Well, they are now. But honestly, it was surprising for me to discover that the people pushing for the wiretrap were actually only the ones selling wiretraps. I really expected some larger conspiracy.
We are living in a global society that has been structured around the singular principle of individual enrichment, and have been for about 230 years, depending on where you live. The answer to almost all modern mysteries of human behavior will lie in that incentive structure one way or another.
Why do people steal of defraud? The potential individual enrichment is higher. Why engage in corrupt short-termerisms like accepting bribes? individual enrichment.
This is all the result of "greed is good" ^1 and its not sustainable.
Is it good when people specialize in destructive things? There are people who specialize in human trafficing, different types of fraud, etc. Is that an n-way mutual losss?
Not exactly, I'd say. It is a mutual win for the people involved in the transactional aspect, but a tragedy for the victims. Having the ability to charge the prices you want for what you offer is a superb self-organising principle; it just isn't sufficient to describe everything we want. In this case: we should agree on certain common rules on what is off limits, but other than that we should get out of people's way so they can create value for each other.
Maybe you should try Occam’s Razor for conspiracies: the most straightforward conspiracy is likely to be the right one :)
For example, one might imagine that eIDAS 2 isn’t backed by a consortium of would-be spies but is more likely backed by a small consortium of crappy CAs that are sick of being forced to comply with CA/B Forum rules and want regulation to override the rules.
(The CA/B rules are very specific and extremely aggressively enforced. It’s not like the GDPR where you can apparently get away with messing around for quite a while. Multiple fairly large companies have had their CA operations effectively shut down by the CA/B Forum for noncompliance.)
I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor isn't a perfectly clear guide.
A 1984-like law for wiretraping every citizen looking for double-plus-ungood speech is way too evil to come from a motivation of selling more wiretraps.
The people pushing it are societal vandals. That kind of thing should be persecuted as treason. You don't do treason just to increase your workplace bottom line, it's absurd.
> You don't do treason just to increase your workplace bottom line, it's absurd.
Did you not hear about the Russian tanks that fell apart on their way to Ukraine because Russian soldiers had been looting parts of them to sell for vodka?
Most treason isn't called out with a big neon sign and a confirm dialog reminding the actor that they're committing treason. From the inside, most treason just feels like workplace fraud/embezzlement, or like laziness, or like "office politicking" where your office happens to be "the state legislature." It's almost always just petty crime, that happens to have big consequences.
Treason (in the US) has a specific meaning, which is knowingly aiding a (formal) enemy of the country you are a Citizen of - or explicitly committing acts of war against said country.
Those soldiers selling tank parks for vodka weren't committing treason, they were corruptly selling military parts (to presumably NOT the enemy) to get drunk. Which is pretty terrible, and would likely get you shot or imprisoned in most armies. But isn't treason.
Aiding a known spy of the enemy? Yes.
Sending military supplies to the enemy? Yes.
Working on behalf of the enemy (knowingly?) Yes, maybe. Depends on what you do.
That might be Espionage, or being an unregistered agent of a foreign power. Both with serious penalties on their own.
Stealing equipment (and selling it) to get drunk is not knowingly sabotaging your countries war effort.
It’s theft. In the military. To get drunk.
It’s far too short sighted and self serving to intentionally help the enemy, it’s just plain criminality. Not treason. Likely to still get one shot or sent to the Gulag of course. But no one sane is writing ‘treason’ on any of the paperwork.
Or is it treason if a woman refuses to have a child because she is ‘sabotaging the future war effort’? Or a car thief who steals a truck, because that truck ‘could be used to transport supplies’?
And where did this ‘intentional friendly fire’ come from?
Telling classified secrets to spies for self-serving reasons (e.g. because the spy will sleep with you or give you money) is treason. We can agree on that, right? People have been executed "for treason" for doing that, many many times throughout history.
The crime of treason doesn't involve/imply a mens rea of being an insurrectionist / working toward an enemy nation's goals. It instead implies a much more limited mens rea: that you knew that what you're doing would help an enemy nation win a war against your nation, and you did it anyway.
> Or is it treason if a woman refuses to have a child because she is ‘sabotaging the future war effort’? Or a car thief who steals a truck, because that truck ‘could be used to transport supplies’?
No, because (among other reasons) in both of those cases, those are hypothetical gains lost, rather than concrete losses realized. The military didn't already own the child, or the truck.
If you steal a truck that's actually transporting supplies to the front — and thereby also steal the supplies — then yes, that is treason!
And, slightly more niche — if this is a monarchy, and the child would become king, and the mother bears the child but then kills it — then yes, that's treason too. At the moment that the child becomes an important state asset, killing them becomes a treasonous act.
Though, focusing on the truck, another reason this could be "not treason", is that a civilian stealing a random truck (presumably not a military-painted supply truck) isn't aware that it's a military asset.
Likewise, if someone hears a classified secret and repeats it, that's usually not considered treason.
In both cases, that's because civilians haven't been told that this truck, or that information, is important to the state. To them, it's just a truck, it's just gossip, etc. So they're just punished for whatever common-law crime they committed, if any.
But soldiers are told these things. They know that the truck is carrying supplies; they know that the info is classified. And so when they steal the truck/leak the info anyway, that's considered a betrayal of their country: treason.
Does this mean because we've become accustomed to ignoring the petty crime treason, when the treason with a giant neon sign and an alert popup that says "THIS IS TREASON" shows up, we're too numb to take action on it?
It's so disappointing, how very little it takes to get so many to sell out. Murder for hire for a couple hundred. Selling votes for a thousand. Betrayal for a little nookie.
People are so much more venal than we give them credit for.
It's a numbers game. A leader can find people poor/greedy enough to do nasty things for money, and then same leader can go find people who want nasty things done for hire. In an unequal society, there's always going to be people 'available' for this side of the system.
What would the motivation be, for the rest of the actors in this conspiracy?
If anything, I'd say the "conspiracy" — or at least, the tacit collusion — is on the other side of this battle.
What few demographic studies we've done on the prevalence of pedophilia, say that something like 10% of men express some level of attraction toward children. (With almost none of them ever acting on this attraction, or mentioning it to anyone other than a psychiatrist.)
So potentially 10% of men everywhere — scattered all throughout industry and government — have clear motivation to push back against the creation of laws that would see their proclivities discovered and persecuted.
Of course, such people wouldn't out themselves by just defending the "rights of pedophiles" in any direct way. But they would act on any opportunity to ensure that mechanisms for "complete privacy" exist; and they would also stand behind others when they see them doing the same; and they would also learn all the rhetoric used by privacy advocates, and use it.
(Yes, there are other people on the side of "no wiretaps" besides pedophiles. I'm not saying "we can ignore the people against wiretaps because they're all just pedophiles anyway." What I'm saying is more that, insofar as "10% of men" is an accurate measure, that's a big implicit voting interest bloc! Probably one larger than all the world's egalitarian "privacy advocates" put together! And so there has always — and will always — be this group with their thumb on the scale, tipping any democratic action in society away from panopticons, for that group's own protection.)
This doesn't seem correct. Someone who has these desires but never acted on them wouldn't need privacy because they never did or intend to violate a law.
Or, it assumes that the only reason they didn’t act on this inclination is due to the fear of punishment. Which omits the possibility that they don’t do it because they know it’s wrong.
There's a very obvious anti-wiretap argument that also happens to be very anti-pedophile: Children don't like to be watched. A panopticon would be the perfect device for a pedophile to abuse.
What is going on here is the EU doesn't want to look like it consulted bastards and is coming up with arbitrary reasons to hide that.