Slashdot Mirror
Some Rights May Have To Be 'Eroded' For Safety
Turn-X Alphonse writes "The BBC is reporting on a speech given by the head of MI5 in the UK. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller claims in the future some civil rights may have to 'erode', in order to keep everyone in the country safe from terrorism." From the article: "MI5 has recently let it be known that it is in favour of making telephone intercept evidence admissible in court. Previously the intelligence and security services had expressed concern such that evidence might reveal operational details. Meanwhile, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has been calling for EU states to keep mobile phone and e-mail records for longer, to help fight terrorism and crime."
This all boils down to one thing: lack of personal responsibility.
:-(
What ever happened to it? So many of our problems are rooted in everyone's attempt to pass the buck: the populace's willingness to give up civil liberties in order to get a nanny state in return, the abundance of frivolous lawsuits, corporate scandals, twelve step programs, people who constantly bitch about politicians but never vote, people who bitch about their jobs being offshored but don't do anything to increase the value of their own career, Karl Rove, etc, etc.... I just don't understand what has happened in my lifetime.
My father grew up within a society that valued "being a man": being responsible for your own station in life and your family's welfare, admitting your mistakes, and genuinely trying to be honorable/noble. If we had more personal responsbility in this world governments wouldn't be able to get away with attitudes like this.
Where's Sartre when you need him?
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
In the US (I'm unfamiliar with the UK), our rights are not granted by King nor State edict. They're inherent ("God-given") to every human born, US citizen or not. Our Constitution provides our government certain specific powers to appropriate certain specific rights of ours onto them.
Reducing inherent rights is an impossibility in the States. It is tyranny to trample on our right to be secure in our person and property when no warrant has been issued for a specific investigation into a specific crime.
Letting government infringe on our inherent freedom from witch hunts is scary. I know it is happening, but I'm not understanding how it protects us. Real criminals know the law and can get around all these government intrusions. That leaves only 'innocent' citizens as the target. With so many vague laws criminalizing behavior, you may be committing a crime without realizing it. Let your elected officials keep a log, just in case you forget to notify them of the crime you unknowingly commit.
It is unjust and unacceptable, and I am unwilling to be part of it. Should I mimic criminals now to keep myself safe from [i]government[/i]? Disposable phones, anonymous mailers, and all that?
Be sure terrorists already are safe from these injustices.
It may be very hard to stop someone who wants to blow up a train and is convinced it is the will of their God to do so. Security should be increased and anything in the power of public utilities like train stations and airports should be done to prevent terrorism.
However, I urge anyone reading to fight the erosion of their civil liberties in a so-called trade for their "security". I'm especially worried about the UK putting forward an equivalent of the PATRIOT Act because if they do, it sets a precident for all of their allies and will likely put pressure on them to do the same (which includes Canada, where I live).
I know I'm preaching to the converted here on Slashdot, but I wish there was a way I could make people see what we do: that the PATRIOT Act in the US allows the Government can monitor an individual's web surfing records, use roving wiretaps to monitor phone calls made by individuals "proximate" to the primary person being tapped, access Internet Service Provider records, monitor the private records of people involved in legitimate protests, spy on suspected computer trespassers (not just terrorist suspects) without a court order, and most concerningly, allows law enforcement to issue search warrants that do not force them to tell the subject that he was searched. (Source: EFF)
The word needs to be brought out to the streets.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Technology changes the balance between victim and attacker. Fact. Occasionally, it is prudent to create new laws to redress the balance. At first, breaking into a computer wasn't a crime. The laws in many countries decide (rightfully, imo) to make this an offense.
The problem comes when the law makers don't really think through the consquences of the laws they write. The start with the assumption that criminals are dumb. Most of the time this is actually a fairly good assumption. However, it is a mistake to right off all criminals as being stupid. The people behind 9/11 were certainly not dumb and it's these type of people we are drafting laws to stop.
. The first question a legislator should be asking themselves when faced with a security decision is "How could an attacker make this law useless". On the subject of wiretapping the first thing that springs to mind is encrypting the connection. How can you wiretap an encrypted connection? Of course, they could try and use RIPA to get the keys off you but RIPA is badly drafted (as I discuss here) and can be circumvented easily provided you use a signed Diffie-Helman key exchange to determine the session key.
Give the fact that the law can be dodged completely it only serves to make us all less secure. It removes a check and balance from our society and opens up to abuses by the Police and other government organsiations. (As an aside, Law should be drafted in that they should fail in the safest possible way when being used by a corrupt Police force).
I'll finish this comment with a point I feel is important. In July, fifty or so people were killed by terrorists. That was the first major terrorist attack since the IRA declared a cease-fire and it was alost the biggest terrorist act in (recent) British history. As much as it is a tragedy that those lives were lost, is it worth changing the relationship between citizen and state for the sake of fifty dead? The same can also be said about 9/11 or the madrid bombings. Yes four thousand people were killed in 9/11 but four times as many die per year in US due to gun fatalities. In terms of a threat to the average citizen of any particular state, the threat posed by terrorism is right down in the noise level. It is my belief that a greater threat to our liberty is posed by the onerous legislation being passed worldwide than by terrorism.
Simon.
You know, there was a crazy american towards the end of the 18th century that seems to have been quoted about this...
Then again, his countrymen don't seem to take him seriously, so why should anyone else?
And each of the accused will be taken captive via SWAT team, then made to pay for their own information collection, right?
They might declare English food to be a terrorist act, and erode the rights of British pubs to serve crap.
It is sad how easily people in the government concede defeat to the terrorists. One of the things that define modern, western democracies is the freedoms it gives its people. When the terrorists see that they have succesfully destroyed those freedoms, they must feel very succesful.
I admit that governments need to make a compromise, but they shouldn't so easily show it off.
"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"1984" could be a reality. "Brazil" could be a reality.
Don't people realize that part of the cost of freedom is by definition risk of being hurt.
Fear is what drives us to give up liberty, and it is only fear that we have to fight. Fear is worse than death, beause it traps us in our minds, afraid to move, afraid to live.
If we want to represent freedom to the world, I believe we ought to stop being afraid and stop lashing out in fear.
If we give up our freedom, doesn't that mean the terrorists are winning?
Why can't anyone see the truth here?
The truth is: we must do our best with the knowledge we have, defend ourselves as best we can, and let go of our fear.
Raydude
But we are more intelligent than those evil terrorists.
Instead of letting them destroy our way of life, we destroy it ourselves.
Thanks for your insightful comments Dame Edna...
If you have no freedom at the end of the day, who cares if you are 'safe'.
But of course no government would think that way, by design they are out to control the public and absorb their rights and freedoms.
Our founders here in the US knew this all too well, and tried to prevent it from happening *again*.
They failed of course, but they were right.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think we've lost the plot somewhere along the way. People have no clue what a government is supposed to do and not do. The government is not here to babysit your children and make sure they don't hear naughty words or see a boob. The government is not here to enforce your religious views on everyone who doesn't subscribe to your religion, whether you're a majority or not. The government is not here to guarantee a right to profit for corporations. The government is not here to keep track of what everyone does day and night in order to prevent any possible crime or terrorism. In general, IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT'S JOB TO CATCH CRIMINALS! That is a SECONDARY function to what governments should be doing. A government is supposed to protect the freedom of the people. i.e. life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. A government is supposed to protect the people from external threats, i.e. terorrism, war, but not at the expense of the freedom of its people. A government is supposed to maintain order, and prevent chaos from threatening people, i.e. catch criminals, prevent theft, prevent murder, etc. A government is supposed to ensure basic quality of living and services, i.e. infrastructure: roads, electricity, water, sewage. All this nonsense about giving up civil liberties to "prevent terrorism" is counterintuitive. You are there to ensure liberty, not remove it. Removing liberty all the time to prevent terrorism some of the time is not a positive net change for the people. Ensuring liberty is your primary function, if you are working against that, there is a problem with the plan or the execution. There needs to be another solution. Restricting freedoms of people who are not themselves the threat IS NOT AN OPTION. Restricting freedom of people to live, marry, immigrate, visit in hospitals, raise families, and be happy because your religious beliefs do not agree with it is not a valid action. There needs to be a threat to others in order for freedoms to be taken away. Claiming it is a threat because "think of the children" is a fallacy. You are responsible for your children. The government is not here to impose your moral values on others. It is not the government's job to instill morality in your children, that is your job as a parent. Try living up to your end of the bargain. If I had one wish in all the world, it would be for an empty habitable space to found my own society, based on reason instead of stupidity, with a design towards reducing corruption. The mult-branch thing was a good idea but didn't cut it. Plurality vote gravitates towards fewer parties. Lifetime politicians who have more interest in their private finances and companies than their jobs is a problem. We need to fix this but the systems around have sunk in and fossilized. There's no way to actively remove them, not even by force anymore. Revolution is virtually impossible in the age of modern weaponry. There is nowehre else to go. Any initiative that makes serious progress will be sabotaged by some existing faction in power, either political, religious, or corporate. I've really lost hope, so I guess do whatever you want.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The BBC has a Have Your Say section where people can talk about news stories. This is a comment on this one:
"Western countries' obsession with individual rights has often been seen as a strength, but in the modern world it has become a weakness. When these rights were developed over the preceding centuries it was never envisaged that they would be exploited to shield those who wish to annihilate those very rights and the society that gave them birth. We should wake up and curtail some of the more excessive freedoms, in order to preserve those that are more fundamental."
What a complete idiot.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
"We are fighting a war on terrorism to protect our rights and freedoms, right and freedoms we must give up, to help fight the war on terrorism, to protect our rights and freedoms." - Source Unknown
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
---- William Pitt, 1783Joanna Baillie, Basil (act III, sc. 1, l. 151)
"Fear is not the natural state of civilized people."
Aung San Suu Kyi
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
First, I think that there are few that would argue that we don't need a government. Even Thomas Jefferson ("That government governs best that governs least.") obviously believed in some form of government, and our national structure owes much to his writing.
IMO, we need a strong government, but we also need strong civil liberties. These are not at odds with eachother. Only a weak government would feel the need to infringe upon these liberties.
A strong government exists to build a strong social infrastructure. This can include such things as commercial infrastructure (highways), information infrastructure (my county owns a fiberoptical network through which I get telephone and internet service provided by my choice of private companies, and besides, what else do you call the public school system), economic infrastructure (protecting the freemarket from the likes of Microsoft), etc. We also need a strong judiciary, and many other portions of the government.
Whether we need wealth distribution programs is a subject for another debate. Personally I think we do need some form of wealth redistribution even if it is only an attempt to help make sure that everyone has the opportunity to get a quality college education and narrowly scoped to achieve that end. But that is beside the point.
When government starts to infringe on our civil liberties as a way of keeping us safe, we are sliding back to the circumstances which spawned our great republic, where fundamental rights (habeas corpous, trial by jury) were suspended in the Colonies in order to help maintain security. Already, the case of Jose Padilla threatens to at least partially overturn the right to a jury trial and the right to habeas petitions.
Welcome to the world of 1770.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
One blatant example of poverty causing death just came up last week: Hurricane Katrina. The majority of the men, women, and children who didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. The poverty rate there is 2-3 times the national average and many people in that group don't have cars.
Now, we're trying to bus them out of the hurricane area. But, where were the buses before the hurricane? We certainly knew well ahead of the time that level of a storm would devastate New Orleans. If leaving the area was the best option, then why wasn't this option given to the poorest citizens before disaster struck? The answer has everything to do with money and the fact that they don't have it. Certainly, the city, state, or federal government could have spent a little money to use local school buses and move those people out. I have a sneaking suspicion where that money actually went...
Karl von Clausewitz is perhaps best known from his statement: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means." This oft quoted statement was part of a dialectic argument set forth in Hegelian terms to examine the properties of war. IIRC von Clausewitz also was the first to characterize an oppresive, desparate state as insidiously furthering their power by pointing to an enemy without. Declaring war on the enemy without allowed a state to cast blame on the enemy for the shortcomings of the state within. In our present case the war on terrorism allows the state to truncate our civil liberties.
The interplay between the rights of the individual and the security of the collective is an ancient argument. In the west Jeremy Bentham presented the struggle in terms of Utilitarianism, "the greatest good for the greatest number". (I've had a fondness for Bentham since, as a schoolboy, reading he was stuffed and sat at the entrance to his club.) At the other end of the stick were the Romantics, best known, perhaps, in the writings of Jean-Jacuees Rousseau, a Calvin in Rebellion (and in my opinion a second rater), and F. Nietzsche.
The argument is ancient and each of us has to reexamine it to find our own place.Good luck with that.:)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi -0509100027sep10,1,5918883.story?coll=chi-newsnati onworld-hed
Shows that the US is not that far behind, as an appeals court says it is legal to hold US citizens forever without trial, as part of the Presidential powers.
I think the courts and our political leaders need to pick up a dictionary.
Fascism: A social and political ideology with the primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms.
I believe we had a world war over this.
Here is a case where the Administration argues that an American citizen, detained on American soil far from combat operations can be held indefinitely without any sort of trial, and the 4th circuit just agreed.
This means no trial by jury, no habeas petition, no access to a lawyer, merely because the government says so. Furthermore the 4th circuit stated that they were going to apply the Hamdi standard here and state that anyone accused of being an enemy combattant might have the burden or proof in proving that he is not, perhaps against a military tribunal. This is very scary indeed.
To see where this leads, I would direct everyone to read Scalia's dissent in Hamdi (in which Stevens joined). He states that the Hamdi standard would lead to an attrition of our due process rights as American citizens. And after reading the 4th circuit's opinion, I have decided that Scalia and Stevens are clearly right here...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Erode this. And the horse you rode in on, bitch.
As a taxpaying citizen, if my hired protectors can't protect me without infringing my rights, then they're fucking FIRED. The People can find someone else who will. These assholes forget who they're working for. The government is for the people, by the people. Their right to govern comes from MY consent to be governed. Do the job you're given, or get the fuck out of the way for someone else who can.
This just pisses me off. Some rights must be eroded? Bullshit!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Bad analogy - voting does not result in broken bones, ragged skin and blood poueing from your hands.
I agree with the GP - don't vote for the lesser of two evils, vote against the two party system by choosing an outsider.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.