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In Finland, Nokia May Get Its Own Snooping Law
notany writes "Nokia may be too big a company for Finland (a country of 5 million people). It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will. After Nokia was caught red-handed, twice, snooping on its employees (first 2000-2001, second 2005), the company started a relentless lobbying and pressure campaign against politicians to push what the press has been calling 'Lex Nokia' or the 'snooping law.' This proposed law would allow employers to investigate the log data of employees' e-mails, legalizing the kind of snooping that Nokia had engaged in. Parliament's Constitutional Law Committee asked the opinions of eight legal experts, and all opined that the proposed law is unconstitutional. The committee ignored all the advice and declared the proposal constitutional." An anonymous reader adds a link to an AFP story reporting that Nokia has threatened to pull out of Finland unless the law passes.
The Soviet Union was involved only implicitly in the Bay of Pigs, due to Castro's and Che Guevara's publicly Communist policies. And the Bay of Pigs isn't, of course, directly comparable to the Soviet invasion of Finland as a full military campaign. But the point stands, they were invaded, by a vastly larger neighbor, and repelled it. The neighbor wasn't trying very hard: think about why that was to understand how small countries avoid successful invasions in general.
For another example of a small country successfully repelling invasion by a powerful neighbor, look at Kuwait and Iraq. Getting foreign allies is vital, and effective.
And for the missile crisis, Castro's reasons for wanting the missiles were _of course_ to deter US invasion of Cuba. The US had already tried it once, and gotten their wrists slapped. That's why Turkey accepted NATO or US missiles threatening the Soviets.
Let's also be completely clear: the Cubans hosted numerous Soviet military vessels, for supplies and shore leave and repair, throughout the rest of the Cold War. This gave Soviet vessels with nuclear capacity excellent excuses to be within range of the US, even if nuclear armed vessels avoided docking in Havana to ease US nuclear concerns.