn't presented any argument for the thing except that you are pro child abuse if you don't agree with him. I'm at the point where I hope he's corrupt and its not just all about power for him.
Is that out of line with similar offenses in Denmark?
I’m not sure how punishments are calculated, but surely a former politician pedophile remains dangerous - even if they don’t abuse children directly they will have residual power that they can use to harm children. Or maybe the low sentence is because of his existing power.
Its just not that illegal in Denmark. Something I would think minister of justice Hummelgaard should spend his time working on first, before pushing mass surveillance at the european level.
Chat control is surveillance for plebs but not politicians. They want to hide their cp and shift attention to the lower class.
I don’t trust Peter Hummelgaard at all. The way he is pushing for this law seems suspicious and I am wondering if there is a third party nudging him to pursue it. Maybe promising some position in the EU parlament.
relevant south park clip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGQS1AZus7E
More generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg
Lennart Betrayer - CEO :-D
Does anyone know if the "Borgerforslag" had an impact?
https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-2115...
https://www.ft.dk/da/aktuelt/nyheder/2025/09/borgerforslag-n...
Consideration of the proposal was moved to the 25th of November. So no it didn't reach a point where it could have any impact. I don't remember a single borgerforslag managing to have any impact though. Even if they made it to parliament in time.
Let's rebrand and try again!
Its like a ocean wave, crashing against the cliff, year in, year out, proposal after proposal, waiting for that final atrocity, justifying pushing it through. The white cliffs of Dover, with no plan on how to regain one day that land, once the crisis subsides. And no mechanism to prevent a permanent crisis, because the controls justify the manufacturing of endless crisis.
Well, we do have the ECJ as a corrective: https://ccdcoe.org/incyder-articles/eu-data-retention-direct...
Not just. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767226
Unfortunately the ECJ’s orders aren’t strictly followed and they recently pretty much indicated they could support an atrocious law like ProtectEU. Perhaps to save face.
Courts are always the last line of defense, there is no way of avoiding that. Rights are never absolute, but have to be balanced against each other, and the courts are the arbiter of that.
Aside from that, raising public awareness like the Chat Control initiative did is the way to go. And voting in the EU Parliament elections.
Yes it is the way to go but politicians get fatigued because they keep pushing the same thing so often. Also the lobbyists have big bags of money to throw at it.
Good. I was tired of it. Denmark is a great place to live but chat control wtf
Did they apologize for proposing it in the first place?
Withdraws it for now.
Why does the government think it is their job to save people from themselves in the first place?
[dead]
[flagged]
If I was a conspiracy theorist I might think that the ruling class who so desperately want these kinds of powers are intentionally dividing nations and breaking down social cohesion so the populace must turn to the governments for protection. They're hoping to create societies where the people will beg them to scan private messages rather than to demand rights.
Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
> Give it another 10 years the way things are going, and I'm sure it will be back.
I'm giving it 10 months or less. The rate at which things are worsening (in most aspects, not just this) seems to be rapidly climbing from my point of view.
I don't think sockpuppet, aspiring actor to politician EU governments will be around in 10 years. People are waking up.
In practice it's a combination of:
a) wanting to soon expand this scheme to catch criminal gang communication (violent narco-related crime is exploding in e.g. some northern EU countries) [center-right goal]
b) wanting to make people more nervous about what they post online (immigration vs crime etc is a hot topic that many want to cool down). [center-left goal]
I suppose that there might also be some naive idealists that primarily care about the stated goal.
In practice it is entirely about wanting to expand the power of the state and cement its supremacy over the rights of the individual.
Those other things are a means to this end. They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.
> They would be extremely happy for there to be more crime and more unrest about immigration if it meant they could seize powers like these.
What country is this? Sounds really bad.
What country is where the state's primary purpose is to perpetuate the power of the state, and where the ruling class desperately want to take more power and rights from the people? Lots of them. Denmark, for one.
It sounds like you are approaching this from a Marxist perspective. Have you tried thinking about this from other perspectives? (Just as an exercise.)
That's not an argument.
You're right - it's an observation and an idea.
Yes I am right. And now allow me to observe and suggest: It sounds like you're having a bad day. Why don't you try again tomorrow if you feel better then?
Okay, I was trying to be constructive. Have a good night.