7 ms·

I wonder how it can be legal to repeatedly undermine constitution and push or vote for later high-court-nullified laws and be allowed to repeat as if nothing wa

I wonder how it can be legal to repeatedly undermine constitution and push or vote for later high-court-nullified laws and be allowed to repeat as if nothing was wrong with that. Like drunk driving forever. We ban counter-constitutional activities outside parliament and authorities. Why not inside? I am much for 3-strikes here.

chopin 2y ago
0-strike. It should be expected that elected officials respect the constitution.
- dustfinger 2y ago
  I agree with 0-strikes. Elect officials should be under constant investigation for any form of nefarious behavior and they should be prosecuted as any citzen would be.
  - sneak 2y ago
    Do you understand what would happen to the system if politicians could be prosecuted for proposing laws?
    - FpUser 2y ago
      Well, proposed laws would need to pass constitutionality test done by some constitutional court stuffed by legal field experts. If passed, no prosecution can occur. I could be prosecuted for driving if the result is death of pedestrian for example. I still drive. So why our fucking "servants" are special?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > proposed laws would need to pass constitutionality test done by some constitutional court stuffed by legal field experts. If passed, no prosecution can occur Congratulations, you re-invented the politburo.
        FpUser 2y ago
        No it is an attempt to bring runaway politicians back to senses. As for politburo: HR in big corporations already does the task quite well. They just do not like to be called what they are.
      - K0balt 2y ago
        Then , presumably, you would need another, lesser court, to vet a bill before it reached the constitutional court. Unfortunately this just creates another layer of abstraction and each layer adds myriad perverse incentives for power brokering and abuse. It’s a very thorny problem that humanity has yet to solve, and is probably unsolvable until we can solve the “power opens opportunities for abuse of those powers “ problem. The only ideal form of government is the benign and just king, which of course does not exist. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
        FpUser 2y ago
        >"The only ideal form of government is the benign and just king, which of course does not exist." This might work in very small society where said king can be quickly brought to senses if he pisses off enough people. Anything larger is fucked up no atter what we do. >"I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." No fuck that
        K0balt 2y ago
        Meh, it’s only a matter of time, assuming that superintlligence is achieved. It will of course be sock puppeted throughout some hapless shmuck, but societies that are not effectively led by superintellignces will quickly become irrelevant footnotes in a sea of strategic superiority.
        K0balt 2y ago
        But, yeah. F that. I’m not looking forward to evolution. It’s probably going to happen anyway.
      - ruszki 2y ago
        Hungary had that. It didn't really work.
      - sneak 2y ago
        They already do that now, there's even a defined procedure for it. They just do it after the law has already passed.
    - dustfinger 2y ago
      You make a good point, I was not clear at all on the scope of my statement. I am thinking about my own countries constitution. I am not familiar with UKs constitution [1], so I don't really know if "control chat" violates the UK's constitution or not. When I said "nefarious", I was in part referring to undermining a countries constitution, as it is illegal to do so. No, I think that proposing laws that clearly undermine the constitution should be stopped immediately at the time of proposal by the constitution itself. 0-strikes for the proposal. 0-strikes here was not meant to suggest the politician be thrown in jail or anything like that. But, I agree with you in that I was unclear. Again, my statement above was poorly worded. This is what I meant by prosecuting for nefarious behavior: It is my belief that government behavior would be better kept in check if elect officials were under constant investigation for criminal acts. Society should have gauntness that their nation is being run by good actors. Those running our country should be legally obligated to be working towards making the society that they serve thrive, not using it as a platform for organized crime, influencing the outcomes of their personal investments, or traitorous behavior like ruining a nations economy to empower another nation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
    - exe34 2y ago
      politicians don't propose law in the EU. appointed bureaucrats do. politicians get to vote on them eventually, but it'll get passed one way or another.
    - mro_name 2y ago
      we germans learn in history lessons at school what can happen once a democratic process abolishes enough fundamental rights.
      - sneak 2y ago
        Yeah, meanwhile, you can't buy video games with too much blood in them now because the censorship ship has sailed. Banning the nazi salute and certain types of ideological publishing is treating the symptoms and not the disease. It doesn't fix the issue, and it involves a lot of collateral damage. Germany has in fact abolished fundamental rights (i.e. free expression) in response to collective fear and guilt about WW2. It's an unforced own goal, just like the USA did to itself after 9/11. The worst possible response. It harms only those who shouldn't be harmed; German nazis will still be nazis quietly in basements, and everyone else in Germany who isn't a nazi is subject to media censorship. It's nonsense.
        mro_name 2y ago
        that's not what I am talking about. I talk about that today it's not allowed to abolish democracy which - believe it or not - was allowed and happened 1933. See e.g. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_9.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_9.html
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I mean nefarious behaviour, sure, but idk if you mean in any context or just this specific one. That said, if they commit illegal acts they should be tried and convicted like any other civilians, if not with a more severe punishment because they are our leaders that set the example.
    - dustfinger 2y ago
      I attempted to clarify my statement in my response to sneak. I am concerned that if there are people in government acting nefariously, these bad actors are free to continue unchallenged. If that is what is happening, then I suspect that this flaw exists in many democracies, if not all of them. I am by no means an expert in government, but I believe that with the way things are currently structured those leading our nations are operating without sufficient checks and balances to ensure their good intent. I am talking about investigating every government leader with a utility to ensure they are acting favorably with respect to peace, order, and good government in perpetuity.
- klausa 2y ago
  Which constitution are you referring to?
- jdasdf 2y ago
  This. Anyone that voted for a law that is later struck down committed an illegal act, and should be liable for it.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    This is a shortsighted kneejerk take to be honest. What about laws you agree with that get rescinded? What if a law that protects your privacy gets struck down, do you think the privacy advocates that made it happen in the first place "committed an illegal act and should be liable for it"?
sneak 2y ago
It’s because we aren’t actually nations of laws. There are certain groups in every nation (yes, even the ones you like or perhaps respect) who operate outside of the law as if it doesn’t exist. The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. Most people in most societies are already under this type of surveillance. This is just to tidy up the small loopholes like Signal etc.
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  > The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. Do you have a source for this? Can this be concluded by looking at the app traffic?
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    "clientside backdoored" is a vague statement, but they may mean e.g. Snowden's revelations that the NSA has secret backdoor access to the big tech companies.
  - sneak 2y ago
    iCloud Backup backs up the entirety of someone's iMessage history (or their endpoint iMessage sync keys, which equate to the same thing) each night to Apple without e2ee. If you enable e2ee for iCloud/iCloud Backup, all of your iMessage traffic will still be escrowed, simply from the other end of all of your conversations because they still have iCloud e2ee turned off (because it's off by default). If the endpoint sends the plaintext post-decryption to the middle transit service (Apple) in a way that is readable to that middle service (iCloud Backups contain complete iMessage history and are encrypted to Apple keys), then it's not e2ee. This is called "plaintext escrow". Same goes for WhatsApp. It backs up its message history to iCloud or Google Drive, which are, in the usual case (99.9%+ of users) non-e2ee.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  > The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. No they are not. This is nonsense. The charitable interpretation is that you’re confusing the systems on iMessage that can voluntarily detect nudity and report it to you (but not the police or Apple) with the systems being proposed in TFA which have mandatory reporting to provider+police. The uncharitable interpretation is that you’re just making stuff up because it sounds good. Please don’t do either, it makes everyone worse off.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> to repeatedly undermine constitution The EU doesn’t have a constitution [1], simply enabling treaties [2]. The solution would be in ratifying a constitution. > am much for 3-strikes here Careful. A party in power will seek to nullify issues by putting forward and then defeating sham bills. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitution_for_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Consti... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Uni...
- thfuran 2y ago
  >The solution would be in ratifying a constitution. That certainly doesn't prevent politicians from voting for unconstitutional laws.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > certainly doesn't prevent politicians from voting for unconstitutional laws At that point you no longer have a legislative body, but an advisory council to whomever it is that decides what votes are and aren’t punishable. (See: Iran, China, the Roman Principate, early parliamentary monarchies.)
    - mro_name 2y ago
      difficult balancing act. Having a legislative body throwing fundamental rights out of the window isn't appealing either.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Having a legislative body throwing fundamental rights out of the window isn't appealing either They’re not. They’re discussing it. Even if they pass it, it’s subject to court review.
        Aerroon 2y ago
ManBeardPc 2y ago
Should be a crime at this point. It’s so far away from a democratic process with all the bad faith arguments and closed door discussions that I don’t see how this doesn’t count as trying to destroy the freedom of millions of people.
nabla9 2y ago
> I am much for 3-strikes here. You want something over democratic control. Democratically elected representatives are sovereign decision makers. They can vote and decide whatever they want. Constitutions interpreted by high courts can strike laws down only afterwards. Democracy should lead to stupid laws if people are ignorant, stupid and easily led. If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago.
- betaby 2y ago
  > If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago. And repealed also decades ago.
  - nabla9 2y ago
    It seems likely that in direct democracy European constitution would have replaced decades ago and ECJ would be neutered.
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  > If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago. this is an important point, rarely discussed. Here on HN I noticed a strong adversion for EU and its politician, but I really doubt that here on HN many are aware of the opinions of the general population in EU. Much worse laws would be in place if we had direct democracy, I am 100% confident that death penalty would be the first big come back, but also stricter immigration laws (intra-EU too) and a generalized increase in the length of penalties for petty crimes, just because people in EU are old and they believe a police state will make them safer. edit: QED the comments show how people would make the EU a worse place. Lucky us they can't. They simply took what's in their interest (for example immigration laws, like really EU was flooded by migrants, spoiler: it is not!) and discarded the things they don't think would happen, because people are like that: they do not think of unwanted consequences and when they happen (like the ban of intra-eu immigration, which would most likely happen, being entirely legal and very easy to stop, unlike the illegal immigration from outside the EU) it means that someone else (in this case I assume the progressists, that they would call communists) worked against it because they hate them and hate their people and traditions. It's incredible how easy it is to prove that trusting the average Joe on long term planning of an entire sub continent leads to catastrophes. EDIT 2: it's also incredible how disconnected people are on political matters, they have a split brain, that thing that Orwell named doublespeak. The most extreme libertarians that scream about being deprived of their freedom to have encrypted chats where they exchange swastikas with their friends, are the most conservatives on all the social matters and are the same people that vote the same politicians that then propose the chat control for the sake of the children.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

chopin 2y ago

0-strike. It should be expected that elected officials respect the constitution.

dustfinger 2y ago
I agree with 0-strikes. Elect officials should be under constant investigation for any form of nefarious behavior and they should be prosecuted as any citzen would be.
- sneak 2y ago
  Do you understand what would happen to the system if politicians could be prosecuted for proposing laws?
  - FpUser 2y ago
    Well, proposed laws would need to pass constitutionality test done by some constitutional court stuffed by legal field experts. If passed, no prosecution can occur. I could be prosecuted for driving if the result is death of pedestrian for example. I still drive. So why our fucking "servants" are special?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > proposed laws would need to pass constitutionality test done by some constitutional court stuffed by legal field experts. If passed, no prosecution can occur Congratulations, you re-invented the politburo.
      - FpUser 2y ago
        No it is an attempt to bring runaway politicians back to senses. As for politburo: HR in big corporations already does the task quite well. They just do not like to be called what they are.
    - K0balt 2y ago
      Then , presumably, you would need another, lesser court, to vet a bill before it reached the constitutional court. Unfortunately this just creates another layer of abstraction and each layer adds myriad perverse incentives for power brokering and abuse. It’s a very thorny problem that humanity has yet to solve, and is probably unsolvable until we can solve the “power opens opportunities for abuse of those powers “ problem. The only ideal form of government is the benign and just king, which of course does not exist. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
      - FpUser 2y ago
        >"The only ideal form of government is the benign and just king, which of course does not exist." This might work in very small society where said king can be quickly brought to senses if he pisses off enough people. Anything larger is fucked up no atter what we do. >"I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." No fuck that
        K0balt 2y ago
        Meh, it’s only a matter of time, assuming that superintlligence is achieved. It will of course be sock puppeted throughout some hapless shmuck, but societies that are not effectively led by superintellignces will quickly become irrelevant footnotes in a sea of strategic superiority.
        K0balt 2y ago
        But, yeah. F that. I’m not looking forward to evolution. It’s probably going to happen anyway.
    - ruszki 2y ago
      Hungary had that. It didn't really work.
    - sneak 2y ago
      They already do that now, there's even a defined procedure for it. They just do it after the law has already passed.
  - dustfinger 2y ago
    You make a good point, I was not clear at all on the scope of my statement. I am thinking about my own countries constitution. I am not familiar with UKs constitution [1], so I don't really know if "control chat" violates the UK's constitution or not. When I said "nefarious", I was in part referring to undermining a countries constitution, as it is illegal to do so. No, I think that proposing laws that clearly undermine the constitution should be stopped immediately at the time of proposal by the constitution itself. 0-strikes for the proposal. 0-strikes here was not meant to suggest the politician be thrown in jail or anything like that. But, I agree with you in that I was unclear. Again, my statement above was poorly worded. This is what I meant by prosecuting for nefarious behavior: It is my belief that government behavior would be better kept in check if elect officials were under constant investigation for criminal acts. Society should have gauntness that their nation is being run by good actors. Those running our country should be legally obligated to be working towards making the society that they serve thrive, not using it as a platform for organized crime, influencing the outcomes of their personal investments, or traitorous behavior like ruining a nations economy to empower another nation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
  - exe34 2y ago
    politicians don't propose law in the EU. appointed bureaucrats do. politicians get to vote on them eventually, but it'll get passed one way or another.
  - mro_name 2y ago
    we germans learn in history lessons at school what can happen once a democratic process abolishes enough fundamental rights.
    - sneak 2y ago
      Yeah, meanwhile, you can't buy video games with too much blood in them now because the censorship ship has sailed. Banning the nazi salute and certain types of ideological publishing is treating the symptoms and not the disease. It doesn't fix the issue, and it involves a lot of collateral damage. Germany has in fact abolished fundamental rights (i.e. free expression) in response to collective fear and guilt about WW2. It's an unforced own goal, just like the USA did to itself after 9/11. The worst possible response. It harms only those who shouldn't be harmed; German nazis will still be nazis quietly in basements, and everyone else in Germany who isn't a nazi is subject to media censorship. It's nonsense.
      - mro_name 2y ago
        that's not what I am talking about. I talk about that today it's not allowed to abolish democracy which - believe it or not - was allowed and happened 1933. See e.g. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_9.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_9.html
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I mean nefarious behaviour, sure, but idk if you mean in any context or just this specific one. That said, if they commit illegal acts they should be tried and convicted like any other civilians, if not with a more severe punishment because they are our leaders that set the example.
  - dustfinger 2y ago
    I attempted to clarify my statement in my response to sneak. I am concerned that if there are people in government acting nefariously, these bad actors are free to continue unchallenged. If that is what is happening, then I suspect that this flaw exists in many democracies, if not all of them. I am by no means an expert in government, but I believe that with the way things are currently structured those leading our nations are operating without sufficient checks and balances to ensure their good intent. I am talking about investigating every government leader with a utility to ensure they are acting favorably with respect to peace, order, and good government in perpetuity.
klausa 2y ago
Which constitution are you referring to?
jdasdf 2y ago
This. Anyone that voted for a law that is later struck down committed an illegal act, and should be liable for it.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  This is a shortsighted kneejerk take to be honest. What about laws you agree with that get rescinded? What if a law that protects your privacy gets struck down, do you think the privacy advocates that made it happen in the first place "committed an illegal act and should be liable for it"?

sneak 2y ago

It’s because we aren’t actually nations of laws. There are certain groups in every nation (yes, even the ones you like or perhaps respect) who operate outside of the law as if it doesn’t exist. The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. Most people in most societies are already under this type of surveillance. This is just to tidy up the small loopholes like Signal etc.

worldsayshi 2y ago
> The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. Do you have a source for this? Can this be concluded by looking at the app traffic?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  "clientside backdoored" is a vague statement, but they may mean e.g. Snowden's revelations that the NSA has secret backdoor access to the big tech companies.
- sneak 2y ago
  iCloud Backup backs up the entirety of someone's iMessage history (or their endpoint iMessage sync keys, which equate to the same thing) each night to Apple without e2ee. If you enable e2ee for iCloud/iCloud Backup, all of your iMessage traffic will still be escrowed, simply from the other end of all of your conversations because they still have iCloud e2ee turned off (because it's off by default). If the endpoint sends the plaintext post-decryption to the middle transit service (Apple) in a way that is readable to that middle service (iCloud Backups contain complete iMessage history and are encrypted to Apple keys), then it's not e2ee. This is called "plaintext escrow". Same goes for WhatsApp. It backs up its message history to iCloud or Google Drive, which are, in the usual case (99.9%+ of users) non-e2ee.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
> The most popular “e2ee” messengers in use (WhatsApp, iMessage) are already clientside backdoored in this manner. No they are not. This is nonsense. The charitable interpretation is that you’re confusing the systems on iMessage that can voluntarily detect nudity and report it to you (but not the police or Apple) with the systems being proposed in TFA which have mandatory reporting to provider+police. The uncharitable interpretation is that you’re just making stuff up because it sounds good. Please don’t do either, it makes everyone worse off.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> to repeatedly undermine constitution The EU doesn’t have a constitution [1], simply enabling treaties [2]. The solution would be in ratifying a constitution. > am much for 3-strikes here Careful. A party in power will seek to nullify issues by putting forward and then defeating sham bills. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitution_for_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Consti... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Uni...

thfuran 2y ago
>The solution would be in ratifying a constitution. That certainly doesn't prevent politicians from voting for unconstitutional laws.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > certainly doesn't prevent politicians from voting for unconstitutional laws At that point you no longer have a legislative body, but an advisory council to whomever it is that decides what votes are and aren’t punishable. (See: Iran, China, the Roman Principate, early parliamentary monarchies.)
  - mro_name 2y ago
    difficult balancing act. Having a legislative body throwing fundamental rights out of the window isn't appealing either.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Having a legislative body throwing fundamental rights out of the window isn't appealing either They’re not. They’re discussing it. Even if they pass it, it’s subject to court review.
      - Aerroon 2y ago

ManBeardPc 2y ago

Should be a crime at this point. It’s so far away from a democratic process with all the bad faith arguments and closed door discussions that I don’t see how this doesn’t count as trying to destroy the freedom of millions of people.

nabla9 2y ago

> I am much for 3-strikes here. You want something over democratic control. Democratically elected representatives are sovereign decision makers. They can vote and decide whatever they want. Constitutions interpreted by high courts can strike laws down only afterwards. Democracy should lead to stupid laws if people are ignorant, stupid and easily led. If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago.

betaby 2y ago
> If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago. And repealed also decades ago.
- nabla9 2y ago
  It seems likely that in direct democracy European constitution would have replaced decades ago and ECJ would be neutered.
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
> If we had direct democracy, this bill would have passed decades ago. this is an important point, rarely discussed. Here on HN I noticed a strong adversion for EU and its politician, but I really doubt that here on HN many are aware of the opinions of the general population in EU. Much worse laws would be in place if we had direct democracy, I am 100% confident that death penalty would be the first big come back, but also stricter immigration laws (intra-EU too) and a generalized increase in the length of penalties for petty crimes, just because people in EU are old and they believe a police state will make them safer. edit: QED the comments show how people would make the EU a worse place. Lucky us they can't. They simply took what's in their interest (for example immigration laws, like really EU was flooded by migrants, spoiler: it is not!) and discarded the things they don't think would happen, because people are like that: they do not think of unwanted consequences and when they happen (like the ban of intra-eu immigration, which would most likely happen, being entirely legal and very easy to stop, unlike the illegal immigration from outside the EU) it means that someone else (in this case I assume the progressists, that they would call communists) worked against it because they hate them and hate their people and traditions. It's incredible how easy it is to prove that trusting the average Joe on long term planning of an entire sub continent leads to catastrophes. EDIT 2: it's also incredible how disconnected people are on political matters, they have a split brain, that thing that Orwell named doublespeak. The most extreme libertarians that scream about being deprived of their freedom to have encrypted chats where they exchange swastikas with their friends, are the most conservatives on all the social matters and are the same people that vote the same politicians that then propose the chat control for the sake of the children.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]