Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

From first person experience, once a society creates a surveillance state, to protect whatever, an inevitable avalanche starts.

A new game will emerge in which the best players are the ones who excel at finding secrets of others and use them as leverage. We had a president on national TV threating a challenging candidate that he will reveal their secrets... Think about that for a moment and you'll find so many wrong things that this implicitly admits to.

The disease was a blessing compared to the complications of the cure.

Nations like to hope things won't happen to them.

Care to provide an example? Just trying to be objective.

Historically, nearly all states have been surveillance states (including early America). all that has changed in the last ~30 years is technology (capability), and public attitude.

Mail snooping has been around as long as mail has been around. Warrantless wiretaps on telphone lines were around in just about every country that started having telephones, including the US. AT&T's NSA listening room (the company that invented telephones) isn't unique or special. Book ciphers were invented because snooping courier's messages was so common.

The NSA didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason either.

I'm not disagreeing with your view, I'm just saying that the anti-surveillance sentiment is particularly unique to the cultural "West", and to the post-WW2 generations.

for example ones porn history could be used against that person if he she wants to go for public office. So there is a chilling effect for watching porn. Politics are dirty allready but the way down is deep.

Maybe they should "own it" instead? I don't think these days legal porn use would be all that harmful. but i don't disagree with your point.

But look at it this way, surveillance already exists, all major governments are hacking into people's phone and spying on them, and forcing telco's to do dragnet surveillance. chat control is about doing it at a greater scale and formalizing it for normal law enforcement use instead of things like counter-terrorism.

yes and I understand the benefit but i doubt the real world consequenzes. It would only filter the criminals who are good at opsec and those who arent. imho elevating a more proffesional type of criminals. Honestly most major crimes are money related. Get rid of papermoney and make digital payments traceable for law enforcement. I know there is something like gold bitcoin etc but at the end knowing how money moves is more power then knowing what people are writing

I don't think a surveillance state is the root cause of authoritarianism, in that sense I believe it is a slippery slope fallacy. I am still very much against this kind of mass surveillance, simply I think this rhetoric is doing everyone a disservice.

We don't get authoritarianism without an actual will from a group of people with enough power and support to achieve it. Mass surveillance is simply a milestone on their path to oppression.

This is disingenuous as a counter-argument because it's never been possible at this scale — perhaps excepting the Stasi. The sentiment has arisen because:

1) yes, people are more likely to fight it.

2) it's being done at an unprecedented and very intrusive scale.

Wiretapping required more labor on all fronts. Mail snooping the same.

If the "East" isn't fighting this, it might simply be because they see no recourse with their less democratic institutions. (I'm borrowing from you for this last point, I'd never presume the West to be as democratic as we'd like to believe.)

I can't speak for Europe, but in the west, a vast majority of people already accept that the government is doing mass surveillance, and they think it's a good thing. It is similar in China, India,etc.. from what I understand. I don't know enough about europe.

This scale has been possible since at least the mid 00's (20 years now , technically a historical fact). consider that most of the files in snowden's leak were from around '08.