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.
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
I downloaded the raw data. Some countries are missing, and the results are quite different from the PDF:
59-China
54-United Kingdom: England & Wales
53-Singapore
53-United States of America
52-France
52-Germany
51-Malaysia
50-Ireland
49-Netherlands
49-United Kingdom: Scotland
48-Israel
48-Russia
45-Australia
45-Belgium
45-Japan
44-Austria
44-New Zealand
43-Norway
41-Italy
40-Denmark
40-Taiwan
39-Canada
39-Greece
39-Hungary
39-Switzerland
38-Finland
38-Poland
38-Slovenia
38-Sweden
37-Cyprus
37-Estonia
37-Latvia
37-Lithuania
37-Malta
36-Czech Republic
36-Iceland
36-Luxembourg
36-Portugal
36-Spain
36-South Africa
34-Argentina
33-Romania
32-Thailand
31-Bulgaria
30-Brazil
28-Philippines
27-India
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
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.
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.
So, if you download their XLS raw data, and add up their scores, the worst 6 nations are:
1. China, with a score of 3.47
2. UK (Englad/Wales), with a score of 3.18
3. US and Singapore (tied for 3rd place), with a score of 3.12
5. France and Germany (tied for 5th place), with a score of 3.06
And as for Israel and Russia -- they are tied for 11th place, with a score of 2.82
Quite different from the top offenders list in the PDF, eh? It gets worse: North Korea and Belarus (in the top 5 according to the PDF) are not even mentioned anywhere in the raw data XLS... So not only did these "experts" pull their data out of their asses, but they managed to fail at adding up their own funny numbers!
After skimming that report, and comparing it with what's on the Cryptohippie website - it looks to me that the document is more of a marketing tool to promote their company. Am I the only one who thinks this?
Here's what the group claims to do: "Cryptohippie USA, Inc. exists to protect individuals and organizations against attacks on privacy by agents of industrial and competitive espionage, organized crime, oppressive governments and even hired hackers. We do this with the best of encryption technologies and a closed group of highly protected networks - for your peace of mind and safety."
Here's what the report posits:
* "In an Electronic Police State...[every electronic flotsam you produce is] criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long long time."
* "Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad"
* The State knows everything you do, a-la Big Brother
They are trying to frame this paranoia into a neat little package, which sets you in the right mood to accept what they have to sell - which is protection against attacks on your privacy.
Classic marketing technique? Sorry, it just looks like another insurance agent to me.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
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
A quote from the articles' referenced PDF:
1. We really don't see how it is going to hurt us. Mass surveillance is
certainly a new, odd, and perhaps an ominous thing, but we just
don't see a complete picture or a smoking gun.
2. We are constantly surrounded with messages that say, Only crazy
people complain about the government.
As a person who has recently (over the past couple of months) done some review and a lot of reading into Nazi Germany, I can see the same types of Authoritarian trends and psychological tendencies to dismiss the worst case scenarios in "Democratic" countries (I scary-quote the word "Democratic" because there appears to be a cultural assumption that Democracy is necessarily equated with Freedom and justice, which, at the most is an accident. Democracy only assumes voting power (to an extant, for the majority of people), and not Freedom from oppression. I will emphasize that Democracy is generally a more utilitarian means towards Freedom than other forms of government. Benign and beneficent Autocracies would be great if they weren't "Utopian" [that is, mythical] in nature).
There also appears to be a tendency for people to appease authority in order to minimize worst case scenarios.
There also appears to be a tendency for governments to rationalize extremist and authoritarian practices. Hitler (and perhaps more tellingly Goebbels [who wasn't intellectually fanatical against Jews, but realized the value of Fear, Ignorance, and Hatred]) used the Jews as his main propaganda vehicle. The contemporary West uses the "pedophile" and the "terrorist" as the excuse. In both cases the regimes generally tend to have financial support from big businesses and the "conservative" voting class (I don't mean to slight well-meaning Conservatives here, but I am taking my language directly from the history books, some of which are contemporary to the history I am talking about). In both cases (Nazi pre-war Germany and the Authoritarian-leaning democracies of the West) share the same thing: the propagation (propaganda) of fear and nationalism. Think of the children is certainly a motto that Hitler used (I'm not going to bother to look up the references; they've been pointed out before on Slashdot). "Terrorism" too, was used as an excuse by Hitler; granted that much of his terrorism was contrived (like the Russian government bombings of residential buildings. Yes, I am aware that the Russians claim it was the Chechens. Western Intel AFAIK and have heard, seems to think differently).
Like the British and American public of 1930's, and much of Europe for that matter, people rationalized away their fears. The moderates in Germany at the time appeased the authoritarian measures as well. They kept thinking that a giving up a little freedom was politically expedient. Like the famous poem goes, people don't put much thought into things until it happens to them (ref: First they came. Considering the fact the US has the most amount of people in jail than any other country in the world, I would be concerned (A popular and fairly good reference: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2494/does-the-united-states-lead-the-world-in-prison-population). Notice that I'm not talking about secret CIA prisons, MK-ULTRA type covert activities, etc., just the stuff that is well documented. Life is fine if you are "middle-class" and lucky enough not to piss off the wrong people. Don't hold your breath.
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.