140 points

Would be handy if they included a pre-written pdf to oppose this proposition + emails or forms to easily submit your opposition to each of the countries.

Instead it’s a general “contact your government”,
which 99% of normal people do not know how to do, me included.

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48 points
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from the linked website:

Ask you government to call on the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal. Point them to a joint letter that was recently sent by children’s rights and digital rights groups from across Europe. Click here to find the letter and more information.

one paragraph below that:

When reaching out to your government, the ministries of the interior (in the lead) of justice and of digitisation/telecommunications/economy are your best bet. You can additionally contact the permanent representation of your country with the EU.

the bold parts are clickable URLs in the original text.

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35 points
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Is there was such a pdf, your government already received it. You writing in your own words is unique

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31 points
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Not necessarily the best idea. My representative went on national television accusing bots of spamming her email, even though every single one of those probably was a person using some template that was provided. Those forms go straight into trash unfortunately. Best to use them as a guideline and write your personal concerns instead.

Alternatively, ChatGPT. No idea if it works, though.

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95 points

They’ll keep bringing this up again and again and again until it passes, huh.

Next Council deliberations and vote in October-December.

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67 points
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That’s the thing. People have to keep voting forever to keep this from coming into effect, but they only need it to pass a vote once for it to be enacted for basically ever.

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17 points

How I wish a chat privacy law could be passed to make more difficult to continue eroding our rights.

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7 points

Idk about yall but that feels like a bad system…

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-1 points

We need a strong authoritarian government with a strong leader (lemmygrad probably)

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22 points

To quote the IRA, “We only need to get lucky once but you need to get lucky every time”.

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8 points

The real goal is to get the population to regret demanding things like gdpr.

Similar to the plastic industry’s covert legislative push to ban plastic straw.

Irritate the public enough to stop them demanding more.

In this case it’s a double whammy of also getting our sweet private data for their AI models.

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5 points

Got any more info on the plastic straw plot? Because I’d love for that to be true, but I’m just getting craploads of articles saying the opposite.

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1 point

Of course, the mad men won’t leak those details until they’re on their death bed and need to repent.

Here of a slightly more refined take.

Anti plastic straw campaign is an industry gambit to undermine environmentalist anti plastic movement. It create maximum public inconvenience and backlash against the environmentalist cause for a minimal loss of profits. This moves protects the rest of the industry by reducing support to the anti plastic caused through backlash and the feeling of accomplishment and sacrifice

Chatgpt re interpretation

This perspective suggests that the anti-plastic straw campaign is a strategic move by the plastic industry to protect itself. By targeting plastic straws, which are a minor part of plastic waste but widely used, the campaign creates significant public inconvenience. This inconvenience can lead to a backlash against the broader environmental movement. Consequently, people might feel that the inconvenience of giving up straws is enough of a sacrifice, reducing their motivation to support more substantial anti-plastic initiatives. Meanwhile, the plastic industry sustains minimal financial impact since straws represent a small fraction of their overall product lineup. This theory implies a sophisticated tactic to safeguard the industry’s interests by diverting attention from more impactful areas of plastic production and consumption.

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2 points

Yes and no As long as there is no wide spread opposition they will Long term we need to make this a very unpopular stance

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80 points

If only in the same breath we would make all the politicians text messages public, guess they only want other chats to be controlled but not their own.

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52 points

I keep mentioning this idea, hoping to someday make it seem less extreme: the government should be under total surveillance 24/7.

Like, anyone at any time can look through any of the tens of thousands of cameras saturating every government building.

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12 points

Open source government, eh? Don’t know if this would work completely but I like the direction.

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4 points

Army and police get to have non-camera operations of course. They’re still recorded, just not broadcast for whatever delay makes the tactical information obsolete.

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4 points

Honestly this is an intersting idea. Albeit, it may be hatd to implement since some buildings have to be private for national security reasons (specifically regarding military strategy and such).

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4 points

Military’s camera feeds go into memory crystals that automatically unshuffle after like 50 years. That way history is guaranteed to get a full accounting of the conflict, but there’s no possibility of strategic information giveaway.

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34 points

Julian Assange tried to do that and he was nearly lynched for it.

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43 points

And then blamed for ruining the 2016 American election.

Snowden showed the government was spying, had to flee, deemed a terrorist. Assange showed the government disobeys the laws it enforces on everyone else, deemed a terrorist. Manning showed that war crimes are constant, deemed a terrorist, subjected to inhumane torture.

Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished. China, Russia, America, England, they’re all guilty of it.

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17 points

Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished.

Typically by being accused of acting as foreign agents. Assange was a Radical Islamist under Bush, a nefarious Russia/China double agent under Obama, and an insidious Hispanic cartel boss under Trump.

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3 points

I don’t know why but I’ve got this strange tingling feeling it might just be a human nature group thing.

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8 points

Even if I deeply like the Idea, something like this could backfire if it’s done constantly and not just once. But I would like to see a law that makes the usage of government communications mandatory for all government-related communication while storing everything revision-proof on their servers with different access rights. And a second law that makes it possible to access it by requiring petitions to be singled by a low number of people. Less extreme but still makes it harder to be corrupt.

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76 points

Make no mistake, Germany isn’t opposing this out of a principled stance. The German government too wants more ways to control people’s activity.

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35 points
4 points

The IMK is not the national government

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8 points

Meanwhile, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) is fighting for the storage of IP addresses and port numbers without cause

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56 points

Folks, this should inspire you to start self-hosting a federated, decentralized chat server with freely available source code by yourself or with a small community. Governments can coerce these big, usually-corpo centralized servers to give up data but good luck if there are hundreds of thousands (of millions?) of small servers with 1–10 users on it & clients not controlled by a single entity for distribution (easier now that y’all coerced Mommy Apple to let you sideload applications & use alternative package managers).

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6 points

All federated services grossly violate GDPR.

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21 points

Sounds like GDPR is the problem then, not federated services.

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18 points

I mean, GDPR is a fucking disaster. Nobody is getting it right, same with cookie consent. This is because the last time geriatric imbeciles at the European parliament seen a computer was back at 98.

Since all those people are using it, it kinda doesn’t matter for them. As if not having their data harvested from every single click makes them not care about GDPR and the other bullshit. What a surprise.

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6 points

How so?

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8 points

If you’re federating the data to servers you don’t control, it’s impossible to guarantee deletion of it. GDPR requires that users be able to request deletion of their data

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5 points
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You don’t need to worry about data retention when you own the server & you are the only user. It’s the servers you or someone you know & trust don’t own where you should actually worry about this.

It’s also more problematic with all systems built on eventual consistency models, so best to avoid those since you’ll never be able to get the data dropped. Chat being ephemeral is good.

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1 point

Matrix I guess?

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4 points
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7 points
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If you don’t trust matrix.org, then you can self host the server yourself. Plus, the article you included is outdated.

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Privacy

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