Totally. This is exactly the problem with things like Chat Control in the EU and KOSA in the US. They will just introduce the same bill over and over and over again until they get the desired result.
What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those of their citizens.
True, and this is also the case in many other countries. Even if it is revocable by future legislation though, having pro-privacy laws on the books to prevent the current executive powers-that-be from abusing them would still be helpful.
A lot of these laws are now attempting to apply extra-territorially, e.g. to servers and companies in the US just because people in the UK are connected to the same internet, with punishments meted out if any part of that company does any business in the UK even if it's unrelated.
It might be interesting to go the other way: Get it put into the constitution of a major country that these kind of backdoors are banned world-wide and you can't do business in that country if any part of your enterprise implements them anywhere else.
To begin with this would make it harder to pass laws like this in other places -- domestic companies with international operations would put up stronger opposition because it would compromise their ability to do business elsewhere, and legislators might actually be concerned about that. And then on top of that it would force the companies to choose which subset of the world they want to operate in, allowing people in oppressive countries to pick up uncompromised devices from the places where compromised devices are banned.
The US constitution already has a provision against unreasonable search properly enshrined, and well tested in courts. Things like KOSA can be rejected as clearly violating it.
The EU does not seem to have such simple and ironclad norm.
Ah, that constitution must explain why we never see people being abducted in broad daylight by goon squads in the US, right? Because anything that clearly violates the constitution would obviously never happen there. Because you're the best country. The greatest.
I'm not sure if the 4th amendment applies to deportation of non-citizens, and secondly you would have to take it to supreme court to find out.
In comparison to the US constitution, EU "norms" might as well be toilet paper. For example, they have some notion of "free expression" which sounds like free speech but is defined to be so weak as to be useless. The european public broadly does not seem to care, they certainly aren't willing to kill for their rights.
Other commenters already mentioned that the current situation in the US shows how fragile this "ironclad" norm is. Aside from that, though, the fourth amendment wouldn't necessarily prevent a law that requires companies to scan the data and creates certain liabilities if they don't. The weakness in the US's version of such "rights" is that none of them are actually guarantee that any individual rights are to be protected against all comers; they restrict the government from doing certain things but allow private actors to do those same things.
I mean that'd certainly be nice, and it is also their only job, but even if they wanted to do it in regular legislation that'd be better than nothing.
Make a law that says companies have to protect the data of their citizens without the possibility of any intentional backdoor, perhaps. Make a law that says companies can't require people to dox themselves with ID scans simply to use a publicly available internet platform that provides no services in the physical world. Make a law that says OS developers can't create client-side scanning services that upload results off-device without revocable user consent.
No security is perfect, you can only create walls and speedbumps. It makes it harder. You're right, limit the power, but that doesn't mean you can't do both. The latter is much harder
It’s this. Even when an effort fails, there are no consequences for the politicians behind it. Nobody gets voted out of office. Nobody loses power. All they need to do is wait a year or two or five and try again. Eventual success is almost guaranteed.
Trust only software and systems you control and even then, approach with a hefty amount of side-eye.
Cable everything is dead. FOX is doing relatively well, but they reach maybe 1% or 2% of the population, and presumably that's almost all already unshifting right-wing people. I'm not saying it's impossible that it's a propaganda power center, but I don't personally know how that would work. It feels like a leftover enemy from the early 2000s that just doesn't make sense post-internet.
"According to data from Nielsen, Fox News — from the period spanning June 20 through Sept. 1 — finished as the no. 1 network in all of broadcast television during the primetime hours of 8-11 PM. During those hours, Fox News averaged 2.43 million total nightly viewers in primetime — topping ABC at 2.38 million, NBC at 2.21 million, and CBS at 2.03 million. It is the second time in the network’s history they accomplished that feat — with the other coming in the summer of 2020."
Whlie it sounds accurate that maybe 1-2% of the population watches it live, it is also the most highly rated and influencing "news" outlet in the US. Their reach is far deeper than 1-2%. It gets retweeted, talked about, and trickles down. It sure seems like at least 1/3rd of the population has a FOX brainworm infection. I've seen in on 24/7 in hotels and some sport bars or restaurants too.
"It sure seems like at least 1/3rd of the population has a FOX brainworm infection" - you had me right until you pulled this completely out of thin air.
All the main news outlets totalling less than 9 million viewers? That's not compelling at all.
Appreciate it- thanks for the feedback. I was admittedly being inflammatory, much in the spirit of the network we are discussing. In my perception it was not always this way and when it first came out I remember liking it. It was generally "fair and balanced" as their slogan was (they dropped it around 2017 when Obama left the WH). I have only been paying attention the last 30 years or so, and what started with AM radio on the fringe seems to have become mainstream in the last 25 years since 9/11 basically and has accelerated to the point we are at now in the US.
Exactly. Come to the Midwest and you'll see Fox News on in bars, oil change waiting rooms, dentist offices, etc. The other thing to keep in mind is that thanks to the electoral college, that percentage of viewers translates to a higher percentage of electoral votes.
> The other thing to keep in mind is that thanks to the electoral college, that percentage of viewers translates to a higher percentage of electoral votes.
Except that it's the opposite. The Dakotas are over-represented in the electoral college but getting them from 60% Republican to even 99% Republican wouldn't gain them a single electoral college vote. Meanwhile states like Michigan and Ohio where changing minds could change outcomes are under-represented in terms of electoral college votes.
But the vote allocations are the least impactful part of the electoral college. If you got rid of the +2 electoral college votes for each state independent of its population, votes in Arizona would still matter more than California. The primary thing the electoral college does isn't to give red states slightly more power than blue states, it's to give swing states dramatically more power than safe states.
> If you got rid of the +2 electoral college votes for each state independent of its population, votes in Arizona would still matter more than California.
There's a bit more to it than the +2 electoral votes from the senate, because even within the House the representations are skewed due to the strange decision to cap the size of the House at 435 seats while guaranteeing each state at least one seat. Thus California has 52 times as many reps as Wyoming although its population is about 67 times greater.
> The primary thing the electoral college does isn't to give red states slightly more power than blue states, it's to give swing states dramatically more power than safe states.
Strictly speaking this too could be changed to some extent without changing the electoral college itself, namely by states switching to allocate their electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote, instead of winner-take all. That is entirely possible now and two states already do it, but it has minimal effect because those states are tiny. But if, for instance, you could win 20 EVs in CA by winning ~40% of the popular vote, you can bet that some campaign dollars would shift to CA from, say, Ohio, because Ohio doesn't even have a total of 20 EVs. You could win more EVs in California while losing the election than you could by winning in Ohio! But most states will not do this because usually the party that wins all the EVs is also the party that controls the state government, and they don't want to give away half their EVs to the other party.
If I gather right-wing propaganda retweets, what fraction do you think will be retweets of FOX clips versus retweets of a right-wing propaganda twitter account? I don't have a methodology in mind, but I'm curious and will come up with something if you think substantially higher than me (<10%). I don't see why anyone would center FOX in the current media landscape. Musk alone has more than an order of magnitude more reach.
My understanding is that Nielsen does track what people encounter at hotels etc. (though only recently), so that should be included (?)
But what about all the re-presentations of the same content in YouTube clips, etc.? It's true that cable as a delivery mechanism is declining but that doesn't necessarily mean stuff like Fox as a content source is declining in influence.
What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those of their citizens.