[pp.int.general] European citizens' Initiative - ID requirement & data retention

[Jerry Weyer]

Hi Pat,

While I like your "global" approach and broader vision of such topics and
agree that one should be cautious of certain developments, I am not seeing
a big risk at the moment to be interested in the ECI. The EU has a big
problem with democracy and citizens' participation and I am inclined to
support and use every possible way I get to influence EU politics.

Perhaps you're too pessimistic and I'm too optimistic ;) We'll see, at
least I hope that this discussing interested some people to look up what
their government plans with ECI and act accordingly. :)

Kind regards,

Jerry

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Pat Maechler aka Valio <pirate at valio.ch>wrote:

> I'm not saying something like the ECI can't be useful; indeed I say
> many good uses for the cause of democracy. I'm just very cautious with
> it as it is currently setup, because the safeguards are not closely to
> what I would consider secure enough and the possible implications of
> intended malice manipulation can be extremely severe; just as it is
> with electronic voting.
> I know that there never can't be 100% certainty in this world (if you
> omit mathematical idealized constructs).
> I'm cautious because we're at the beginning of the digital revolution;
> a revolution where today no one - really no one - can even grasp where
> we might end up in 100 years. If we are not be cautious enough of
> steps with possibly severe implications, we might miss the point where
> it was probably still possible to turn things for the better (probably
> we already did) and safe the ideals & achievements of the French
> Revolution. If things go really awry, there might be simply no "second
> French Revolution", after which individuals can act on an autonomous
> level, but instead just dictatorship where the few rule over the many
> without their consent (probably not on worldwide level, but on
> sub-levels; but that doesn't really matter). If you don't see that you
> probably have not yet understood what Cory Doctorrow was saying in his
> speech "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation". The
> possibility for a prosperous, free society scale with technological
> improvement, but so do the risks for a society that is ruled by
> dictatorship for egoistic purposes, because the dependency of
> technology by and the means for control over individuals scale as
> well.
>
> -pat
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
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>



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