[McDyver]

They make it really difficult to fight any of this.

You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind.

This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.

This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if they have strong feelings about it.

I wish there was an easier way for people to say they are against this

[afarah1]

Same for any legislation piece.

A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.

Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.

And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.

It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.

"In vain do we fly to the many"...

[p1dda]

The European Commission (EC) is particularly sinister in so many ways and not like any previously known modern democratic entity. The EC has been constantly pushing for less democracy, less transparency, more censorship for decades. All the while the horrible president von der Leyen makes billion dollar deals with Big Pharma in complete secrecy without any repercussions or oversight. Europe is doomed if we don't destroy the EU in its current form, but how?

[cortesoft]

This is the case for so many things… it is why every attempt to make filling out your taxes in the United States fails completely.

[Der_Einzige]

Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.

Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.

Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.

It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.

[chrischen]

Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?

[aleph_minus_one]

A possible countermeasure could be to make the life of politicians (which we will of course all name individually) who voted for such laws a hell on earth ...

[thephyber]

“Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”.

[darkmighty]

On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.

Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.

From wiki:

> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"

Campaign donations, per this website:

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.

Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.

It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.

[AlecSchueler]

> It's just the power structure of any representative legislature...

... Under capitalism.

[sidewndr46]

One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.

[ryandrake]

The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.

[soulofmischief]

A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.

[deaddodo]

Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.

[mc32]

It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.

[Kim_Bruning]

That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)

[noqc]

This system would make a lot more sense if the number of people you had to get to agree to a bill with a bunch of riders was more than 50%.

[atoav]

There is a German Verein called digitalcourage who lobbies for this: https://digitalcourage.de/en

You can toss some money to the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) as well: https://edri.org/

All of those are doing good work in the digital rights space

(Edit: there is probably more but those are the ones that came to mind)

[miohtama]

The only way to stop it is to have positive rights written in law, like right to online privacy and privacy of communications.

[mystraline]

Yes, like the Soviet Union.

Whereas the West has predominantly negative rights, the USSR had positive rights. And due to their campaign, even got the UN declaration of human rights to mostly include USSR's positive rights.

https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on...

Part of USSR constition indicating positive rights: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....

Women and men have equal rights in the USSR.

Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities have equal rights.

Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society.

Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.

Now, that isn't to say the USSR was blameless. We know it wasn't. However, we can take their successes and failures in what we propose and build next. Negative and positive rights both are needed. But the West is allergic to those.

[lupusreal]

Article 35: Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.

https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20...

Constitutions are just paper. It doesn't matter how they're written if the guys with the guns don't care to respect it.

[cobbzilla]

Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!

[whywhywhywhy]

Ultimately if you want politicians not to do this then you need to start pooling your resources and just paying them not to, because it's pretty obvious with how all this stuff is getting rolled out in a month that someone someone has bankrolled it.

[wyuenho]

The UK has a petition website. It logs the signatory by constituency. Once a threshold os signatory has cross, the government has to respond and parliament will have to consider a debate on the topic.

[Ylpertnodi]

And just because they respond, it doesn't actually mean anything will result from it.

"No more something!" "We have seen your petition. Fuck off, peasants".

[crinkly]

This exists only to pacify people and make them think someone has listened to them.

[voidUpdate]

This is the relevant petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903. The government's response so far is "lol no"

[HPsquared]

The proposing side can be centralised and organised; the opposition diffuse and disorganised. Hence the continual growth of all forms of legislation.

[klysm]

Why would the politician in question give a shit what you think? They get into office mostly by funding which comes from… guess who?

[pcrh]

On the other hand, elected politicians (senators, MPs, etc) are supposed to represent what the populus wants, else be ejected.

So in theory, they should be paying as much heed to lobbyists as to their constituents.

The question arises, then, as to why they do not. There's no ground swell of public opinion in favour of being continually monitored.

[nucleardog]

> The question arises, then, as to why they do not.

There are huge bodies of research out there on voting behaviour. If you look at it, it's a lot less surprising.

The means by which we're supposed to hold the elected officials accountable for not representing our best interests is voting. It doesn't work.

Most people don't, as individuals, hold any sort of stable policy positions to begin with. People have a poor understanding of the candidates' position on various topics (strongly correlated with not having a stable policy position themselves). Candidates themselves have influence on people's view of subjects. People tend to take some of their views from the candidate they've decided to support, and project their own views onto the candidate in other cases making them seem more aligned/preferable.

The entire model is basically set up assuming that:

1. People have a view on policy which they decided on.

2. People will understand the candidates' positions and vote for the ones most closely aligned with them.

3. If an elected representative does not follow through on their positions and views, the people will hold them accountable by voting them out of office.

4. Therefore, in aggregate and over the long term, the elected representatives represent and enact the will of the people.

For the vast majority of issues in the vast majority of cases... one and two do not hold true to a level that's meaningful or significant.

That means the third step falls apart. In practice, there's little accountability to the electorate for the elected representatives.

Which means the fourth falls apart.

Given the elected officials aren't really beholden to the electorate, what else would guide their position? On an individual basis, there are a lot of opportunities for wealth and power. Unless it's anything particularly egregious, the only real impediment to them taking advantage is their own personal ethics and morals. The kinds of people that want to put their life on hold to run a campaign so they can maybe take a shit job with mediocre pay where a bunch of people will be pissed at them no matter what they do... are unfortunately often not in for the mediocre pay and anger.

And here we are. It's not whether there are enough people that support being continually monitored, it's about whether there's enough people and enough money _against_ it to stir up enough people to care to stop them. There's almost definitely not.

And just to make it entirely hopeless--even if you are a well-informed voter with considered and consistent views on policy... Many countries have very little in the way of options for who else to vote for. Is this important enough to enough people to make them a single issue voter? Would they vote for the hypothetical "We Support Murdering Kittens" party if they were against the spying? Probably not--they'll probably hold their nose and vote for the "We Love Kittens" party as the lesser evil.

[zx8080]

> This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying.

That's gighting against an organized crime syndicate. It requires coordination, resources and aim.

1984 is coming in its worst scenarious.

There will be no win for the people, no hope. Freedom is gone.

[aunty_helen]

I donate to an org that supports free speech. They do a good job for me. If there’s something they need a signature on I’ll generally follow their instructions and sign it.

[dyauspitr]

I don’t think people are particularly against this. The kids are imploding and people dont care about a completely open internet as much.

[sunshine-o]

I was told by a Brussels lobbyist a long time ago that the EU was by design made for them. I then was shocked how in your face it is within the EU walls.

In a sense citizens also have legitimate lobby groups, they are the political parties we know.

Foreign countries also lobby. Now recently what should worry Europeans is they don't bother anymore and just wipe the floor with the EU representative in front of everybody like Xi and Trump did last week.

So you can vote and lobby but I don't think it is enough today. We should first opt out of a lot of things and defend ourselves digitally:

- Buy some cheap LoRa devices and give some to your friends. Get into meshtastic and reticulum

- Buy some cheap HaLow WiFi devices and get into things like OpenWrt and B.A.T.M.A.N

- Self host as much as you can (It is worth doing just to avoid the Cloudflare " verify you are human" thing)

- Look back into things like Ethereum and good projects, they slowly made some real progress. Crypto is not only about price, annoying bitcoin bros and memecoins. It is still bad but banks and credit card companies are worst.

- Get some useful skills.

We have entered some kind of world war already and it will most likely include some ugly cyberattacks. In that context ChatControl matters much less and you can kill two birds with one stone.

I am still looking for a realistic solution to the email problem. If you have a suggestion I am really listening.

[FabHK]

It's equally difficult to support it, no?

[verisimi]

There is no way to resolve these problems. Every answer involves capitulation to governments with loss of personal freedoms.

One has to admit the system is fundamentally broken. Once this is accepted, and people stop investing themselves further in the political system, then we will see change.

Sadly, the change is already planned for and will likely be a jump to some sort of communistic, ai-managed technocracy. However, it is also an opportunity to make the point that force should be no part of a future system. People should be able to opt-in or opt-out. That's freedom.

[Jommi]

just use a browser agent

[MPSFounder]

This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and private interests, decide accordingly. If the majority believes in something, then we the people decide. Congress and the senate have been too bought up by private interests, that starts with campaigning (you receive x millions, from a lobby group (AIPAC for instance), and every legislation that affects their interests has to go through them). I dated a girl who was a lobbyist in DC, and relocated back home. It is unbelievable what goes on behind the scenes. Much of us do not recognize for instance the extent to which fossil fuels or car dealerships dictate how we live our lives. We may be aware of it, but there is a bureaucratic apparatus built in DC, at least 50x the size of congress, that strips We the people of power.

[sevensor]

> an educated populace

Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.