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."

Comments

Personal Responsibility

[XorNand]

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? :-(

Re:Personal Responsibility

[daniil]

Where's Sartre when you need him? :-(

In Hell, sharing a small room with two other people.

Re:Personal Responsibility

[NickFortune]

Voting is accepting the nanny state.

Given that we already have a nanny state, it seems to me that not voting is representing the nanny state - it says "go right ahead - I don't care enough to oppose you".

And you know what? If the nanny state was the worst we had to worry about I might even agree with you.

But we in the UK live in a country with more surveilance cameras per square foot than any other in the world. We have a a government that has introduced curfews, travel restrictions, has done away with the right to silence, wishes to remove the right to trial by jury, has instituted detention without trial and without evidence, that lies to its people to justify foreign wars of aggression, has no compuction in victimising journalists that speak out against it, that plans to force through expensive identity card schemes in the face of both public opposition, and a total lack of evidence that thes scheme will benefit anyone at all.

And one that apparently condones shooting commuters in the head at point blank range without evidence and with no warning.

So I think there's just a wee bit more at stake here than the Nanny bleeding State.

Don't you?

Fight this

[TheSpoom]

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.

The laws are worse than the terrorists.

[Ckwop]

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.

Re:The laws are worse than the terrorists.

[i_should_be_working]

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.

I agree, and it's funny how people almost never think of this. How so many other dangers are more present and deadly than terrorism, but aren't seen as important. Where's our war on smog, bad driving, and gun proliferation?

Before the 2004 US elections I saw quotes by people saying things to the effect of 'who cares about the economy when we're at war with terrorism'. Yet far more children are going to die from poverty induced things like exposure and malnutrition than from any acts of terror.

Re:Read 'erode' as 'trample on'

[perky]

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.

Guantanamo Bay.

That is all.

Where is freedom?

[RayDude]

"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

Re:On the plus side

[tuxette]

If you think the food is crap, then you're not drinking enough ;-)

Same ill logic as in the US.

[kprox]

"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

There passed a long time since the last decent PM

[oakad]

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

---- William Pitt, 1783

The problem is not gov't, but the role of gov't

[einhverfr]

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.....