>When lawmakers start actively going against the interests of society at large[...]

But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?

I am not sure because this assumes a very well informed and educated population.

Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins. So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.

That's the benefit and frustration of the democratic or representative democratic process.

Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.

Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.

But exponential backoff feels too open to be gamed by countervailing factions. Some small period of time within a session however could make sense.

The problem here is that many who are in favour of Chat Control (and of its predecessors) really do honestly think they're doing something for the benefit of society.

Focusing on these supposedly well-meaning individuals - I'm going to assume they somehow never consumed any dystopian fiction as a child, the purpose of which was to inoculate a generation against totalitarianism. They don't understand the overreach they are committing to. They think that, because they're a Good Person and wouldn't abuse it, nobody else will, and the massive security loophole created by this effort will not have any downsides. They'll just be able to stop all the baddies!

Meanwhile, those of us who live in reality know that:

* smart criminals will just use unlicensed technologies to get around this, trivially

* dumb criminals will figure out how to use code words for plausible deniability / bayesian "hide in plain sight"

* political dissidents who are exercising free speech will become more vulnerable than ever

And, of course, that's all if the government was only populated by good people who don't intend to abuse this! I have no reason to believe that; does anyone? Is there anyone who so truly loves their government in 2025 that they want them reading all their messages (even moreso than now)?

Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.

Double jeopardy in the US means being prosecuted for the exact same crime more than once. It does not, however, prevent being prosecuted for similar or related crimes.

For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.

That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?

Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.

In many countries, it took multiple attempts to get gay marriage legalised. Having a double jeopardy type block for repeated attempts at passing laws would prevent social changes being captured in law.

Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.

There are a bunch of people in my country who have been pushing against abortion rights for 50 years. So far they have never even come close.

Now I suppose theoretically one day all the other 100 members of parliament accidentally push the wrong button but it seems farfetched.

And there is in most parliamentary law, but usually restricted to sessions. Additionally, there's usually a proscription against passing negative laws (i.e. "we will not do X"), meaning that when something passes it becomes law and needs a supermajority to repeal, but when it fails, all it needs is a majority to be passed (in the next session.)

The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.

If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.

The EU doesn't even have that level of democracy.

It would be nice, but they change it a little bit so it's technically a different law.

Yes, but whatever law you pass that is incompatible with future attempts can just have its repeal included as part of future attempts.

I did mention that it had a million problems.

That escalated quickly from my comment to "but Nazis"...

Well an euroskeptic government is out and a new as pro-EU as is possible to be (Donald Tusk was President of the EU Council) is in, so all is well... You may recognise a pattern that is at play in other countries both in the EU and outside.

That's probably the plan anyway. The plan is to defang the courts, and especially the ECHR, since the beginning. The AfD explicitely said it was their plan, the National front in France didn't, but would be very happy if it didn't had any power, and a lot of media close to the neolib/conservative/nationalist are more than happy to shit on the ECHR (Pericles project is only from one of those).

Each time the courts disqualify a parliamentary law or executive decision, it has to spend political power. If the decisions or laws it stop are all from the same side, that side can start chipping the courts power away. The reason for the legislative part to exist is to avoid a dictatorship of the majority (basically X is arrested for something, Y is not even though he did the same thing, because Y is from the majority group). Having the ECHR censoring the law would have been sold by a lot of media as "the ECHR is supporting pedophiles" and "those non-elected judges wants to keep abusing children", and hopefully after a dozen years of similar attemps, the court would be either defanged or totally partisan.

Never trust the courts to protect your rights, even if you think that a law obviously infringes on obviously well enshrined rights that still is no guarantee of victory.

I think the implication was that there's something like a tipping point after which the surveillance leads to people not daring to oppose it in an organized way anymore. Which, at least to me, is a way more realistic danger than, for example, AGI.

It's usually much easier to pass a law than to get rid of it once passed.

What kind of government will on its own initiative want to give citizens more privacy not to say actively push for it against other governments? EU parliament cannot propose laws, so it would be nearly impossible to grassroor such an initiative