Is the EU becoming nationalist/fascist/undemocratic?
 

Now actually that is a bit of a rhethorical question because I think it is quite obvious that it already is not really democratic with a weak parliament that is more often not asked to decide when the EU commission makes a decision - and then all member states feel obliged to follow these regulations made in that undemocratic way. Often things happen very obsured, MOPs may only read certain proposals of new regulations in a closed decure room and are not allowed to talk about it to the public and so on. And it is becoming more nationalist and fascist as can be seen by the reecent years worth of pushes for censorship laws, crackdown on immigration, ACTA, data retention, contracts with the US to deliver passenger lists of air travel and information on bank accounts. And some states like Hungary but also it seems Scandinavian countries are increasingly nationalist as well. The UK is a joke anyways in that respect with their internet censorship laws, CCTV everywhere and recently they seem to think about privatizing large part of their police force and give private contractors the right to detain people and investigate crimes. Denmark had a little lapse recently when their internet censorship firewall accidentially blocked google and a number of other large webservices.

But now to the current videos that brought me to bring this up again:
Here is an incredibly strange ad by the EU. They pulled it back after they saw that people are not ready to swallow that much xenophobia yet, but it is still out there on youtube:
EU enlacement ad - YouTube
(It depicts coloured people from other countries like Asia, Africa and the Middle East as male attackers against a female European white person who then defeats them by multiplying - and then she herself becomes just another star in the banner)

And some stuff about the EU financial situation and the decline of democracy by shutting people and even legislation out of the process of how to deal with debt, new money, tax money etc:
EU: Treaty of debt (ESM) - stop it now! - YouTube
It seems to be valid, though maybe a bit hyperbole in leaving out other parts. Still it is scary to see how that huge sums of money are thrown around when no one really has any and how that whole thing is then protected by a set of immunity laws that protect participants of these commissions. That has nothin at all to do with democracy or even a state of law if people are excempt from judicial processes, law and executive force. It makes sense if peoples privacy is in peril, like with lawyers and doctors - but not with financial decisionmaking.

So I see that even from within the EU the signs are visible (from outside maybe they are even obvious) that the EU is going the same path as the US in these times of crisis - namely turning towards a politics of isolation, nationalism, nondemocracy, authoritarianism and sacrifices liberty and freedom to safety, security and profit.

By the way--- today is World Day of fighting internet censorship... that's already happening in democracies, too, as well as the total surveillance of cell phone net cells, lest one bloody activist disturbs some Federal hullaballoo going on... so, best to watch everyone, making it impossible for anyone to emerge from that mass.

It seems, like "us" western civilized like the feeling of our breeches pooped brim-full from "our" fear of vile aliens, other religions, people wanting to live differently (and that means, in accord with Nature, listening to Her and treating Her with affection and respect...).

Speaking of fear... in Bonn, Germany, an islamist named Yassin Chouka (propaganda officer of the Uzbek Islamic Movement) is warning of possible terrorist attacks in Germany...


Sorry, if this sounded too bitter... just had to vent a little...

;)

Wiggling bare toes,

~*Txim Asawl*~

I don't know about the rest of the EU but to be honest, I don't think the UK is in that bad shape. I wasn't aware of internet censorship here and CCTV is just the price you pay for living in an urban area.

The privatization of the police force is kind of odd,but if that goes ahead we can deal with it. Everytime somebody is deported from here, the European court of dumbasses cries 'human right violation' and criminals only gets a slap on the wrists for their crimes, I think we've a way to go until things get super bad, respectfully :)

The sooner we get out of the EU the better, I think. While I'm not so sure about nationalism, it definitely has federalist tendencies, and that is reason enough to leave - the impending collapse of the euro should be driving more nations to seek proper independence, but many have given away too much power to, when laws are made by some anonymous unelected official in Brussels based on latest political correctness targets and quotas instead of a country's elected representatives.

When it started as just the union of coal and steel industries throuhgout Europe, the so-called "Montanunion" together with the farming cooperation and, oh, yes Euratom as well, it was clear to be just an economic complex.

By now, the surveillance and security measures are making me feel rather unsafe living here...

I am looking for ways out (of this country only, people... no worries, OK? ;) )

Wiggling bare toes,

~*Txim Asawl*~

One of the awesome things about being in the EU is the fact that moving to and working in another EU country is made sooo much easier. Txim_asawl, assuming you wanted to you could go to wherever you want and barefoot all over Europe :D

That benefits some countries, but not others. Yes, the whole 'Eastern Europe taking everyone's jobs' is a cliche, but it's still true that a lot of people don't benefit from that other than not needing a visa to go on holiday.

Oh, I've been barefoot in Holland, the Alsace, Denmark, Sweden... a few Eurozone countries already... you're not surprised, right?
:D

Well, OK, granted, the comparingly open borders (in comparison to the pre-iron curtain-fall-era) are a benefit. The problem is the giant balloon called financial system hovering above it like a full-grown Pandora puffball tree, ready to explode...

http://images.wikia.com/jamescameron...fball_Tree.jpg

Most likely, I will never cross the Atlantic, unless that 15-year storage of all passenger data to prevent terrorism is going to be thrown to the dustbin it belongs into... authorities already have so much data from me... I just took the second round of the German Zensus 2011 - yes, I was in the "Wiederholungsbefragung", the second round of inquiry... I took the easy way out... again in my life. I could have easily footed the bill of a 300 Euro fine...

Wiggling bare toes,

thoughtfully,

~*Txim Asawl*~

Sure - travelling within Europe is a bit easier (though it was not that hard in the past either. You needed a passport, change money and get a travel health insurance. Big deal. The big difference now is that you can also get a job anywhere in Europe without it being a big deal, though it still is not just completely easy. But I think these freedoms come at a high price - too high I believe. A true federal system is not the worst situation - it implies that the members keep their sovereignty and work together in a federal way in aspects that really do affect all the participants. If that federal system takes over power, things are getting more into something like the United states of Europe. As quite often, at the base of this was economic interests. The comforts for the people are basically a byproduct and a way to sell this to people. The tip of the iceberg. And the policy against non-EU members are getting worse, not better. It is easier to move from Italy to Spain maybe but it has become harder to move from any other country into the EU. And that sort of attitude displayed in the video clip does not really help to work against that tendency.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..." one hippie-era music icon sung once...
Even though Germany now has another protestant cleric at the top of the government (we already have a priest's daughter as chancellor), I doubt that suddenly things will change on this matter...

Quite on the contrary, our new German president Joachim Gauck is a strong fan of things like Vorratsdatenspeicherung (large-scale data mining and storage of all internet connections for at least six months, regardless of any criminal or so-called terrorist charges...). Cheer up citizens... life's gonna be a lot safer now...

Wiggling bare toes, a little sarcastically, too...

~*Txim Asawl*~

EU... i never liked that idea anyway, perhaps it was a good idea in the beginning, but so many stupid things did follow afterwards..

I would for sure not cry if the EU would finally be go down once and for all

Sometimes I wonder if America's greater problems are exacerbated by the size of land and amount of people governed. Perhaps the same goes for the EU, in a manner of speaking.

Strong encryption. Learn and use GPG*/PGP (myself, a I prefer a GPG implementation simply because it's open source), and if anything has an https option, use it. Read up on security and good practice. The more informed people are, the harder such surveillance is to implement.

*Ironically, indirectly funded by the German government :P

Some things are possible with encryption, but many are not. Email encryption for example only works if both persons do have it - that means you have to insist on it and probably install encryption software at your friends computers. Oh and then you have to convince them not to use Yahoo Messenger or Skype like all their friends do but something like Jabber with OTR. And then you have to install certpatrol on firefox and use TOR and convince all your favourite websites to ude SSL, which they do not want to do because valid certificates cost money and self signed cause freaky error messages and besides all thet, SSL is buggy and was hacked several times.
Believe me, I am trying to use the internet safely for years and it is a nightmare - most of all because no one else is interested in it, but people instead post the photos from the last student party on facebook and give the facial recognition software all the names of the people visible there. And they allow facebook and google to read their emails and adress books and thus read my emails to them as well. That way facebook knows more about me already than I know. And how do you use GPG for emails that you send to people who only use webmail, which are A LOT nowadays. Even if their webmail solution has such a thing as GPG, the cleartext would end up on their server. OR you have to manually copy each encrypted email text into some GPG application to read it.
The problem is not that I myself cannot use secure ways of communication, but that most people and services I communicate with do not know/want this...

To use the Alice and Bob style, if Alice uses GPG then she can sign her messages with her key, in which case they are still cleartext but they have a hash that can be verified against her public key to prove it is the message she sent; Bob only needs to have an implementation to receive messages encrypted to his own public key. The point is that retaining the ability to communicate securely does not prevent non-secure methods, while it leaves the user with more options.

Yahoo, MSN, and Skype are all insecure, yes, but the principle isn't to make ALL communication secure, only to have the ability if necessary. Always consider WHAT you're sending and the nature of how it's transfered, including points of failure security-wise. There's no need to use Tor for most circumstances, as PGP or a strong symmetric cipher hides content just as well, and Tor has its own security issues when it comes to facilitating packet sniffing.
Yes, SSL is a pain for small sites to implement, but that's why I mentioned to take advantage of it on anywhere that DOES offer it, not to insist that all transactions are covered by it (although obviously, keep in mind what you transfer based on whether or not it is). Vulnerabilities on SSL are of the Man in the middle attack type (common to any form of key exchange that is not an in-person meeting)*, which does limit potential as the level of access needed is high - but again, that's why the critical point, as in any system, is awareness of limitations, the Debian OpenSSL bug was very specific and keys generated with the cryptographic weakness are blacklisted almost everywhere; overall, the level of access to break SSL is still high - yes, people under extreme risk would do well not to rely on it, but it isn't something most people will encounter.

*Not strictly true, but close enough, and ways to work around this involve a web of trust.

As for webmail, that's not true. If Alice sends PGP message to Bob and Bob accesses it with a webmail application, it still only displays the ciphertext. If he used some form of integrated implementation, then ys, there's clearly a risk, but instead, he could copy it to his computer and use it locally (a far better idea as it does not allow remote access to the private key) so the plaintext is only on his system. Yes, that's a slight burden, but the point is that there is always a tradeoff of convenience, while having the ability and understanding does not make it a requisite for all communication. Manually copying a block of ciphertext is not such an inconvenience, especially when it's far simpler than having to type in a long key for strong symmetric encryption (128- or 256-bit).

In the end, a proper understanding and having the ability won't make all communication secure, certainly, but it's having the ability that is important, as well as the understanding of the principle, because the more people that do, the more realise surveillance will always prove inviable against people who actually know what they're doing; who are of course the people it is intended to target.

Thanks for explaining basic cryptography, HNM, but that was not really my point. Of course there are ways which can provide some security in specific communications between 2 people that are security aware and capable. Which by the way is why all this data retention and internet censorship is bloody useless when it comes to the issues the lawmakers pretend to be the reason for installing them (child pr0n, terrorism, criminal activities, hackers,...) because these people are the ones that are most likely to soon figure out a way to get around these restrictions. But the issue is that most traffic is unsecure and that this , if used properly , can tell someone very valuable personal information about almost all people.

That's the point of awareness - even if they don't change it, people should know what their trackable/identifiable footprint is. There's a lot more I could do, certainly, as with alost every person on Earth, yet I'm still more secure than the average, but I'm aware of the impact of each activity.

There is always an arms race between censorship and bypassing it, and it will always have the same result - not least because the most knowledgeable and skilled people always realise that not only is freedom more important, but that authoritarians will always be playing catch up.

It's the chemtrails man.

Well, I follow the talks at the congress (CCC | Veranstaltungen des CCC) and other activities of the CCC, I think we here are quite aware of the possibilities. Still the gap between general application and the front of the arms race is widening. Some people even claim the we lost the war (video) and to be honest, it is not looking good. There is a war on general computing that has started escalating. And meanwhile people are just not aware of this - they dump all their private data (and mine) on failbook and elsewhere by themselves - no data retention and spying laws needed. This is the masterpiece of surveillance - to convince people that they WANT to give up their privacy and data. Its a really well done large scale social hack :(

Communication will split - if you look around, there are even plans to facilitate this, primarily via darknets, but I think it will happen anyway as people who are aware gravitate towards those who are aware and take action, while those who are unaware remain in the same place. It doesn't even take an amazing amount of skill to follow or participate - well beyond the average luser, but not to someone who is even aware of the issues.

But I think it is a problem if everyone but some who are aware of the issues just lets things go as they do. Sometimes, awareness is high enoug - like in Germany when 100.000 people went on the streets to protest data retention laws and a subsequent lawsuit in the supreme constitutional court resulted in a retraction of that law. But at the same time 2 or 3 other major issues went ahead (electronic RFID passports, centralized medical data collection,...). I really fear that we are loosing here, not winning. 20 years ago, the percentage of privacy-aware people in so many areas was higher than it is now. People protested the census back then - nowadays there are just a few concerned voices. Yes, the "pirate party" has won 7% of votes and thus has entered the parliament in one of germanies states last week, that is a good sign in terms of the reflection of the awareness of voters of the privacy issues which was one of their main political themes, but I feel somehow that Germany is not really the norm here. If there is something I like about the German society, it is that the people are overall more aware of the problematic issues that threaten the world and the ideas of a free society. Maybe because Germany has experienced two totalitarian states and it has experienced the effects of pollution and overburdening industrialization early on. We had the NAZIs, the STASI, completely toxified rivers, forests dying of acid rain and fallout from Chernobyl. Maybe it is no wonder that antifascism and environmentalism are not as weak as elsewhere here...
But still - I observed the trends over the past 20 years and looking bad I see that the trend is not encouraging, that things seem to rather decay than to progress towards something positive. Not all is bad and not all is gloom and doom, there are many good people out there trying to keep civil liberties, freedom and democracy alive and the environment safe. But if I go around the street and ask people if they heard about TOR, they probably would in >>90% of the cases direct me to the nearest city gate (Stadt-tor) and not to a computer program and for GNUs, they probably tell me to go to Africa. If I send someone random a PGP encrypted email, I will not get a reply (heck sor some even opening a HTML email is a challenge). We spread flyers and stickers making fun of pseudosafety measures like CCTV or try to make people aware of horrible internet laws, but I still feel this is not enough and we are still loosing. You in the UK have already lost, I think. If I'd have to travel to the UK, I'd probably have a strange feeling in my stomach. I would not take my laptop with me (as they can force me to give away my password for the encryption), I would feel watched by CCTV wherever I go and try to spot the cameras and I would try to always use a proxy or TOR when available to go on the internet. But what do people complain about who live there? That THEIR neighborhood has not yet enough CCTV cameras. W T F...

Generally speaking, this is the way it has always been. Complete awareness of an issue usually only comes with civil war, afaik.

Well - I think it is absolutely no coincidence then, that the language of the CCC congress titles are increasingly sounding like a military congress. There is a war going on about the internet and computing in general. And if we loose, computing and internet turns into a massive machine to control people like the TV did but worse. Maybe people will wake up one day to a civil internet war - or they will wake up only after it is over and the war has reached the real world.
I dont even want to think about what a totalitarian government can do with all the data that each of us has sitting in the internet and on devices. Social Network, Friends, location data, sexual orientation, political orientation, religious issues. If the NAZIs would gain power today, it would make everything a lot easier for them to round up people they do not like - just visit their f-ing facebook pages - or the ones of their friends and there is all the data an opressive government ever wishes to know, including "facbook locate" data and so on. The amount of data, facebook knows about each of us would make the east German STASI totally envious.

People need to pick their battles. Census protesting is stupid, while if you make every random go 'not AGAIN...' in regards to privacy threats, they will become more ignorant, and it makes real threats harder to get people aware of. RFID passport chips are a classic example - yes, there are security issues around them, but in terms of remote reading (get a shielded case for it), not in terms of general privacy, remember if you go to an airport there are dozens of facial recognition and ANPR camera systems in addition to people observing. That's the point about levels of acceptability and being informed about what data is being collected where and by who, and in either case, I'm less concerned about airports wanting to stop people who are on terrorism watchlists than I am about interception of private communications (although the two together are why data sharing between organisations is always a big concern).

See my previous points. It's never going to be for everyone, but by the knowledge being there, it changes how things are thought of and respected, while, although it's a painful thing to admit, some people are simply too ignorant of privacy issues to be helped.

Probably cause. They can't look randomly because they feel like it, and need an actual case. As it is, and in an exact example of my point, it is trivially easy to implement measures to defeat this if you really do have something that can not be located without a key even within a decrypted volume.

I don't understand CCTV-phobia, although I do not support overly widespread use either. It's less useful than it is claimed to be, yes, but it's a deterrent in the same way that police standing around are, police are watching people too, but I think most people would oppose banning them. People just need to think about where it is and how likely it's useful to be (airports, stations, buses, trains, hotspots of crime: sure, they need them. Random streets, no). Again, the issue is how they're used policy-wise, not their existence, and again, that people know what's happening.

As for internet use, you're confusing Britain with France/the US/Australia; the only internet censorship is a massively and systematically flawed system which is trivial to bypass in any case, used to block access to child abuse images instead of actually taking action against those responsible. Tor is actually a bad bet for many people - it's vulnerable to several attacks up to and including people simply running a packet sniffer over an exit node they operate, which has been done both in proof of concept and real use several times. That doesn't give some info that may be useful such as source IP, but the more datasets they have, the easier it is to find consistences (e.g. AOL's search data leak, which allowed a huge number of people to be personally identified). It helps as a layer of security, but relying on it is failing to understand how it works.

Of course I know about the weaknesses of TOR and almost all other ways to retain some privacy. And yes of course one can hide sensible data inside video files and so on. All kinds of things are possible but most of them will be only for very well informed and capable people - and of course those who are targeted, namely terrorists and criminals.
And that is the whole point - not if it is POSSIBLE for individuals who are interested to protect at least some of their privacy (though somtimes that is impossible or illegal as well as in the example of CCTV, number plate-logging, cellphone position logging, facebook/email accounts of friends and relatives). But the pure fact that people have to do all this sort of things to maintain at least some shreds of privacy is not good.
And it is even proven to be inefficient for the cause they claim to erect many of these. Overall crime rates do not drop by setting up CCTV, Terrorists do not get caught by data retention - but the collateral damage is huge. This issue is way too large to describe here completely, but I think it should be evident that a government or corporation logging the social network, movements (cellphones, cars, CCTV+facial recognition), email contents etc is a danger. That whole post-privacy bull**** goes on my nerves. "Oh, I dont have anything to hid, go ahead and install a friggin video camera in my living room". Everyone has something to hide - maybe not from friends or even an uncorrupted police. But data is eternal and once logged and stored, the risk of it getting into the wrong hands or the right hands turning wrong is just too large.

It is not so much about myself - I can probably go ahead and ramp up my security status with various tools I know of, but I am thinking of the general public. The US is showing very fascist tendencies similar to pre-1933 Germany. Do you think in 1925 in Germany it would have been regarded as reasonable if the Jews and Communists and Gays would have put their friendslists on facebook, if the democratically elected government would have installed CCTV on the streets, logged the cellphone positions of the citizens, ran automated software to read unencrypted emails. Of course they did not have the technology, but what if... - and then what would have happened after 1933. You think the newly instated insanity at the head of the state would not have seized and used that data to create the most efficient way to arrest and kill persons that have the wrong sexual orientation, race, political opinion or that have just been close friends to someone like that? Of course some people can slip by that - and some people did. Some people pretended to be "good Germans" while secretly helping Jews or secretly communicated. But a free society cannot give away their freedom by giving someone that much control over their lives. Then it becomes not free anymore.

The issue also is not to imprison more people, to ramp up police to arrest more people, to install more CCTV cameras to drive criminals into those places that dont have CCTV - this is like putting concrete blocks into a river. You can divert the flow, maybe slow it down in some parts or even stop it for a short while, but the river will always find a way and there will always be the same amount of water washing over the blocks in the end. It is futile. In case of crime and terror, the proper strategy is prevention, not punishment or crackdowns or surveillance. If a society is managed properly, it does not have as much crime - CCTVs, data retention or censorship laws or not.

And speaking of censorship - maybe it is easy (for us) to circumvent internet censorship (with TOR, proxies, alternative DNS, tunnels,...) - but for most it is not. If they call up some website and it says "not found" or "this site is illegal", they will think "oh, geez, I better look elsewhere" and thats it then.

Again, the CCC has been working on this issue for what - over 30 years now? Trying to raise awareness of privacy issues? And there is some success recently in Germany at least, but other countries seem to be much less aware.

But of course awareness of this is based on assuming that there could be something changing in the future - probably too much of a stretch for most people who think that all will just go on as it has been going in the past 20 years.