I can understand why governments would push for something like this after 9/11, though it of course goes without saying that this is a totally unacceptable violation of someone’s basic rights. It also goes without saying that governments always want more control over their citizens, but what exactly are they so worried might happen, right now, in 2025 or the near future?
I feel it’s the same vibe with return to office policy in Canada.
These things seem like they come from absolutely no where with no legitimate reason and then all of these executives are on board making it happen.
Like what the fuck is going on
It’s due to Palantir and co, lobbying various European governments in recent years. Look at which EU governments are Palantir’s clients.
The NWO people in each nation have their own special part to play until we get to one unified world government.
Right but where are the “fuck the NWO” people
It’s a coordinated play, that’s why. Their hope and plan is that VPNs become worthless because you’re gonna be VPNing into censored countries anyway. They won’t want anonymity/pseudo-anonymity like we’ve had.
Gaza
Does Israel have that much sway over Europe? The Germans are perhaps still motivated by guilt over the Holocaust, to the extent that they’re willing to look the other way while another one is being committed. Makes sense, right? 🤦 Pure insanity.
70 years of propaganda has its roots deep in generational beliefs that any criticism of Israel’s actions as a nation state could only be rooted in their ethnicity and religion and therefore must be countered.
No one wants to criticize privacy-invading “think of the children” laws for fear of being seen as a pedo or pedo-enabler, and likewise no one wants to stand up against Israel for fear of being seen as a Jew-hating antisemite.
I see the parallels, but is it really causal? I feel like this was going to happen given the state of net neutrality in general with or without Gaza.
In terms of “why?” it’s not causal on its own, but in terms “why now?” I believe it is. It’s the two-by-four that broke the camel’s back.
it was always going to happen eventually, but the situation with gaza lit a fire under its urgency and you can see it happening for yourself as the west is capturing moderation on all centralizated social media platforms via appointing of idf & isreali officials/officers.
Denmark decided against banning genital mutilation of boys (girls are thankfully already banned), just after Israel said they’d view it as antisemitic, and would take economic steps against Denmark if they (we) banned it. The danish government went into a complete fucking panic and shut down all talks about banning it.
For some retarded reason, the world actually gives a shit what Israel thinks…
It’s partly because of the guit of holocaust, but also because they just don’t personally want to lift a finger regarding Palestine. It’s a toxic mixture of inbred zionism, cold geopolitical calculus, appeasing the US in trying time in transatlantic relations, and neocon hubris. They maybe can bend to appease their own populations, but they really are not prepared to stop Israel and they would much rather help them. They just want the genocide to happen, but quietly and out of sight and no protests.
But it’s not really just Gaza. They do this because of Ukraine, rising cost of living, European humiliation in from of Trump, falling economy, their own unpopularity, etc… They are fearing the upheaval and people getting ideas when Brussels doesn’t seem to have any of it’s own. Remember that these are the same people who though that the end of the soviet union was the end of history and they are the culmination of humanity. They cannon accept being wrong or stepping down at this point.
Does Israel have that much sway over Europe?
It’s not so much that Isreal does, but for all intents and purposes Israel = America. It’s our colonial outpost in the Middle East, an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, and as Joe Biden said, “if Isreal didn’t exist, we would have to invent it”. And as much as Europeans don’t want to believe it, most European countries are American vassal states. Look at the pictures of all of your leaders gravelling at Trump’s feet and literally calling him “Daddy”.
Gaza is only the beginning. They are also preparing for mass unrest at home as standards of living worsen. Just this week the German chancellor said Germany “can no longer afford the welfare state”, meanwhile they are spending record amounts on arms. They are preparing for millions of climate refugees at their borders.
You should expect and prepare for a lot more Gazas all over the world in the future. Your leaders are.
It’s nothing new, They try to pull some bullshit at least once every decade. In the USA it was the Clipper Chip in the 90s where they said “trust the government with a backdoor” and then it got cracked and they tried very hard to prosecute one of the inventors of PGP… in the 2010s it was SOPA and other bills they tried to pass.
Falls somewhere between people not being cool with genocide and greed.
I do think it’s Gaza. For decades until the last couple of years, the plight of Palestinians have been mostly ignored. The whole of Europe and algosphere in the middle east have had active or passive public approval for middle east policy for the past century. Vietnam war reporting soured the public on far east colonialism and war reporting went softball afterwards and that softball unraveled in the 2010s and now Gaza is the modern day Vietnam war for reporting on disregard for life from pretty much ourselves. Israel is an ally of our countries.
So now government policy is incredibly misaligned with public opinion now and what was a steady grind at enacting internet control is suddenly a mad rush for governments. Israel is a line in the sand for the powerful like Vietnam was in the 60/70s was for media control/influence
I think there are two discrete forces at work pushing in the same direction here. The Jewish supremacist EU states want to spy on all communications because of Gaza, but the push for age verification is more that ad companies fund everything in the West and ads sell for WAY more if they know exactly who you are (this was Facebook’s major advantage in an internet that was largely pseudonymous at the time). Age gating the images of warcrimes and making those who see them register that they’ve seen the images to see them is just a side benefit.
Why are so many European countries getting worried about encryption and/or age verification?
EU elites want to hold on to power. They know everything is going to shit economically and politically and there will be backlash for this economic situation, covid, Ukraine, Gaza and everything. So they try to shut down free information and speech by censoring internet and enforcing self censorship to stay in power. Free speech and any civil liberty is on the loan anyway, unless the people are ready push back constantly. These fuckers have no morality or common sense otherwise.
This battle will define the class war.
I doubt plebs win, at best tech savy will maintain modicum of privacy while under class will be fish in a bowl… All that data will be used to enslve them even further.
Sadly, many just accept it
This could be it. If they get any inkling that people are seriously organising politically, they’ll want to get in early and nip it in the bud.
They try to push Chat Control every year for some time now…
More than one European prime minister spoke loudly about a coming war. Whether they mean it or it’s an excuse to do fascist stuff is another topic. There’s also the Russian sabotage going on.
This is not solely a european problem, and it’s not new.
A faction of conservatives will scream up and down that they’re protecting the children. Most people will generally side with privacy.
My suspicion is that the end goal is to classify people to target your opponents, even the ones who don’t have much of a platform.
Once you can identify all the anonymous people on the internet and build profiles of all their communications with ML, you can easily generate a list of people who are against your policies and target them. I’m pretty sure you could find other subsets of data linking these people so you can then target them indirectly without too much friendly fire against your supporters.
In the US, One easy target I haven’t seen any actions for is Marijuana. All those medical patients are in a database somewhere. All the debit card transactions in stores are in a database somewhere. It’s still federally illegal and the punishments are nuts if prosecuted. Take your communications list, and the MJ list, target the ones on both and ignore the rest. You get to legally enslave your opponents under the guise of weed.
Sports rights holders
are bleeding money due to IPTVgot even more greedy and they own the politicians.Interesting theory
Is that the reason?! Good grief.
The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it’s not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).
More specifically for your two points:
Encryption
It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes…
Age verification
This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don’t want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room…
Now personally I don’t think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an “are you over 18” banner ought to be enough… I don’t think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it’s happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.
Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.
messengers started to E2EE
This is a big deal. I’ve had the archetypal non-technical user, my mother send me a PGP encrypted email. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who has done so that this did not become our default.
Now the majority of our messaging and calling is via Signal. It’s effortless.
My signal chats will all start with:
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Soon, I’m guessing.
yup, that is why (if memory serves) the chat control proposal has rules in it that look like they were specifically written for messengers, the authors seem to have no clue that encryption can, you know, just be run on any device using publicly available algorithms…
I think this is likely
A lot of good points here, but I’d also like to bring forward another hypothesis which partially explain the incredible speed at which this is moving forward in the last few months (even though things have been brewing back and forth for years, decades).
The US has become a hostile state. For Five Eyes, Six Eyed, Nine Eyes, and Forty Yes that means much less domestic intel since all the Eyes were sharing domestic intelligence to circumvent stronger protections on their own citizens. Canada would spy for the US and the UK, and vice versa, which was a neat way of getting rid of pesky rights afforded to citizens.
