Obviously, this is about creating the infrastructure for a continent-wide surveillance program, using children pornography as a troy horse.
The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing, at least until said European laws get implemented locally.
Whenever things like this come up with the non-tech folk I deal with, the conversation tends to turn to "Oh, well, I don't have any of that sort of stuff, so nothing to worry about", or "Good, child abusers should be in jail".
What are people's talking points against these views?
Couple of ideas of top of my head:
- Think of the most embarrassing thing you've done, and now tell me about it
- Unlock and show me your phone so I can view all your messages, photos and apps
Now that we've established that you have something to hide, we can talk about where the line is.
I think that second retort that everyone says is so weak. People are trading their privacy for services not for nothing. Think how many people would actually give you their phone if you said you'd give them $20 or cleaned their house or something.
Give me your phone so I can make sure there isn't illegal porn on it. There, this is the real example of what's happening, and you're getting something out of it (taking pedos off the streets).
On that last sentence, I wouldn't say "something to hide". I like to think of it in terms of highlighting the difference between secret and private. There are lots of things that I'm not ashamed of, or protective of for the sake of my safety, but still have a totally valid desire to keep private. Going to the bathroom isn't secret, but it's still private.
"Something to hide" specifically makes sense in the context of the phrase "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".
Unlock and show me your phone so I can view all your messages, photos and apps
This sounds like a very hands on counter argument. I'm gonna use that the next time this comes up in conversation.
This is actually a pretty good idea.
I collected some examples of "actually, you do have something to hide" in this older comment of mine:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114262
Today I'd add to the list the discussion on Israel using AI to decide who to bomb. AI isn't smart enough to understand that people who just bought a washing machine shouldn't be shown ads for washing machines, but apparently it's good enough for deciding who's a terrorist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245
Having said that, I personally know someone who was arrested and mistreated by police forces for being related to a criminal, and yet I've never managed to convince them that maybe the police shouldn't have that kind of power. In those cases I typically consider that the person discussing probably won't change their view, but maybe I can still reach those listening to the conversation.
I doubt ad targeting actually uses AI, at least not in the quite heavy form we currently associate with the term, but the rest of your point stands.
However, I am not sure if using examples of something currently considered crime will work well, especially as people will actively deny anything other than petty violations like speeding. It is valid of course, in particular when combined with inhumane regimes and authorities, or even regular ones that do not see lightly on people airing their dirty laundry, but convincing others takes more than just having a correct argument...
Ad targeting has long offered ML based targeting models. Usually with product names like "audience extension", "predictive segments", "likely X buyers". LLMs have taken over the "AI" term in general discussion, but the strengths and weaknesses are not too different here (just more computationally efficient).
My normal stance is to compare it to using the toilet.
Everyone knows what you're doing in the toilet, yet we do not use glass walls for toilet stall doors.
Some people abuse this and do drugs or hide in toilets, but does that genuinely mean we should have glass doors for all our toilets in society?
What about toilets at home?
Usually they start to see the problem.
Some people abuse this and do drugs or hide in toilets, but does that genuinely mean we should have glass doors for all our toilets in society?
For many europeans, US-style toilet cubicles (with large space between floor and wall) feels pretty much like glass doors. I wonder why people tolerate that.
South Park did this well. "Toilet Safety Administration" https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administrati...
"You also don't do anything illegal in your mail and email, so the government can also read those, right? And you never speed so the government can get a black box in your car, right? And you never download anything illegal so the government can monitor all activity on your PC, right? And you never do anything wrong against your company so your company can also monitor all your activity, right?"
"Would you mind if all your online activity and chat histories were sent to ChatGPT live, with it deciding if you're a suspect or a criminal? If not, why are you okay with a vague system designed by politicians?"
"If you or your partner is short and look young relative to the average Caucasian, for example due to being from certain Asian countries with low average height, would you trust that ChatGPT wouldn't erroneously classify pictures as being of a minor and mark you a criminal?"
People tend to get sensitive when you expand the idea a bit and give them an example of the technical part that they can relate to.
"You also don't do anything illegal in your mail and email, so the government can also read those, right? And you never speed so the government can get a black box in your car, right? And you never download anything illegal so the government can monitor all activity on your PC, right? And you never do anything wrong against your company so your company can also monitor all your activity, right?"
I know a lot of people who would just go “yes?”. The same people would freak out if there was a camera in their Airbnb. Or if they thought two steps ahead and realized their sexy photos or pictures of their kids would be viewed by some 20 year old moderator-reviewer type. Or would want to make revenge porn criminal, or even deepfake porn. Let alone any type of concern for journalists and their sources.
People for some reason don’t think these laws apply to them, that they would just be ignored by any snooping eyes because of course they look only for real criminals like terrorists and pedos. These proposals should ideally cause the same type of worry as being stopped by a cop even if you didn’t do anything wrong.
The second and third line of arguing, underlining the technical issue rather than privacy, might still work for those individuals.
There will always be people you cannot convince however, either because they have different ideologies or being in a place in life where all arguments wear off and they have no reason to spare it another thought.
We only need a majority in the voting group, not everyone.
There are much better longer argumentations and essays out there which are easy to find.. two badly rephrased prime args for me:
- It is not about you but fundamental rights in our society that are important. Argueing like "I don't have any of that sort of stuff" is like saying "I'm not gay, so what do I care about gay rights" (replace with any disadvantaged group and don't blame me for bad example please).
- Things can quickly change, even when done with nothing bad in mind. You find countless misuses with collected data, prime example is again the Nazis that rolled into Dutch (or Belgium?) and abused the recorded religions. However, today in almost any democracy imagination has not to be taken too far that another worse power comes to real power. Just look at threats Trump, or mostly right wing parties in Europe already made.
"Would you like the people on the far [left|right] to have full access to your communications, and to those of their enemies, in case they end up in a position of power (or access to this data some other way)."
If you're talking to someone on the left, you can say "if the party you don't like gets into power they could use this to track and punish people for getting abortions", and if they're on the right you can say "if the party you don't like gets into power they could use this to track and punish people for owning guns, not getting vaccinated and making politically incorrect jokes".
These are going to fail in a lot of EU nations because abortions and gun ownership aren't issues associated with (current) politics.
Straight from the article (shortened by me): "The promise that professional secrets should not be affected by chat control is a lie cast in paragraphs. [...] Chat control inevitably threatens to leak intimate photos"
On a more abstract level: in a democracy you need to consider the abuse potential of a law, and you need to leave open ways for peaceful reform if our institutions fail. That's why confidential communication channels between citizens are important, and intercepting private communication has to always come with strong checks and balances
If you got nothing to hide it means you don't have anything worth protecting or competing for, and you 100% trust the system not to do wrong with your information, no matter who gets the political power. You also don't ever need to protest or demand change against ingrained power.
What are people's talking points against these views?
If you have nothing to hide then unlock your phone and let me dig in. And give me all your passwords, you have nothing to hide, right?
0% of them will comply.
Or you can cite the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Can you hand me your phone? I want to go through your texts and photos.
Snowden had a simple and good one.
"Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
Well, what are your own arguments against those views? You can just use those.
Just ask them for all their passwords or to unlock their phone and hand it over. You just want to take a look, they have nothing to hide. No big deal, right?
"then why does your bathroom have a door with a lock"
Failure happens, abuse happens. And then start talking about the costs..
"Can I see your search history?"
"Can I see your chat history?"
"So you are also OK with the government installing a 24/7 hour surveillance camera into your childs room, so they can make sure nothing bad is happening?"
We are very fast approaching totalitarianism here in Europe. It is really sad to see. There is basically no free speech anymore and now they want to even track and control our private communication. And what's worse is, everyone is so high on moral superiority over other cultures that they cannot even admit to themselves that this could be happening.
We are very fast approaching totalitarianism here in Europe.
That's false
There is basically no free speech anymore
That's a far right narrative and that have never been as false as today given how much we are now unfortunately allowing far right bullshit.
they want to even track and control our private communication.
Some executives wants it yes, but this still have to be voted by the European parliament, which is democratically elected and which already voted this [0] . Friendly reminder that European elections are on 6-9 June 2024.
0: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/historic-agreement-on-child...
That's a far right narrative and that have never been as false as today given how much we are now unfortunately allowing far right bullshit.
You say so, but is it true? If it were obvious, it'd be faster to say the explanation of why it were obvious than to describe as you have. You'd instead be able to say something like 'we have the first amendment, and there aren't any exception-- we don't do anything like that fire in a crowded theater stuff from WWI', and then you'd be done, and you'd have done it in a way that's certain.
I don't think it's obvious at all, and it may well be false.
What evidence do you have to say that free speech is gone?
If you're making an assertion you need evidence, for someone to say "that's not true" in response providing the same amount of evidence is fine.
I don't actually say that we don't have free speech but rather that you never gave an argument that it isn't, and then I followed that up with that isn't obvious that we do have freedom of speech in practice.
There was the recent Varoufakis thing, there's all sorts of weird corporate censorship on the web, there's these laws about offensive speech in the UK, there's that weird thing where a politically controversial newspaper run by a Swede in Estonia had its bank account frozen (it was eventually unfrozen after a lawsuit, but that took time, and harassment strategies can harm a publication just as bans can), these arrests of anti-monarchy protestors in the UK-- all that stuff about blank protest signs etc.
There's so much weird stuff that it's not obvious that we have freedom of speech. We might, but I am personally not totally sure of the total situation, taking everything into account.
That's fair enough, and while I think we do have free speech I respect you saying that it's not obvious, and it's very possible I'd think the same on digging into the things you reference.
However, the main point I was making is that a refutation without evidence is a valid response to a statement made without evidence (which is what the comment you replied to was).
Having a higher burden of proof doesn't make sense to me.
[EDIT I just reread your comment, and noticed you said "you". I just wanted to point out it was someone else you were replying to before]
That's false
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:...
Like in all capitalist countries: Youre free in Europe as long as you don't pose a risk to the ruling class or oppose the ongoing foreign policy. If you do, there are many ways to repress you.
That is why things like this chat spying thing are dangerous. They increase the amount of surveillance and control. All it takes for it to be used for another purpose than fighting pedophilia is a new administration coming to power in a few years and deciding to do so.
Don't a bunch of european nations have free speech laws and restrictions?
The commission are certainly deranged, and the UK is certainly deranged, but overall I don't agree that the situation is bad.
Maybe in Germany.
Well Germany is were I live, but if you are any EU citizen you are technically free to come live in Germany, but then you will get your mouth shut and your thoughts policed by the very many German bodies, governmental and otherwise. So in a way even as a non-German you are still affected.
What are you talking about? There is literally only one opinion that is illegal in Germany and that is to deny that the holocaust happened.
Everything else can be published (there can be civil lawsuits later of course, but the state won't stop you unless you are actively treating people).
According to Robert Habeck and the post-Merkel clique, criticizing Israel is antisemitism. Ironically the AfD are Israel sympathizers. But Israeli Jews who have the wrong opinions according to the state of Germany, cannot speak in Germany without getting censored or locked up.
Maybe you forgot RT being banned?
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I think the best way to get rid of a horrible law like this is indeed to enforce against the people who wrote it. Enforce equitably, and enforce equally: the same misery everyone else already knows. If ministers worry about their private communications being read by strangers—if that makes them feel fearful, paranoid, violated—then let them feel fearful, paranoid, violated, just like the hundreds of millions of other people they would enforce those feelings on.
"Laws are to govern all alike — those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." –Ulysses S. Grant (1869)—often misquoted and misattributed to Lincoln,
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant#First_Inaugur...
I'd go further and say the more power you have the less privacy you should have.
Spot on.
The silver lining about them clearly trying to exempt themselves is that they at least seem to be aware of the negative consequences of their proposal. So: not the right solution, but at least something that looks like a transition from blissfully ignorant -> aware of problems. Cogs are in motion, learning is happening.
are you crazy? it means they are aware, and WANT that for the population, but not themselves.
cogs are NOT in motion to fix this for the people, they are in motion to DO this to the people.
Well, I learned not to attribute to malice what could equally be attributed to incompetence.
... But I get your point
This makes harder to lie about the fact that this is a mass surveillance bill.
>Cogs are in motion, learning is happening.
They know what power is, and have demonstrated that clearly. If there is a silver lining, it's that they've revealed their knowledge and desire for asymmetry of power.
Or at least, the more public resources you manage the less privacy you should have.
or why not both?
When working for a large company, everyone was miserable with bad IT support outsourced to India (not about India). Then I learned, that one level above me, there was special director level IT support inside the country.
When working for a large company, when moving, my boss praised the virtues of the new open office and how our current team rooms were bad. Then we learned, that he had a private office in the new setup.
"Whataboutism". Brushing away hypocrisy is way to easy nowadays. It would be way better for morale if they just said that offices are a benefit then pretending to defend something they don't believe in.
I'd prefer the EU to be dismantled just because of this.
Laws like this don't appear out of thin air, those ideas come from member states and are voted on by politicians from all those member states. So without the EU stuff like this would have to be fought against in each individual state, because of course every government loves surveillance and will sooner or later try to increase it.
The 'problem' with the EU is that even if you live in a country that values privacy, if 51% of the other countries don't, you're out of luck.
It's similar to how in the US you have people complain about the flyover states, though I'd argue that people from Spain don't think of people from Poland as even close to the same. The difference between the two peoples ideologies is fundamentally great.
But at the same time, the 49% did vote to join a union where this could happen so could you argue they must be fine with it? I don't know.
The 'problem' with the EU is that even if you live in a country that values privacy, if 51% of the other countries don't, you're out of luck.
National governments have veto rights on passed laws. Problem rather is that even when people value privacy, it's normally not on top of their priority list. E.g. in Germany people do value privacy if you ask them - but the two biggest parties don't, and people still vote for them.
National governments have veto rights on passed laws.
this hasn't been the case for over 20 years, it's now almost all by majority vote
the only things that are still subject to the veto are treaty change, new members, defence and a few other things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...
if 51% of the other countries don't
Laws in EU don't get passed if just 51% of countries agree.
They also don't get revoked if just 51% agree
That alternative seems better on the whole. We're far from the margin where more competition in governance is inefficient.
IIUC, this is why it's good to have separations of power and slow legislation. EU ministers can keep wanting stuff, courts and the parliament keeps rejecting it and the public keep pushing back.
Pretty much it's what divides the free world from the dictatorships. Its pretty scary when you start seeing politicians attacking courts, judges etc.
Every country that went ahead with steamrolling courts has become a dumpster fire. When politicians start saying that they have mandate to do this one thing but the courts are not allowing it, it's a huge red flag. When institutions or politicians say that something is slowing them down, it's a huge red flag.
It would be great if this was that simple (and in general I agree with you), but Bukele taking over El Salvador was an exception: the whole judicial system was captured by criminals that enabled killing people on a mass scale, he got rid of it all, and crime rate went down significantly.
He also changed the (otherwise unfair) constitution that prohibited him from going for reelection, although at that point I believe a referendum would have been a much better solution.
I'm seeing the same taking over court happening in other countries, so I just don't think there's a simple solution that can be applied in all cases.
Bukele is not an exception. He's not replacing a functioning democracy. As you describe, the old system had no true separation of power - criminals had already captured it and made it dysfunctional.
As everything in live, just because it says X on the label doesn't mean it has X in it. Same with democracy. To have a functioning democracy, you not only need to have separation of power, you also always have to make sure it is maintained, and a society has to constantly re-educate itself on why that is so important. When we take things for granted, they are up for grabs from people who just want power.
I guess this rosy view depends on viewing constant martial law as a positive thing, and not counting the tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests as a downside.
Makes sense. So that von der Leyen, president of the EU, can just continue deleting her SMS containing secret vaxx purchase deals with BigPharma [0]. SMS is somewhat a chat, too, right? But good that she can be now exempted from ChatControl.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/new-york-times-sue-european-...
Yeah, or that lady, that fled her office in Brussel with bags full of cash. What was her name again? I wonder what happened to her.
Edit: Eva Kaili. They found 1.5 Million in cash. She lost her immunity, but is still member of the parliament with full voting rights. Excellent.
--
https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/eu-parlament-hebt-immunitaet-...
They did not find Eva Kaili with 1.5 Million in cash.
Lots of doom-speculation here, but I think the whole "ChatControl" controversy could be contained with One Single Measure: "If >X% of messages in a given group contain the term(s) 'Y', auto-report that group, and silently-add verified LE to said group if requested."
or hows about the government stays the hell out of my chat groups?
Yeah, and then it turns out your chat group was all about breaking into all cars in neighborhood Z, or spearfishing all elderly in e-mail domain D, and you're all like "why didn't the police stop this?"
Well, guess what, the police is the government, and they need some intel to go on... (And, yeah, they also need to be restrained. But that's not what this particular submission, nor your reply, makes a strong point for)
The actual proposed regulation [0] is definitely worth having a look at. For example:
5. This Regulation shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent the provision of end-to-end encrypted services.
[0] page 36 onwards of https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/202...
4a in page 37 is most tellingly crossed out. So I’m going to copy and paste 4a and instead of crossing it out invert its meaning:
This Regulation shall lead to the general obligation to monitor the information which providers of hosting services transmit or store, to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity.
It’s a good summary of the purpose of the law, I should say. Welcome to China… I mean, to the EU.
Ha! Just thought about and posted the same. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063256
The executive becoming legislators, Montesquieu told you so with his principle of "Seperation of Powers", but the EU was built after WW2 as an inter-governmental organisation, critized in the 60s/70s for being a group of Ministers sitting in a closed room, and taking decisions for their own ministries. The European Parliament was born out of those critics (and some German Const Court decisions).
But that does not solve the core problem that the executive should not become legislator.
Lol I'm so not surprised.
PS: When it was shot down a few months ago, I told everyone it was only temporary and they will keep trying again and again but people downvoted me for not celebrating :/
Sounds like the QAnon may garner more support.
Some animals are more equal than others.
The website recommends to contact the permanent representation of my country, and more importantly by phone which is apparently more effective. Not that I'm worried about it but I wonder if anyone here already did this, is it an accepted practice to reach out with such a method ?
I don't get it, I thought an EU court decided that encrypted chat was a human right a few weeks ago.
Wow, imagine if governments correctly checked if children were actually psychologically safe and healthy, even once a year. That must be totally different from ChatControl, and a it could be a hard problem, with lots of last mile problems. Doing this for all humans would be nice. I'm reminded of instructions postal delivery people had to check on elderly after it turned out an elderly person was found dead, months after dying if I recall correctly. Maybe it's a human network connectivity mapping problem with a lot of tricky user experience / delivery/ last mile problems. I dream of this being solved. Is anything like this being done in the EU, or elsewhere on a reproducible scale? That and reliability predicting and relieving suffering seem like important projects to me.
I just mailed my local newspaper about it, asking them to write about this (Süddeutsche Zeitung - basically the German NYT). If you live in the EU, I encourage you to do the same.
Holy shit... I wasn't even aware such a surveillance program was on its way. Sneaky. Jesus, I hope it can still be stopped.
The EU governments want to adopt the chat control bill by the beginning of June.
Just in time for elections...
ah yes, like they exempt themselves from pesky things like income tax
Huh, I thought ChatControl plans were dead, have they just rebranded and restarted?
What is the base of this claim? There are EU elections this year FYI.
Those two statements are orthogonal. EU elections have little impact on EU institutions. The elections are only for the European Parliament. The European Commission, which controls the institutions and dictates policy, does not get elected by the populace.
There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.
Right, but the other EU officials are not Belgians or Germans or aliens from another dimension but people who are appointed by the elected governments in every country. As a result, these elections define part of the EU and the elections in every country defines the rest.
In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.
You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).
EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.
Can you point me to the parts of the Lisbon treaty that facilitate this please?
Well, for one, many areas now require "qualified majority vote" instead of unanimous decision.
Few key countries (Germany, France and Italy) got their voting weights in both the Council of Ministers and the European Council increased at the expense of everyone else.
European Central Bank got official recognition.
European Court of Justice got its jurisdiction expanded.
This is exactly the argument that was used to defang reform of EU Parliament, which gave more power connected directly with voters, and kept the strong but non-transparent EU Commission as the only one with legislative initiative.
Because it's easy to blame "Brussel bureaucrat" when it's hardly visible that said bureaucrat is minister and/or represantive from the party that is now campaigning against "brussel's edict".
I'd argue it would be more democratic like that. If we had pan-European parties with their own pan-European agendas, people would know what they are voting for, and would be much more involved. Instead EU is still rather an international organization where governments of member states set the agenda, so the result is a very indirect way of decision making where an individual voter can hardly understand what impact their vote makes.
It’s a political process that will or will not happen to a point. Currency it’s not there yet, it’s quite far of it and honestly I don’t believe that it will happen before fixing the Eurozone and that’s a hard one.
The Parliament has veto rights. Nothing gets enacted without parliamentary approval. Which is very good, considering some of the bullshit that comes out of the Commission.
Legislative veto without legislative initiative is barely useful.
True, but note that the national governments (i.e. the Council) also have a veto.
But I do agree that Parliament should be given law making powers, and the Commission should just be enforcement and implementation of said laws.
Can they remove or update bad legislation that is currently in place?
Sure, but the commission is proposed by nationally elected representatives (namely the heads of state) and then approved by the elected European Parliament, so the overall process is not too undemocratic.
Of course, direct election of the commission would be more democratic formally, but the fact is there's not really a truly European polity in the first place so its not clear the outcome would be much better in regards to the problem of the commission being composed of random politicians you never heard of.
If you were gonna elect Commissioners/President etc directly, you'd probably end up with something like the US electoral college system.
In fact, given that Ireland (a very small country) would have to have a referendum on it, then I can almost guarantee that such a system would over-weight small countries.
The Commission doesn't "dictate" policy. They are the body that has the power to initiate legislature, but the Parliament (the democratically elected part of the EU orgs) has to vote on them.
Also from my interpretation of TFA, the people that expect intelligence agencies to be exempted are national interior ministers (not named though), there's no such thing as a "European Union minister", which have no influence at the EU level.
The EU Commission do not dictate policy.
This is a convenient fiction that the EU Council (i.e. the national governments) are very keen to retain, as it insulates them from the consequences of their decisions.
If you really wanted to be tactical about it, one should vote for a disjoint set of parties in the EU vs the national elections, as this would be more likely to lead to effective supervision and assessment of decisions.
I'm not anti-EU, on the contrary, but honestly the claim is true in practice. I'm not going to give you any hard data, but I think it's just obvious in plain sight.
At least in my country, almost all the debate in news outlets is about national or local issues. EU regulations do come up, but they are always depicted as something that comes "from above" and not tied to specific parties or people. If there is controversy about a national law, the media will blame things on the government or on the opposition (depending on their bias). If there is controversy about an European law, the media will blame an abstract "Brussels"... or directly the government or the opposition anyway, as they're the ones who implement it.
In the EU elections, most (euphemism for all) people I know just vote to the party they prefer in terms of national or regional politics. Almost no one votes because they want a given European directive to be implemented.
Sometimes I have actually made some effort to find out what each of my country's parties voted in some EU decision, and most of the times I failed. It's not clear what decisions come from the Commission or from Parliament (many come from the Commission which is not even directly elected but elected by local governments, by the way). And even for those from Parliament, it's not clear how to find detailed results of Parliament votes. Mind you, I'm not saying there is no way - probably there is one, if you are very well informed or have a lot of time, but there is definitely no way that I could find in 20 minutes of Googling, and most people won't make a greater investment than that.
Not sure if it's the same in all countries, and not sure how to fix it... but yes, I do have the perception that EU institutions are detached from citizens.
That said, this has its pros. If citizens had more of a say, we'd probably have no low-emmission zones, no or almost no pollution regulations, etc. Many environmental policies that are, IMO, unquestionably good, are pushed to reluctant citizens using the "hey, don't blame me, it comes from Brussels" wildcard, and we are better for it (again, IMO). Sad, but true.
I agree that it's under reported but I don't think it's because the EU is far away or detached from the people. The media simply don't tell us what's going on. There's no regular programmes in my country covering it. There are shows like that for local politics and for national politics, and I can even keep up with US politics if I like. But to know what's happening in the EU I have to very actively choose to search for it.
The US is surely more removed but everyone seems to know every detail of what's going on over there.
Except for Britain, European nations simply do not have a strong tradition of news publishing and free debate like the United States. In Europe, news mostly came and still comes in the form of dictates from the rulers. That's why it was so important that people had to go to church each Sunday: not to listen to the word of God, but to be told the latest decisions of the king directly from the preacher's pulpit. Later on, non-government affiliated media has mainly been partisan affairs, directly or indirectly controlled by political parties.
With a weak tradition of free speech and press, it is no wonder that European journalists prefer to sit around all day and read reporting on American politics and summarise for their readers, instead of doing some actual investigating, reporting and interviewing.
That's just anglo spin, sorry - and pretty galling coming from a country where Fox News thrives and propaganda is rife (Judith Miller, anyone?). Same for Britain, dominated for decades by agendas set by Rupert Murdoch's properties.
European traditions in terms of journalism are as good as any. The problems of modern media are the same everywhere: nobody wants to pay for quality journalism, so only people with deep pockets end up footing the bill and hence setting the agenda.
I follow news about German, British and US politics, and I can't quite understand what you mean. Clearly there is debate in Germany, both in parliament and in press. The author of the discussed article is a German politician himself.
news media in the USA has become dysfunctional due to the economic changes of the last 20 years. Local news is not available or just so bad that it is obvious.. and national stories have been co-opted into camps promoted on corporate owned channels.. truly, the US news media is only a ghost of what it was forty years ago
Don't blame it on the media, though I agree that they're not doing a good job. If you know they're not doing a good job, don't be complacent. Do the research yourself. It's not like this is a secret law and the Internet doesn't exist.
Yes, people should be more focused on what's going on in their back yard, at least on the social level, than another country "half way" around the world.
I do do the research myself and consider myself a very engaged citizen, but the power of the media to inform poeple shouldn't be overlooked. It's very difficult for someone starting from zero to even know they're missing something never mind what to look for.
There are several ones in mine. However, the huge majority of people is not interested in watching them. Unless it is making the headlines/major news programs, most people only hear about it when it is too late to change anything.
The media is demand-driven. What gets attention will generate more coverage, what gets ignored will wither.
If there is no coverage of something it generally means people don’t care. That can be a vicious circle, of course. But as soon as people start paying attention to the small outlets that do cover these things, the bigger ones will adapt their coverage.
In Berlin, the EU has a information shop kind of thing. Its nicely done but is pretty much verbatimin stuff from the EU website. I tried asking a couple of questions to members of staff in there and they didn't seem to have any more knowledge than myself on the inner workings of the EU.
I think its good to have that sort of thing though and I don't think we ever had such a thing in the UK. I would have liked to understood how the EU works better and the interaction between the parliament and the commission.
This is definitely a feature disguised as a bug.
It has a proper term for it in political science. I wish I could remember what it is. I think its something like offshoring democracy but I'm really not sure.
That's not only sad - it erodes public trust in democracy, and leads to a rise of populist parties.
I see your point but it appears that countries prefer keeping their sovereignty and as a result EU doesn’t have any direct impact on people lives. Every now and then countries agree on some standardization and it’s only then when people see an EU impact on their daily lives.
Since we would rightly blame corporations for polluting the Earth and not ourselves, we would absolutely do away with low-emission zones, but we would surely crank up pollution regulations for them.
50% turnout last time around.
Not very different from any election in the developed world.
It has been historically low in Sweden. Last time 55% voted in the EU election while 82% voted in the Swedish election.
The more local the more people care but half of the population voting is not really drastically different than 2/3 of the population voting.
It would be better if more people voted though.
This assumes that the ones who decide to vote in the EU election are a random sample of the ones that vote in the national elections, which is almost definitely not true. One of the parties is likely being over/under represented at the EU election.
It only means that underrepresented should do better in convincing people to vote.
You said:
And I was simply pointing out how the result is different. I thought you were referencing that it was a random sample. Though apparently you just decided it's the same even though you knew it wasn't a random sample.
It depends, in Germany we enjoy a quite high turnout of ~70-80% for federal elections (https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2274/umfrage/...) [The site is in German, but should be fairly easy to read].
While for European elections it is usually 40-50% with huge differences by country (https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/turnout/)
Then you should vote more on the EU election I guess.
Why do you think they don't?
The two democratic bodies of the EU, the EU Parliament and Council of Ministers, do not have the power to submit new legislation. Only the appointed Commission has the power to submit documents.
Who appointed the commission and are they Germans or Belgians or something?
When the head of the commission was elected various parties presented their favorites for a direct election as had been done in 2014. When the results came in for 2019 parliament refused to accept them and selected its own favorites from out of nowhere. An election result that can be disregarded at the whim of the current ruling parties does not paint a very democratic picture.
The Commission acts almost exclusively on mandates extended by the EU Council (i.e. national states), which also nominates commissioners. EU Council effectively tells the Commission "Something should be done about X; write a directive to achieve Z, K, and J". Then the Commission sits down with MEPs and national ministers to bang something into shape. It very rarely comes up with original policy suggestions, and when it happens it tends to be big news - like with the daylight savings stuff, which eventually wasn't carried through because the EU Council (i.e. governments) wasn't particularly interested.
Political initiative and agenda-setting, in the EU, are firmly in the hands of national governments - they just hide behind "Bruxelles bureaucrats" as a shield.
European parliament has a democracy-decorative role. All the important institutional decisions are taken by the commission and the european central bank. The parliament at best approves, or works on the less important stuff. EU is a very undemocratic institution, despite all the pro-democracy talking.
Are those in the commission all Belgians? Where do they come from? What happens if the parliament doesn’t approve? Do “they” do it anyway?
There are elections in most countries in the world. There most likely are in your country. Would you say the people you've elected aren't detached from your way of life and concerns?
The thing about elections is that you don’t elect the detached ones. If they are elected despite what you think about them, it simply means more people think otherwise.
There is usually very little news coverage and public discussion with anything going on at EU-level, unless it's a hot topic or something that concerns a specific number of people in some way, like in this case.
And EU-Elections have usually a pretty low participation, showing how many people it really concerns.
It still boggles my mind that it's not obvious how much of my tax bill go to the EU. This aids in the feeling of detachment.
With the EU having a total €150B budget in a €19.350B GDP economy it's probably still noise in your total taxes.
I can't help thinking that you must have the decimal point in the wrong place...
Or else they are European and use . as the thousands separator.
I wondered if that might be the case, but they're writing in English which use a comma as a thousands separator; in which case, they definitely have the decimal point in the wrong place, even if it's down to a grammatical error.
I see many Europeans write in English but still use European number formatting - they are sort of different things.
I'm not so sure they're separate, or at least that they should be treated as such. Either way, it's a shame that this isn't standardised, regardless of the language spoken. Likewise units of measurement (weight, distance, time etc.).
Windows treats them as separate settings.
I can set my language, and separately I can set my regional format which encompasses things like which decimal symbol and which thousands separator to use (both offer the comma, the dot and '), how dates are written, which day is the first of the week, how time is written (12/24h), whether to use Arabian numbers or one of the other digit-based systems, which unit system to use (US or metric) etc.
It kind of is: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures has maintained since 1948 that you shouldn't use dots or commas as thousands separators. ISO 31-0 prescribes the use of small spaces, and so do various other American and international standards organizations. It's just that this is widely ignored.
Just had a look: 25 of EU countries use ".", and 2 (Malta and Ireland) use ","
That's how it's done in Europe. . not ,
Does this chart [1] for contributions and this [2] for net contributions (direct financial contributions minus direct financial benefits) not answer that question?
Then just figure out which portion of your countries budget comes out of your taxes, and how big the total budget of your country is, and you have your answer. It's not like this is top secret information
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/316691/eu-budget-contrib...
2: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
It's more like "I can't be bothered to look, but I can be bothered to complain".
Basically nothing.
They get 1% of VAT which is mostly spent on poor regions (cohesion funding) and agricultural subsidies (Common Agricultural Policy).
That's largely because citizens of several countries accept the narrative of their local governing parties that the EU is some "external force" that is outside of anyone's control.
Reality is that the EU is largely formed by members of local political parties sent to EU-institutions. They just send people there which they deem not useful for local campaigning or prefer to become "invisible" to local politics.
Citizens should not accept this narrative, and instead demand more transparency on the activities of the local politicians sent to EU, holding the party accountable for their actions (or non-action) within the EU.
Eh, partly.
But it's also inherent in running an organisation with 24 official languages.
Let's say you had really strong opinions on this, and you wanted to rally voters for a letter-writing campaign. Good luck coordinating the Spanish-speakers, the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers and so on. All of whom also have different TV networks, different newspapers, different radio, presumably different social media and so on.
And politicians have the same problem - maybe you're an amazing public speaker. Maybe you've got the farming subsidy policy equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Clear, succinct, witty, persuasive, honest, passionate - everyone who hears it will be fired up to support your vision. But if you can only deliver that speech in Portuguese? Good luck with that.
Hell, look at this very discussion: I know first-hand about the complex relationship between the EU with the British parliament, press and electorate. But I have no idea what the equivalent situation is in the Czech Republic.
That's all a symptom of the current state of affairs. If citizens would hold their government accountable for their actions on EU-level, the ruling political parties wouldn't send people to the EU who are ill-equipped to communicate/execute.
But it's also an inherent problem of the EU. In retrospect, they shouldn't have left communication with citizens to the EU-members, expecting that they would communicate based on common interest.
As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".
The EU charter should have included the means for the Union to communicate directly with citizens, i.e. the basis to have their own local news-channels.
I can see improvements in communication nowadays, with EU press-releases and announcement carrying over into local (online) news at least. The fact that none of those messages are already carried by the local government speaks volumes...
> That's all a symptom of the current state of affairs. If citizens would hold their government accountable for their actions on EU-level, the ruling political parties wouldn't send people to the EU who are ill-equipped to communicate/execute.
What I'm saying is that everyone is ill-equipped to communicate, when communications are conducted in 24 languages.
Imagine a Greek newspaper decided to send a team of dedicated EU reporters to Brussels - how are they supposed to talk to the delegates from Sweden and Slovenia and Spain?
(and if you're thinking "they'll just communicate in english" let me remind you that less than 2% of the EU population lives in a country where english is an official language)
> As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".
Truth.
But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.
I get what you're saying but that's a non-issue. At plenary meeting and conferences every country is in the same situation, they communicate via an Armada of interpreters, just like they do at the UN, at the WTO, the WHO, the NATO, and so on. Outside of those they communicate in English and/or French.
If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person. If a local government sends a politician into the EU who can't communicate in English or French they sent the wrong person. Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels. So far not even THAT is happening in a sufficient manner...
Every single press-Release of the EU is done in English language. Granted, the EU doesn't invite to press-conferences in London to talk to the local press, that's the job of the local government.
Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European", but as everywhere it is more useful to their narrative to promote "We are Nationalists!"
Interesting, maybe that’s totally changed as of today with the AI voice and language and lip synching tech we have now
This.
It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things.
Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc.
Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.
This is similar to the Soviet Union. A lot of factories and utilities got asked to send their best employees to be council representatives. The factory managers naturally sent the most useless workers to become politicians. The rest is history.
How exactly is it detached?
The EU parliament is elected.
The EU commission is composed of members appointed by each member state (and every member state is - or should be - a democracy, so the commissioner is s representative of an elected government).
I keep seeing this bullshit being repeated as if it was true, and whenever I ask I never get meaningful answers.
They're socially detached. Yes, people vote for them; no, people do absolutely not follow anything the EU does until it reaches national parliaments.
This socially qualifier completely changes the original meaning.
One might argue that even national governments that are directly elected are socially detached from the general population.
That is in my opinion a fault of society rather than fault of governments. If you don't care about politics, you are doomed to be ruled by those that do.
I don't even know what language the Wednesday morning meetings that the commission have are held in. The official minutes are in French; are they conducted in French?
At least this was the case back in 2016 when I was doing as much research as I could before the referendum.
I'd call this a failure of the elected officials - elected just as the national ones yet feeling quite remote to their voters.
You mean, the MEPs? There's very little that MEPs can do to hold the executive (the Commission) to account. Commissioners are appointed by national governments; each government gets a quota. The appointees are generally ex-ministers whose careers in national politics are over, due either to failure or disgrace.
Essentially the only power that MEPs have is to vote down legislative proposals from the Commission. They have approximately no power to remedy administrative failures, corruption, and mistakes in implementation.
Oh but lobby and communications and meeting the commissioners and and and. I don't hear any that all too often, but maybe it's on me?