Slashdot Mirror
The Electronic Police State
gerddie writes "Cryptohippie has published what may be called a first attempt to describe the 'electronic police state' (PDF). Based on information available from different organizations such as Electronic Privacy Information Center, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House, countries were rated on 17 criteria with regard to how close they are already to an electronic police state. The rankings are for 2008. Not too surprisingly, one finds China, North Korea, Belarus, and Russia at the top of the list. But the next slots are occupied by the UK (England and Wales), the US, Singapore, Israel, France, and Germany." This is a good start, but it would be good to see details of their methodology. They do provide the raw data (in XLS format), but no indication of the weightings they apply to the elements of "electronic police state" behavior they are scoring.
UK is particularly bad, the goverment want to have records of every single phone call, sms, email sent or web page read by every single person in the UK. Needless to say, this is a ridiculously expensive enterprise at a time when the UK's public borrowing is higher than every.
I am sorry, but if you are claiming something to be a report on "national rankings" of "The Electronic Police State", you should at a very least have a clue.
A few hints to the fact that this report is a bunch of crap (no offense to a good name of real crap) is clear lack of understanding of legal concepts, imprecise and not legally or scientifically accepted definitions and simply errors in basic terms and grammar.
It is spelled "habeAs corpus". You do not start a paper that you want to be taken seriously with cheap usenet flame references to "Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR".
It is not a "criminal evidence" (what the hell is "criminal evidence" anyway?), unless it is admissible in court and no information as collected is admissible on its own merits. And how do you compare countries with completely different legal systems?
I could go on and on, but really it isn't worth the time. This report should not be on a first page of "idle", much less on /. Really, editors - get a clue.
with no information on how it was compiled
good job
Next up, we'll publish a list of the top 50 mutual funds to invest in...with no mention of the criteria for generating the list.
If you have nothing to hide, government surveillance would not matter at all.
Just stop using the Internet, driving a car, visiting public places, using credit cards, signing up for lists at major US retailers, enrolling in any public organization or institution, talking on a cell phone, renting videos, or getting cable television. This should ensure your basic expectations of privacy are respected.
M
It's the "rules set out by the government" part that bothers me, because I see an increasing disconnect between the government's interests and mine.
Perhaps then an anarchy like Somalia would be more preferable to you than an oppressive nanny state like England?
The government inspection is not nearly as bad as employer/school policing of your online activities.
My apologies, but I am always shocked when people make the claim that potentially nefarious activities are somehow "more evil" when performed by private actors as opposed by government. What is the basis for your argument?
The government has an absolute monopoly on force. A corporation, no matter how evil, cannot lawfully detain you, lock you in a cage or kill you. The government can do all of those things and more. Your school cannot deprive you of your income, restrict your movements or require that your name be entered on a list of proscribed persons. The government does these things as a matter of course.
Perhaps you feel more in control of your government than you do your employer or school? Good luck with that. You can find another job. You can study elsewhere. Your government is inescapable.
*Ahem.* Somalia is more like a conglomeration of warring mini-states than an anarchy. The problem isn't that there are no rulers (an-archos), it's that there's too many, and they fight each other.
You forgot to mention traveling on an airplane, traveling on a coach, traveling on Amtrak, holding a bank account, gambling at a casino (they have to take your details so they can tell the IRS if you win and need to pay income tax on that win IIRC) or owning a firearm.
This technology is available to the next Pol Pot, or Idi Amin, or Saddam Hussein. As a dictator, cost is little if any problem - you just tell people to set up the surveillance, and report to you. Not to mention, the US comes awfully close locking up political prisoners sometimes. Remember McCarthy? Just think if HE had access to all this newfangled monitoring equipment. The next George W. Bush may whisk you off to Guantanamo, based on some comment you made online, or in an email. And, people who notice you gone will say, "Well, if he had nothing to hide, he wouldn't have gone missing!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
1 in 31 people in the U.S. are in prison, on parole or on probation.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469360/
The U.S. has more people in prison that the Peoples Republic of China.
It doesn't really matter if it is an electronic Police state or not.
The RIAA haven't undertaken raids on their own authority, nor have they used their own forces. In these cases, they are influencing government (police SWATs) to use its monopoly on force to "enforce the law". Maybe it's a fine line, but it is a line.
No, it's a blurred line. Corporations write the laws the government enforces, even if not directly.
Is it too much to ask for a limited government that is by the people and for the people?
Surveillance should be in the opposite direction. We should be able to see what our elected officials are doing 24/7. Have microphone on them at all times to make sure they arent being bought by lobbists and taking bribes and what not.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
If you have nothing to hide, government surveillance would not matter at all.
Everybody's got something to hide and it's none of the government's business.
England is a very curious case. In law its in a situation in which any authoritarian government, having got itself elected, would never need to call another election. There are a host of measures which have been passed in the last ten years which would permit the suspension of Parliament and rule by decree. The terrorism legislation would allow such a government to imprison anyone it liked for any or no reason. Then there is the surveillance, which is on a scale only previously found in science fiction. All travel, all communication (including this post) are logged. Henry Porter's articles in the Guardian and Vanity Fair detail the whole thing. Recently an opposition Member of Parliament was arrested, on Parliament premises, on suspicion of 'conspiring to encourage misconduct in public office'. Well.
Yet, it is obvious that England is a far pleasanter and freer place to live than the countries it is being compared to. Its also obviously, if you look at the recent deep embarrassment of its politicians over expenses, ruled by people who feel accountable to public opinion in a way that none of the true authoritarian states do. You will still find vigorous debate in the media. Only today, for example, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian runs up one side of the Prime Minister and down the other, and calls on the Party to get rid of him in the next three weeks. There will shortly be elections, relatively properly run, and the goverment will take a huge hit, and will accept it.
What has happened is that a genuinely democratic party, elected admittedly on a flawed and not particularly representative electoral system with a minority of the vote, one which consists of pleasant and well meaning people, has gradually without realizing what it is doing, passed legislation which would enable the British National Party, should it ever take power, to be as unrestrained by legislative limits on its powers as the Nazi Party in Germany 1933.
At the moment what stands between the English and either left or right authoritarianism is tradition, an independent judiciary, and the goodwill of the ruling party. We are effectively Weimar, with all the legal framework any future government will need to turn us at will either into Nazi Germany or the GDR.
We just have to hope that the wrong people don't get elected. If they do, its all over.
In their "Raw Data" list Russia is ranked #13, but in the report it shows up as being #4.
This is not a serious research, rather a "geek-made" wikipedia-based crap.
Thats correct, I miss the point because there doesn't seem to be one. I suppose I could just move to NK if you think I'll find it there, but its your argument not theirs. You can pat yourself on the back all day for being better than other people because you cling to your ethnocentric cultural superiority of cold war America, McCarthy, Hoover, Hogans Hero's reruns, and best of all we're always the good guys. NK is a living hell, just like you know and love it - its the good ol days. Believe me, I'm not trying to convince you to move to NK, as you suggest, I'm just saying the list is arbitrary and seems to reflect US cold war prejudice more accurately than it even substantiates "Electronic Police State" criteria. The four countries on the top of the list are there because why exactly? What is the metric? Belarus and NK but not Estonia and Latvia and Ukraine and Bulgaria? WTF? Just make up any ol list for any old reason for all I care, but the only country that we need to fix is our own. So far, ideology is cheap when its all your own, but I'm convinced people are people everywhere and that North Koreans feel the same way about creepy electronic surveillance as any other people on planet earth. Since we seem to be the country where all forms of policing has been excessive, particularly electronic, then how is it that tiny Belarus is considered to be next to China and Russia, but Good ol USA never managed to get around to it? Because you say so? We have more police, more technology, more criminals, prisoners, and felons, more victims, car alarms, phone fraud, identity theft, zombie pcs, wire fraud, etc. etc. than most anywhere on earth so it seems really peculiar to contemplate a list of countries that has absolutely no clear basis of quantifiable fact worthy of mention, and yet it seems to insinuate that our shit don't stink and that we're better because Eurasia is a lousy place to live and we're golden. Whatever. Think what you like, but I bet you don't have the slightest idea what they think about it in China, NK, Belarus, and Russia. You don't even seem to care. So its pointless to use them as a basis for comparison when you are too ethnocentric to realize people are people. Even in electronic police states with no foil hats