My big thing is all citizens should be given a guaranteed email account that they can deal with any issues at a physical location. For the us I see it as being run by the usps and emails would be treated like they treat physical mail (pay to send, need a warrant to view an email) and government agencies should have to send communications through it. I get flak for this so I must stress that no one need use it (outside government communications) and could use whatever personal mail they want. The main thing here is its guaranteed so can't go away and makes sure you know government communications are legit.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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Enshittification
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Some European governments already do what you describe. Of course it’s only acceptable to the extent that it is voluntary. It’s becoming decreasingly voluntary which creates a bigger shit-show than you had before. Denmark has gone to the extreme of ditching snail mail. So Danes are trapped in whatever comms system is imposed.
Big govs like to outsource to big corporations. Some govs use Microsoft for email by every agency. There is no way to correspond electronically with that gov without having a surveillance advertiser with shitty ethics in the loop.
I think the problem is that it would be impossible to stop a gov from marginalising those who object to using such a platform. I would welcome the platform only if I could be absolutely guaranteed that it would not be imposed on me. But no gov can resist the urge to save money and steem roll over the minority of hold outs. The minority of hold outs is important for everyone because that group ensures competition of options.
BTW, I should say this thread branch is not really on topic because personal communication is very different than distribution of public docs. E.g. if the gov produces crime statistics for a region, your personal inbox is not the proper place to publish that.
yeah I guess I should have mentioned that I expect it all to be run by government servers using open source technology. I mean all government things should be like this. It should be government owned infrastructure. Im also sorry this is tangental but more that you should have something you can imap or pop down rather than existing just in a portal when they "send you stuff". Something similar is I wish the government would require places to always offer physical mail as an option with no fee and pdf by email as an option. You always get this security excuse with email but it exists for physical mail and the actual security thing is to scrub sensitive numbers. ugh my one bank still insists on doing *lastdigits rather than use the nicknames I setup in thier system.
One EU member state implements their own msging system which uses 2fa by requiring people to insert their ID card into an EMV chip reader and enter a PIN. Despite that quite good security, they started block Tor. That way they can track your approximate location by IP address. Then to notify you that you have a msg waiting, they send an email with a surreptitious tracker dot, so they can track whether you opened the email and your approximate location at that moment. If you decide the bounce upon discovering the shit-show, then you would have unread msgs on the server which are deemed to have registered letter status and considered to have been read (even though all their tracking theoretically ensures that they know what is unread).
FOSS should certainly be on the client side. But on the server side FOSS doesn’t help. FOSS rules: only ppl who receive the binary are entitled to the code. FOSS does not require distribution.. just that binaries must come with source. What you’re perhaps really after is Italy’s “public money → public code” rule. You couldn’t know for certain what is running on the server or with what configuration, but at least in Italy the code is available for reuse.
Anyway, there are a minefield of problems. A public option is good to have and it’s likely inevitably coming to a gov near you. The dire need is retaining snail mail as an alternative. That’s where the good fight will be. In the US you already have gov agencies that ignore postal mail. For example, go to a secretary of state website to lookup a business. You might be blocked by Cloudflare (esp. if on Tor). And if access is granted, you could be forced to solve a Google reCAPTCHA. When you quite reasonably say “fuck this, I’m sending a postal letter to request the records”, you will find that they will just ignore it.
℻ is a quite useful alternative because you can send it electronically without revealing your email address, thus preventing the recipient from responding with personal data in an email. But we’ve mostly lost fax. Many gov offices have dispensed with it.
The digital transformation shit-show is in full swing in Europe. It’s a little slower to impact public services in the US, but it’s coming.
why would they need to send you an email if they are providing you with an email. That is where the communication should be. The problem here is it needs to have all the legal protections of regular mail. It should be illegal to monitor someones activity like that without a judicial warrant just like opening mail or putting a tracker on a car. We have historic examples of the way freedom and privacy should be implemented and it can be done the same electronically as it is physically. That is the problem. I should say that everything. Absolutely everything. Should be able to be done in person at an office without any need for any technology. Thats a big problem to. There should be a right to not use technology.
why would they need to send you an email if they are providing you with an email.
The msg portal uses 2FA to access. People do not likely want to go through that login process on a daily basis to just to check for new msgs, so there is an /optional/ e-mail notification feature. The notifications can be disabled but then you are legally responsible for having read msgs that arrive even if you did not login to see them.
That is where the communication should be.
If you mean that conventional email (SMTP) is where the sensitive payloads are sent, very few people can handle PGP, sadly enough. I would sign up for PGP over conventional email if, and only if, the gov would also guarantee that surveillance advertisers like MS and Google are not used on the gov end (I don’t even want them to have metadata).
The problem here is it needs to have all the legal protections of regular mail. It should be illegal to monitor someones activity like that without a judicial warrant just like opening mail or putting a tracker on a car.
Yes, I would insist on that, but I would still distrust legal protections on their own in this post-Snowden era.
Should be able to be done in person at an office without any need for any technology. Thats a big problem to. There should be a right to not use technology.
Europe assumes the only reason not to use tech is incompetence. So they provide the elderly with “digital buddies” who do the tech work for them. For me that’s insufficient because it’s my opposition to the tech that stops me using it, not competency. I would not want a “digital buddy” solving Google recaptchas on my behalf either.
So indeed a !right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz (right to be analog) is paramount. I believe it’s the most important right we could have w.r.t. digital rights. It’s the only nuclear option we can trust.
I don't know about FTP, a useful and crawlable website is fine for me.
What I am much more taking issues with, is the use of proprietary file formats like the MS ones.
I maybe am overly critical, but in my opinion, public access should be access without any redundant payment requirements.
I don’t know about FTP, a useful and crawlable website is fine for me.
The problem with HTML is it gives too much freedom to the web developer who can enshitify it with proprietary JavaScript, CAPTCHAs, etc. Sure it is possible to implement interoperable non-enshitified HTML like this example:
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
But you cannot trust web devs to be responsible. And you cannot trust lawmakers to have the competency required to ban all the shitty things that can be done using HTML and JS. FTP is inherently limited so a bad admin cannot screw it up too much. It technologically protects us from enshitification.
public access should be access without any redundant payment requirements.
Not sure what you mean by payment requirements. Govs distributing docs usually does not involve payment. Nonetheless, I want as many payment options as possible because even payment systems are enshitified. E.g. PayPal is a shit show by a controversial company with a long list of wrong doing.
By paying requirements I mean, that at least the German government sometimes still provides documents in Microsoft formats using macros, templates and design features, that are not supported by open source, or free alternatives.
In my opinion, every document provided by a city, a state, a country, should be available in the least expensive way and it is really no big hustle to turn MS stuff into open formats.
Regarding the HTML problem, I think everything can suck hard, if someone wants it to or doesn't care. But honestly I myself don't know how to address that in a useful way except for annoying people until they do things right.
By paying requirements I mean, that at least the German government sometimes still provides documents in Microsoft formats using macros, templates and design features, that are not supported by open source, or free alternatives.
That’s already illegal. Directive 2019/1024 Art.5¶1 states:
Without prejudice to Chapter V, public sector bodies and public undertakings shall make their documents available in any pre-existing format or language and, where possible and appropriate, by electronic means, in formats that are open, machine-readable, accessible, findable and re-usable, together with their metadata. Both the format and the metadata shall, where possible, comply with formal open standards.
So when you encounter a gov agency who distributes public docs exclusively in MS Word, in principle it’s just a matter of filing a complaint that they are required to act on. But I suppose there could be a snag because MS published an open spec for the Word format. It was likely just a symbolic gesture because I heard MS Word implementations do not comply with MS’s own spec. But then that works to your advantage because it could be argued that a non-conformant doc fails to be “re-usable” and fails to comply with the open standard.
In my opinion, every document provided by a city, a state, a country, should be available in the least expensive way and it is really no big hustle to turn MS stuff into open formats.
I agree but there need not be a law about cost because using an open standard generally and typically implies that some FOSS will exist for it, and most FOSS is incidentally gratis.
Regarding the HTML problem, I think everything can suck hard, if someone wants it to or doesn’t care.
Not with FTP. FTP greatly limits the ways and degree by which the deployment can suck. Someone who doesn’t care in the very worst would choose a non-intuitive file structure. Someone who wants to be malicious doesn’t have many ways to do so. And their act in FTP would stand out and be difficult to explain.
With HTML there are infinite ways to make it suck. Most web devs abuse their freedom in countless ways to make it suck. It’s actually very difficult to find well designed websites. FTP is the inverse of that. It would be difficult to find a poorly designed FTP host.