On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
I don't think this is a given. Just Stop Oil says that their tactics do make people hate them, but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to. Their position is that if they achieve what they want while gathering animosity towards their organisation, once achieved, they can disband.
It was first and foremost a decription based on observation, but I think it conveyed that he felt that the Overton window was moved by vorces in the middle, and forces at the extremes moved it in the other direction.
There is a distinction to be made of how strongly the opinion is held compared to how much the opinion differs to the median view.
I think there is a correlation at the extremes, but I think the Just Stop Oil approach is deliberately splitting those two, performing extreme actions to promote a view that is not terribly extreme.
This is consistent with the view of the Overton window that the extremes repel and the moderate attracts.
Compare that to a vegan who doesn't campaign, but silently judges every meat eater as a murderer. If their views were more public, it may drive people the other way.
I'd really like to see that research.
(I don't know anything about her.)
Thier "research" might be full of yes men.
If they want to fix the climate crisis, they should engage with normal people and find effective ways for them to save money (e.g. like https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/ do) or pressure councils and such into providing better public transport (e.g. like https://bettertransport.org.uk/ do).
People don't consume oil because they intrinsicly like consuming oil. People use private cars that consume oil because nobody else gives a shit (especially not councils) about their needs to get from A to B on time and doesn't offer suitable public transport. People don't buy into mad schemes that require £20,000 upfront and might return about £200 a year in savings, just for ideological reasons. They need cheaper things that pay off sooner, like portable solar panels they can put out in the garden when it's sunny.
Probably the best thing they could do is tell all their other ecological activists to stop being NIMBYs and stop protesting against pylons, so we can get lovely clean renewable energy, generated by turbines in the North Sea, to all the places in Britain where it's needed, especially the south east of England.
Regardless, this is enormously dumb. If you want to search and arrest an activist who crosses the line, you make it as boring as possible.
that's what activist have to do to shake people
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
That's also the line most terrorist groups use.
Its not exactly wrong i suppose. 9/11 did get Americans to think about the middle east a lot more.
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
Eh, the history of Islamism comes out of rebelling against secular dictators who had a habit of imprisoning their thought leaders.
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
I guess it's okay we napalmed Vietnam and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians because it was "part of a larger operation"?
American Exceptionalism is a disease.
> When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation
Why does that matter? The attacks on the Twin Towers were also part of a larger operation, does that excuse the attacks in any way?
> Terrorist attacks only target civilians
Nope, terrorism can include literally anything when Power deems it convenient.
https://stratnewsglobal.com/europe/united-kingdom/uk-charges... : British MPs on Wednesday voted to declare pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action a terrorist organisation, after its activists broke into a military base and damaged two aircraft
> I have never seen such an attack by USA
That may very well be true, but the world is a lot bigger than what your eyes can capture. "I don't see it, therefore it doesn't exist" is a state of mind that most people grow out of around the age of 8 months.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre : When the soldiers got to the village, they did not find any NLF troops. Despite this, many soldiers began to kill the villagers, mainly elderly people, women, and children
> [the USA] always try to target military or leaders
Bless your heart.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/02/politics/timeline-us-strikes-... : The US military has killed at least 207 people in strikes that have destroyed 66 vessels
> The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2
Yet another example of "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/24/worlddispatch.... : To some in the Arab and Muslim countries, Shock and Awe is terrorism by another name; to others, a crime that compares unfavourably with September 11
> the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then
Nixon and Kissinger were not part of the first world, then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu : Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused [..] The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government
Nixon decided to keep the bombing a secret from the American people as to admit to bombing an officially neutral nation would damage his credibility
> that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks
We know perfectly well what it looks like: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/12/22/2025-in-gaza-12...
Umm, do you mean al-qaeda (if you are referring to 9/11). Al-qaeda and the Taliban are different groups. Neither are particularly nice, but only one did 9/11.
Not an expert either. I haven’t seen one make this case. What I have seen is cross-conflict studies on the success of terrorism, and that sets my baseline for Afghanistan being a special case. (Domestic terrorism works a little bit more frequently than international terrorism. But they’re both very, very bad strategies that frequently blow back.)
Do you have an historical example?
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
Only online. The Viet Cong weren’t targeting civilians. They hit American soldiers. Targeting military and narrow political power are the hallmark of proper rebellions. Targeting civilians is how terrorism works.
The closest analog to terrorism in warfare is actually strategic air campaigns. Dresden and the London Blitz are closer to terrorism than e.g. the uprising in Bangladesh or even the Taliban toppling the Karzai regime. And lo and behold, strategic air campaigns have a history of uniting the enemy much more than undoing them.
People also don’t use the term to relate to rebellions. It’s more an internet meme or cases where like a few people call e.g. Russia a terrorist state by analogy. Freedom fighters fighting rebellion tend to work to keep civilians on their side. When they don’t, they become terrorists and tend to lose.
Literally every terrorist group ever claims they are responding to some sort of violence or oppression.
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
It's interesting that you actually wrote down in this sentence the very explanation you say doesn't exist. It's pretty obvious: instituting an empire is the policy others will hate you for. The fact that you can't imagine this despite spelling out the facts yourself is curious.
Not being an empire is an option, too. That won't save you in all cases, especially if you're seen as a fallen empire, another empire's lackey due to alliances and dependencies, or your culture is simply incompatible with some other culture that happens to be frequently in contact with you. But it will reduce the likelihood of a convincing narrative - one that could lead people to hijack planes and fly them into buildings - emerging.
It's not a topic that can be fully discussed in HN comments, as there are many complexities involved, but "They hate us because we decided on a policy to be an empire" is not that far from the truth, I think.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
You're missing the story here. Any popularity of a murder in the streets is exceptional. The expected value for "What fraction of the population supports this (alleged) murderer?" is much closer to zero than the ~25% that Mangione polls at, never mind the 40-odd% that he polls with young people.
Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
From https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/health/health-insurers-preapp...
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
However, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
> However, multiple provider associations and patient advocacy groups interviewed by CNN say that little, if anything, has changed over the past year.
So, hard to say for sure.
I don’t think it is. Healthcare prices are widely tracked. They’ve been rising faster than inflation for years. I have seen zero evidence that trend even temporarily abated after Luigi.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
Successful in winning over the public.
Were there people that liked high Healthcare bills that changed their mind?
Was there a way of politicians elected to implement socialized Healthcare that I missed?
In practice however he didn't inspire further revolutionary action by the public, because they were pacified by memes. And that's why he's a failure.
It was murder, but it was neither indiscriminate nor irrational. Certainly not in a culture that enshrines the right to shoot people as its second most sacred Constitutional principle.
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
It seemed for a brief moment like some of the other psychopaths CEOs might start changing things for the better.
But you're right, when there wasn't a wave of "finding out" for other health care CEOs they seemed to go right back to it.
Please, he was a middle manager with a CEO title.
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
The problem (to me) is less the "wealth" of these psychopath CEOs, and more that they're literally taking advantage of the people they're supposed to be helping, for their own benefit.
The concept of an income cap might fix that in some situations, but I'm unsure how complete a fix that would be.
It's not even slightly broken.
It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping, instead abusing those people for personal gain.
Is that really something you think should keep heading in the same abusive direction it's been going for many years? :(
That's what the justice system is for. If you don't like the way it works, then vote to change it. Look how Luis Rossman is doing it for a good example.
But shooting people you don't like as vengeance for what you perceive is wrong, is some third world banana republic shit, and no such country where this is normalized is remotely safe or functional, look at Africa and parts of Latam.
You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Welcome to America. Are you new here? :D
This way we can make two people happy at the same time(three if you include me), and the lottery of birth advantage evens out, so the world becomes more fair and less unequal.
Nobody wants this. This is the result of the breakdown of trust in the judicial and democratic processes. GP is just acting the zeitgeist.
I'm sure people who control the economy, pahrma, law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies are shivering because of fear from people with glocks.
How do you feel volunteer groups rounding up Luigi supporters and gunning them down in the street like dogs?
There are a million reasons why we don't want to live in a society where each person tries to solve their political grievances with a gun
You and me are preaching to the quire here and wasting our time. Some on HN they just wanna see rich people get killed, as if that fixes anything that's wrong with society. By rich people, they mean everyone richer than them of course.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
But it's easy to push to one side or another
Cowards would have you believe otherwise, but force is sometimes the only way to get what you want.
It really doesn't matter if you come across as the villain as long as you impose great enough costs for not delivering your desired reality.
Brilliantly. It coaxed an Israeli overreaction which has led to basically the entirety of the rest of the world turning against Israel.
> Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane
Why would Hamas care? They remain firmly in control of Gaza, while their cause is winning hearts and minds globally.
This is an entirely backwards way of portraying the situation. American evangelical Christians are by definition not based in the region.
They believe that they must supply Israel with the weapons it needs in order to bring upon apocalypse.
So if you think justice for Palestinian civilians is their cause, it's not them who are responsible for it winning hearts and minds globally
Maybe because they were actively avoiding civilian targets
And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
But IRA didn't win because those people supported their cause, IRA won despite those people being against their methods.
It was the force they used which directly led to the GFA, without the bombs and the killing the British would never have surrendered.
In signing the GFA, the UK effectively gave up on it's sovereignty over NI. That was never going to happen through "peaceful and democratic means"
Look at where the border is, the separation has already happened to a very significant degree.
It's difficult to make out if this is ignorance, a poor attempt at satire or simply trolling.
The border is in the North Channel today, so the bit about sovereignty clearly holds up.
Are you saying the GFA would have been reached through peaceful means?
I'm not sure if Iran's regime has the staying power, but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
It’s the same way Islamophobia doesn’t become justified based on the actions of some Muslims.
Anyone who does do that is already a bigot, and would do the same to any other group, regardless of what they do.
A culture that normalizes hatred of Jews (or Israelis) as a group, will very quickly devolve into one where other minorities are hated as well. Because the youth, as gullible as they are, can still detect when a system of values is inconsistent.
Obviously the Israelis could have just kept their mask on, but Hamas was clearly correct in their calculation that they wouldn't.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
Just to be clear - there is no actual vouching, there never was, nor any plans for that. Fanatics are unpredictable, it doesn't matter in which area, their decisions are primarily emotional. He certainly behaved as one. Rest are details.
Or do you consider family stalking as a correct sane approach that actually achieves the goal effectively?
I agree with you that he goes over the line, but only if these ministers are totally unrelated to the measures they are trying to impose on the population. If not, he just gives them a taste of their own medicine.
If politicians are attempting to undermine your children’s right to privacy forever, and yet these same politicians don’t like when this is being done to their own children…it shows either an astonishing level of hypocrisy and/or stupidity.
Europe is filled with these types of authoritarian urbanites, who make decisions from an elitist “i know what’s best for you” attitude while eating 6 course dinners. This is the same class of European leaders who steered the regions entire energy/economic/social policy so bad that the whole European model of the last few decades is in slow collapse and fiscally unsustainable. Yet ironically, the most common phrase you’ll hear while eating these 6 course dinners is “sustainability.”
These people are some of the worst hypocrites on pretty much every topic imaginable and need to be called out for it.
Compare this to Jesper Graugaard, who is know locally as the "Chromebook-dad". He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade, and after 6 years we recently had a ruling forbidding our cities from using Google services without proper data ownership agreements. He's obviously not the only party behind this, but he's a massive force in the agenda against non-EU tech in our schools. He does it through reform and political campaigning.
Jesper has wide public support, Lars is not viewed favourable. This story hasn't even hit our news, I've only heard about it here on HN.
> He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade
> I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
> On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
> He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
> I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
Big tech (private companies who largely just care about profits) and foreign governments (the Americans for example), are way lower on my “things Europe should be worried” about list. They’re there of course, but lower.
Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money. And the US government is truly a disinterested party. 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding). When push comes to shove, they fundamentally do not care what happens here.
The real threat is our own governments, who we have given the legal authority to enact all the negative outcomes that will come from totalitarian erosions of privacy and over regulation of individuals. Building up this scary “foreign boogieman” and stoking this moral panic is what is enabling the authoritarian action.
Pointing fingers at Big Tech and the US is a giant distraction tactic so you don’t look at the terrible things our own domestic politicians have done and the fact they have zero plans to do the hard things needed to get us out of this mess. It's just champagne and smiling over dinner, while the old eat the young, the government eats the private sector, and endless legislation eats away your opportunity to do anything more exciting than build powerpoints at a braindead consulting firm.
And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
It’s an extremely common bias on the left just as the anti-government bias on the right.
Both public and private entities are capable of abusing power.
Only one group however is legally entitled to take 50% of your money regardless of the quality of their product, by holding a gun to your head. They can even take more via the phantom tax of inflation using deficit spending (as is happening now all over Europe). This group is the one you should fear more if looking at it from first principles.
The current runaway deficits across Europe and rising political unrest prove this.
The only thing companies can do to “take” your money is offer you a service that’s better than all alternatives that you chose to buy voluntarily.
If you think that’s the bigger authoritarian risk something is wrong with your mental model of how the world works.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
> totalitarian privacy dictatorship
That’s an illogical concept. What does that even mean?
sixty one percent of statistics are fabricated on the spot?
I guess they need to ascertain whether he's operating organically, or at the behest of another nation, and whether he's scouting out ministers for something bigger in the future.
Though, the irony in all this, is that it all could've been avoided if the government weren't acting at the behest of another nation, and scouting out what they can get away with on their authoritarian warpath. Maybe the police are arresting the wrong people.
This is an unequivocally reasonable approach. The prohibition of cannabis is a grotesque charade.
I don't have time to be an expert in every subject. I appreciate using the collective power of society to put stamps of approval on things, so I can use language with an element of trust.
If I want to smoke, I want to know what I'm smoking, and don't want to waste time trying to work out the exact chemical composition. I'm not sure why anybody wouldn't want that control over their bodies.
I quite like the idea of words actually having meanings which are enforced, and not being vague concepts coined on the street by people who don't have me or my community at heart.
However you are putting words in my mouth, in a typical American style of prosecution-->banning. It is quite possible to legalise and regulate marijuana. American halfway legalisation creates an industry which funds OC and can't be prosecuted. Canadian legalisation creates a revenue source for the provincial governments while providing vertical integration and control, and the volume of illegal weed has plummeted.
This is about as far from "over the line" as I can imagine.
Or, say, because they want a judicial warrant to be sufficient for obtaining someone's information without their consent?
> Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
Huh? This sounds crazy.
Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:
"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"
so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.
(source for quote https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115314954743042414 -> https://www.dr.dk/lyd/special-radio/prompt/prompt-2025/egois...)
"It's not that complicated"... indeed?
Privacy was a thing long before encryption even existed. So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible. (And for arresting stalkers and wiretappers.)
Encryption changed all that. It effectively undermined the ability of warrants to do their job.
Regardless of how you feel about the above, surely you agree that none of that is factually incorrect, right? Plaintext + privacy were simultaneously a thing for a long time, right?
So, whatever you feel, doesn't it feel a little disingenuous to suggest that the two are necessarily tied together? And to smear someone as hypocritical because they believe in both? Did the guy ever advocate for exposing everyone's real-time location?
Look, I don't even know the guy. And I'm not even trying to defend anything here on its merits. I'm just trying to set the record straight as to what the facts and the logical implications are(n't). Do you(/him/etc.) want an honest debate? Where you can actually win with people coming to support your ideas on their merits? Or do you want to take the craziest logical leaps and lose all your potential supporters in the process?
Certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
The Danish constitution also mentions privacy, in the form of paragraph 72 that stipulates that the confiscation and examination of letters and other papers; as well the interception of postal-, telegraph- and telephone communication cannot be done without a judicial order.
Those things were costly and didn’t scale very well. Which is why it was more tolerable.
Without encryption and with legally required backdoors the authorities can just “wiretap” everyone just in case they might commit a crime. That is what the Danish government wants to do by pushing ChatControl in the EU. There is absolutely nothing crazy about that and they are perfectly transparent about what they are doing. Most sensible people believe that that’s a too high cost.
It’s not the same as gps, but it’s similar. If you can decrypt someone’s communications, you can more easily determine their location.
I'm Australian and I'm all for peeling back and making transparent all the comings and goings of public officials (within reason) - they deserve a good return, a hefty return even, for dedicated public service .. and they deserve to know that there's a hammer waiting for any betrayal of public trust, shady financial dealings (while in office), etc.
As a "known in advance covenant" that's not altogether unreasonable, raises the bar for would be Trumpesque grifters, and allows for privacy for those not seeking access to public offices, trust, and cookie jars.
What these weirdo hacktivists don't understand is that the voting public wants to live in a society.
when they do it, its A-OKAY, but if he does even 1/10, its the worst catastrophy in the world.
> that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe
This pretty accurately describes lots of stuff going on here in Germany as well and well the state of most of our "liberal democracies".
Does that change anything?
Only taking action because you can change corrupt ways doesn’t actually change anything because the average person has no power to do so. And the proper channels are gummed up to not change anything.
What Lars does is possibly inform or change perspective of those unfamiliar with their nation/world-state.
I'm not sure about that. People on HN are generally well in the know, while laymen don't event understand the substance of the matter in question.
People on HN are generally well in the know
Even if the text message was exactly the same, there are plenty of valid reasons why one might be prosecutable and the other might not be.
Some of us prefer not to give up on that though.
I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider.
I don't think they would reject that. In fact, you are arguing their point: It's the context that matters, not just the act. Without knowing the context it's not valid to presume a particular scenario.
Not sure how that's "obfuscation".
The underlying problem is that a LOT of public servants are very scared what will happen if the party who keeps getting threatened gets elected, which is a real possibility. So, they're using all sorts of underhanded tactics to try to prevent it. In a way, it's a fight about public servants trying to keep their job safe. It's political because they all owe their jobs to a particular coalition that's been in power for ages and ages.
Oh and it's a fight about muslim immigration and the influence of that in and on society. So ...
That's why it's obfuscation. You're leaving important things out.
The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
> I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider
... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here. You are aware you're making that implicit statement, right?
That is far from obvious.
In general i think that attempting to alter the course of justice via a threat is much worse than a simple threat. Any situation where officers of the court are afraid to impartially do their duties to coercion is a fundamental threat to society and should be dealt with harshly.
> ... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here.
I'm basing my view on the arguments presented in this thread.
So far what has been presented is that the prosecutor did something very normal that happens all the time for very reasonable reasons. Its possible that in this case it happened due to inappropriate reasons, idk, but so far nobody has even presented a theory for why the action was corrupt instead of normal.
In general i think it is the job of the person arguing that misconduct occured to present evidence that it actually happened. Otherwise things descend into witch hunts as it is very difficult to prove a negative.
But, yeah, depending on your threat matrix, you might want to consider hidden trail cams with their own cell service.
I think this is very irresponsible. What would happen if the owner was armed and harmed the police thinking that they were criminals?
I'd personally like to see the laws protecting this strengthened, to make sure that cops aren't charging unannounced into peoples' homes and then charging the homeowner with murder when they react with reasonable gun violence in self-defense.
This kind of pro-cop propaganda placing them above the law is disgusting.
Cops should go to prison for illegal raids. Some behaviour needs to be severely punished.
This kind of betrayal of trust is one of the most severe crimes one can commit against society, the punishments should be equally severe.
In that case, how about the cops can just shoot anyone with a gun who's not a cop?
Should keep things pretty simple, and the majority of the population in the US would be a bunch safer. :D
https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/D...
That being said, if I were a police officer I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
Anyway, unless you actually have stabbed someone before you don't know whether you got what it takes until you're actually in a situation where you find out.
A guy tried to rob me, I fractured his skull with my iphone before I even realized what was going on. You don't just freeze when someone suddenly attacks you, you'll try to swing at them with whatever you have at hand.
At home? I might just have been cooking, or carving a sunday roast. Who knows? But if someone suddenly smashed through my door, I'm pretty sure that whatever object happens to be in my hand would be heading towards the intruder long before I've had time to think about what's going on.
But you can't use it against someone for just entering your premises illegally. It needs to be a clear and present danger.
ECHR necessarily guarantees the right to shoot some intruders in some situations, but it's kind of impossible to know which situations those are except after the fact.
You base this on what? I know plenty of gun owners where I live, and most would pull open their safe the moment they hear something during the night. I'm willing to bet most gun safes are located in the bedroom.
Weapons are normal here too.
We don't have precedent in the way that common law countries do, and the judgements in actual cases point in slightly different directions-- in one case a court felt that the failure to fire a warning shot made it not self-defence, in another fighting people trying to get into an apartment with a knife was deemed acceptable.
Generally though, if someone is breaking into your apartment while you're there, possibly trying to get at you, there's no limit, as long as you're actually trying to defend yourself (so no executing someone who you've clearly disabled, etc.).
If people are breaking into your apartment and you fire a warning shot, then proceed to shoot the attackers, no one will complain.
This guy for example was convicted of murder because he got his gun out without even trying to contact the police directly or indirectly. So even if he pulled the trigger under reasonable circumstances (a know violent offender was trying to take his rifle) he was found guilty because he should not have gone for the gun without considering alternatives like locking the door or fleeing.
I can’t see him being anywhere near guaranteed to claim self defense even if he had fired a warning shot first.
https://svenskjakt.se/start/nyhet/skot-inkraktare-med-algstu...
Notice again the lack of warning shots. The courts really want you to do one.
They just violently entered his home in an effort to attack him, dressed in a way designed to intimidate. These cops were deliberately cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad, they obviously wanted him to believe that they were going to kill him.
It's not like the cops just accidentally went out dressed like that.
Yet they're dressed exactly like a hit squad in a Brazilian favela!
>Especially when they want to preserve evidence which might be quickly destroyed if the suspect sees them coming.
Somehow cops elsewhere manage this just fine in appropriate attire.
Naturally, getting raided is scary as fuck. And them being plain clothed certainly doesn't make it less so. But based on the part of the video which he chose to shared I don't see why one would suspect anyone other than the police. Had they been out to kill him it would have been easier to just go in blasting instead of yelling while using a battering ram.
Hit squads are truly exotic here. Plain clothes police raids are not, although the norm is for them to be uniformed. I have no idea on why they chose to be plain clothed instead of uniformed on this occasion, but I can't see why we would attribute it to "cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad". Another possibility, which I believe is somewhat common, is that they can take him away without making him look like a criminal in the eyes of his neighbors.
Where in Europe are you from? I get the impression that you are used to a very different kind of society.
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?
Might as well talk about unicorns as we are imaging this scenario in Denmark.
This isn't limited to shotguns or bolt action rifles for hunting. You can own up to six handguns.
You do need to be licensed however, and given Andersen's history he probably wouldn't be permitted.
A hefty prison sentence for illegal handling of firearms and attempted homicide would be my guess.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1c0e24s/american_...
The entire scene is probably not meant as effective policing, but as punitive theater. This also explains why they disabled the cameras, as the theater was not intended for content reuse.
Given that, I'd assume they knew he wouldn't shoot them or do anything even remotely like that.
Sentences are not added up. So yes, trying to shot a police officer will definitely get you decent sentence -- it's not hefty by American standards.
What is good is that he is a wrench, that throws itself in the works repeatedly. This is a healthy thing to have.
While I don't doubt they have a way of getting permission to access that data, I don't think they will put in the effort unless you're a relally big fish.
This seems exactly backwards to what I'd expect, I wonder what the official rationale is.
He describe himself as an anarcho capitalist so I guess, ideologically, it is government surveillance that he is concerned with and that the free market will sort out the rest.
On a second thought (addendum), ...
1) Publishing PII like phone number of a high profile person in your society is causing them harm since they obviously put effort into not having such out in the open. (e.g. I can find anyone's phone number in my country via leaks. No big deal... but I shouldn't publish such. I shouldn't possess such data either.)
2) SSN is a different category of PII. Publishing this of anyone is an invitation of harm, even more so of a high profile person in your society.
It is akin to inviting people to DDoS a website, or blocking them physically access to exit their house. That kind of thing. Except that on the internet, anyone can abuse this. Even people (including criminals) in foreign countries, residing in hazardous jurisdictions (e.g. Russia).
Either way, what's the point of publishing such information? When German activists published the fingerprint of a German minister, they were making a point. They got the fingerprint via a glass of wine, but the interesting point is that a fingerprint cannot be revoked. It isn't used to authenticate a password, but a user(name). It should therefore not be used as single factor.
Peter Hummelgaard on the other hand, can just fuck right off. Former head of the ministry of justice seriously argued that the mass surveillance initiatives he led were right because he "felt" it...
remigration, monkey comparisons, generally some awful stuff. yikes. Just focus on privacy, dude.
I see it as a morally valid approach. Politicians are well within their power to not be corrupt and value the US/bigcorp/oligarch x over the people they vowed to represent.
Umm, so was he arrested for doxing the prime minister? Is there more to the story than that?
As someone who cares about privacy, arresting people who dox other people seems like a good thing. Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous, but still at the end of the day i have trouble objecting to someone getting arrested for doxing people.
No, i dont think it is.
> He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her
Denmark is a democracy, that is a decision for the electroate to make during an election. In general we give governments rights and abilities that normal people do not have. Where the line should be is up to the voters to decide.
> and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed."
Not really equivalent. I'm pretty sure the Danish survelience plans, whatever you think of them, intend to have some sort of controls against misuse. (Im not saying that makes them good or ok, just that they aren't equivalent to doxing people)
I fear for what our political system will look like when only those who have become completely numb to such threats remain. What kinds people are they, those who can live with hundreds of daily hate messages and death threats, doxing of oneself and family members, having to live with security guards and secret addresses? What are we losing by allowing this kind of "freedom of speech"?
If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution, then maybe his actions make sense. But I do not believe that that gives us a better society.
It’s still preferable to doing nothing when that politician is publicly declaring their support of indiscriminately violating inherent personal freedoms on an unlimited scale.
Do you really want armed and masked police to break down the doors of people who dox others, disable their cameras, and arrest them while refusing to tell them the charges? Because without these details this would have been a non-story.
It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.
The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.
The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the society).
So, success?
He’s not doing anything for the cause he claims to fight for. He’s doesn’t want a right to privacy he wants to be allowed to continue to sell drugs “in private” from the government. And he thinks freedom of speech should cover his freedom to harass and threaten politicians which it doesn’t and shouldn’t.
Doesn't seem to be working.
You can’t just declare “I am an anti violence activist” then go out and beat up politicians and declare that the system has a problem with violence when you get arrested.
This is the equivalent of what he’s done. He claims to support privacy laws so he violated the privacy of someone who is currently protected by the PET (equivalent of FBI) due to safety concerns and he proudly proclaimed that he did so by stalking her children. He’s not a political activist he’s a drug dealer who’s hell bent on getting revenge on politicians because he just spent 8 months in jail after being convicted on counts of death threats harassment and illegal possession of arms and drugs.
By the metric of Denmark being the leading force being Chat Control, Palantir driven panopticon and worse.
Sorry, you made a silly typo that made you look bad. I fixed it.
I think this is useful context for evaluating his judgment.
All too often people throw around the racist buzzword without ever actually providing evidence. It's as if we're expected to just blindly trust and follow that somebody is now excommunicated from modern society.