It's the establishment putting measures in place to entrench their position with an uncertain future coming towards us, fast. They are setting up systems to prevent revolution.
Yeah but was it to the same extent? People are regularly posting guillotines these days and our economic outlooks for much of the world, and especially the US, is not all roses and sunshine.
The urgency comes from having the actual war on the East side of the EU and whatever the hell is happening down South with refugees and what not. Then in the EU proper -- sabotage acts, ammunition dumps being blown up, cabels cut and drones flying above the military bases hosting nuclear fucking warheads, Chinese and r===an spyies in the parliament, armed nazis in the military, etc, etc.
The shit has hit the fan about a decade ago already and not calming down at all, but intelligence gathering capability of secret services of all EU countries are being continiously degraded, because everything is E2E by default and money flows are obscured too.
Nobody likes to see shit being on fire and having all the dashboards down.
Another happening happens, the services are asked why they didn't prevent it or report it being likely -- what do they answer? "We can't read the damn messages, so we can't know if there is a cell that plans to do it again".
It's because they have finally found the perfect trojan horse—"think of the children!"—in a time when people are too busy entertaining themselves to death.
This is their best chance for them to enact mass surveillance, before the hoi polloi crack and finally get out of their couches.
That strain of libertarian rhetoric is overwhelmingly encountered on American-dominated fora. I won’t say it doesn’t exist in Europe, since Europeans can pick up on American internet culture, too, but it is too marginal in Europe to affect politics much. There is no significant libertarian party in the EU. Some of the far-right parties stoking and benefiting from popular discontent even promise to uphold the welfare state, but simply deny it to immigrants.
Cool, but it's anything but libertarian, which is what we were discussing in this thread.
Regarding democracy, we have pretty severe failings, which you won't hear about because the EU is busy with Poland/Hungary/other conservative countries.
Not as a major political force to which Denmark’s Chat Control could be responding as the OP claims. Moreover, expressions like “milked and oppressed” ring American libertarianism to the ears of this European poster who is familiar with long years of European cypherpunk activism.
Cypherpunk activism is closer to anarchist ideals, and criticism of the State and its coercive power is central to its ethos. Yes, citizens are being milked and oppressed against a state and a political caste that has grown too powerful.
American right-libertarianism is a joke that originally started as an anarchist branch and has degenerated into getting in bed with the state to further its selfish ideals. Criticism of the state has nothing to do with those posers, as their goal is solely to become the state (i.e. the oppressor), rather than truly pursue the ideal of a free society.
