[IlikeKitties]

There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.

[pcrh]

A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Specifically:

>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...

[hexbin010]

Exactly, great quote from the ECHR. Massive blanket exceptions for the prevention of crime or disorder

[timschmidt]

Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't.

Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.

[zdragnar]

Text, phone calls and emails which are not encrypted are the equivalent of a postcard. They don't need to seize the effects, only observe them.

Encrypting, end to end, would be the equivalent of posting a letter. The contents are concealed and thus are protected.

[HNisCIS]

Time to wiretap all of Congress and then have a bot post it all to mastodon...

[golem14]

Except, wiretapping was considered very illegal in the USA.

[roenxi]

> all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.

I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law.

And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.

[vanviegen]

I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the law to distinguish between official acts taken in an honest attempt to benefit the nation, and those taken to corruptly and brazenly benefit oneself.

[roenxi]

That'd be a massive break from tradition in the US. AFAIK the only formal mechanism they have to separate the official from the person behind the role is impeachment by Congress. Apart from that there isn't really a mechanism to handle brazen corruption.

And US presidents have a long history of corruptly and brazenly benefiting themselves. Sometimes you see those before-and-after charts showing how much money they make while in office in excess of the official salary. The typical modern US president makes at least 10 of million in office and it isn't from the salary. Nobody likes it, but there is an open question of what exactly can be done about it.

[socalgal2]

I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.

[hexbin010]

> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy

Which apply equally to the government?

[IlikeKitties]

Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.

[hexbin010]

Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU

The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries

Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws

[pavlov]

Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them.

Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.

[rvnx]

It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention

[izacus]

That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.

[tremon]

No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).

[izacus]

If this passes, Germany would have to approve of it, which makes your diction a bit wierd.

A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.