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In the UK, Big Brother Recedes and Advances
PeterAitch writes "The UK government's Home Office has put a hold on their surveillance project to track details of everybody's email, mobile phone, text, and Web use after being warned of problems with privacy as well as technical feasibility and high costs." Four hours before the above Guardian story was filed, the BBC reported that the same Home Office insisted that it will push ahead with plans "to compel communication service providers to collect and retain records of communications from a wider range of internet sources, from social networks through to chatrooms and unorthodox methods, such as within online games."
could someone please seriously enlighten me as to why the UK government believes this has a chance of succeeding?
TalkTalk's director has already said unequivocably that TalkTalk will sue the UK Government if they proceed with policies like this, on the basis that presumably the TalkTalk director does not want to be put in jail for being ultimately responsible for implementing UK government policies that violate E.U and International Laws on privacy and human rights.
Additionally, the UK's secret service has warned the UK government that raising people's awareness of attacks on their privacy simply raises their awareness of techniques to keep their conversations private, thus making the job of snooping on conversations that really *matter* just that much more difficult and costly.
All right, people, I'm in charge now and we will find the terrorists. Jarvis, I want you to check for any terrorist chatter on AOL. Marley and Greggs, try searching for nuclear devices on askjeeves.com
This is the level of sophistication we're dealing with. They might catch some really, really stupid criminals. Like the ones that put their bank robbery's on youtube.
Now bearing in mind that they currently are looking at the connections between communicators, rather than the content of those communications; that's arguably even more dangerous, because it's like a giant fishing expedition combined with "guilty by association".
It's not just the Brits, it's the whole EU. It's an EU regulation that pretty much all countries accepted.
And it's for our protection, it's to stop terrorists. Erm... or what is to stop child pornography. Maybe it was to catch copyright infringes. Well, it was to stop something anyway, I think.
Anyway, the people will be more safe.
This is good news, because it creates more jobs so that half the people in the UK can watch the other half all the time, and then they swap over every so often.
No one will be without a job then, and we solve the terrorist problem in one shot!
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I would be very curious to see statistics of what exactly those efforts achieved (or will achieve). How many crimes, terrorist attacks or whatever were actually prevented by those. I have the feeling that we hear a lot about new systems being set up and very little about their successes... Surprisingly.
Who wants to live under these circumstances were you are constantly being under surveillance and apparently mistrusted by your own, elected?, government?
This kingdom i not free any more, it is time to abandon these islands ..
It is very hard to object to this kind of thing, because no-one is against catching criminals and terrorists if it makes us safer, right?
The opposing arguments are hard to make because they rely on criticism of human nature and seemingly outlandish warnings of sleepwalking in to 1984. None the less, they must be made if we are to save ourselves.
Everyone has things to hide, and everyone needs privacy. You don't expect your bank statement on the back of a post card, you expect it hidden inside an envelope. Surely though the police should be allowed to monitor everything? The problem is that the police are human beings too and there are endless examples of them abusing their power.
My local MP (Sarah McArthy Fry) made the argument that internet surveillance had been used to prevent a suicide, and so was entirely justified. Harsh as it may seem, one life is not enough justification. If we banned cars we could save thousands of people from being killed or severely injured every year, but the bottom line is we consider the benefits of cars to outweigh those lives.
There is no perfect system, but there must be a balance between privacy and limiting the powers of those in authority on the one hand and prevention of crime on the other.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Two questions:
1 - Isn't this just making official what is already being done by the intelligence agencies (Echelon)?
2 - Is it possible to maintain privacy / anonymity on the web - why can't encrypted web traffic and email be the norm?
Quite simply, we don't. It's just that we have no say in how the country is run. Oh sure, there are those election things, but when there are only two parties and neither is any good, it doesn't really matter who is in power - both sides want to do this kind of thing.
You dumb ass. Nobody wants this.
Nobody, (well perhaps Carol Vorderman) wrote to their MP and said "Gief me digital police state pl0z!?"
Governments suck up all the power they can get, limited only by technology and democratic checks and balances. We are all in this together, because the cancer tends to spread.
Some little bastards in your own government are looking over the deployment of the Chinese firewall right now, and saying "Yeah, that's cool. That could work here too."
Regardless of race and nationality, if you like your rights online, then censorship and mass surveillance can not be tolerated to exist. Anywhere.
Thankfully god wants us to be free. Which is why he gave to Moses, a stone tablet containing reference implementations of various public-key cryptography schemes, licensed under the GPL. At least that's how remember it.
Sadly, some of our compatriots do want it.
Some of them have a mix of just enough racism, just enough respect for authority and just enough credulity to have really, heavily bought into the "terrorists are everywhere" line. They think anyone with dark skin of arab/persian or even indian descent is probably plotting to overthrow the state and/or perpetrate some mass murder like 9/11 or 7/7. The tabloids deliberately confuse them and conflate immigration (legal or otherwise), asylum and terrorism into one big boiling mess of "those dark skinned foreigners are just evil!".
And so when the government tell them they are doing something, anything at all, they jump for joy. Criticism is taken as dangerous, subversive anti-patriotic and prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. They also tend to be the types that will immediately defend any action by the police because beating up defenceless protestors is somehow defending the public.
This is not some sort of "those people" thing either, this cuts across social class and geography. Hell, I'm even related to some people like this.
Now, before americans jump in here please remember that there's a big chunk of your population that think exactly the same way. They are often also the ones quickest to shout about loss of freedom when it comes to social programs.
"In Western Europe" is the new "In Soviet Russia".
Hope is the currency of fools
They're going to have fun sifting through /Trade chat trying to work out if "Anal [Terror] LOL" is a secret code...
You're going to be brought down by what you hate. We Yanks are going to be brought down by what we love, and we'll merrily go along with it.
the problem, is that the islamic community needs to do more to out these factions. when these communities refuse to habor criminals who blow up buses, then we might actually get somewhere. take the london bombings, there's no way the people that made those bombs had their wives/family/friends/neighbours all fooled. someone close to them would have known something was going on, and could have pretended that attack.
until you start seeing real rejection of this from islamic communities, you won't see any kind of understanding from the larger population.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The only possible explanation that I can think of is based on simply following the money - who expects to gain from this? Simple: the big IT service vendors that have been getting a stream of huge IT projects from the public sector. Our politicians are a fairly gullible lot and typically have no experience of being given the hard sell before they get into office - no wonder the poor fools fall for it when the nice man in the expensive suit offers to solve their problems on a time and materials basis. Now that they have sucked the public purse dry they need fresh victims and they don't want willing customers so they need their friends in power to inflict massive IT projects on the private sector.
I talked to the government about this. The question I put to them was 'How?'.
It's pretty easy to install a secure private network - with any form of transport to go over it including voip, mail, irc, what-have-you.
It's a necessary feature of the internet.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
We already kill ourselves in large numbers each year using cars, tobacco, junk food and alcohol, without any help by religious extremists. They're not even going to make a dent.
This proposed legislation has little to do with protection of the citizenry and more to do with making sure that those in power, remain in power.
1. Little Billy logs into CS.
2. "LoL N00bs Terorist5 p0wn"
3. Crash. Bang!
4. No profit (apart from the politician who can claim another terror attack stopped and hostages saved...).
Or maybe:
@terrorist twitted 10 minutes ago - off to blow up infidels. BRB.
Or even:
EmEYeFive has joined
EmEYeFive: sup all. ASL&Religion
mohamed: 25,male,London,muslim
EmEYeFive: You'll do. IM me your address.
In soviet UK government terrorizes you...
Sounds like UK is taking their lead from Romania, where 1/3 of the population watched the other 2/3s. How sad that most of the news out of Britain has to do with the rapidly expanding Police State.
New tag for British / Big Brother stories = AirStripOne.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Isn't there a problem besides the privacy concern here. That they're getting too much noise from creating a too indiscriminate collection of information, thereby shooting the signal-to-noise ratio through the roof? I understand if it looks good on paper from a security perspective, but what about a practical standpoint? To me, this feels more and more like something that is bad both from a privacy perspective and in practice.
Besides, their analyzed tubes will sure get noisy as wireless connections keep getting more common in society, along with their encrypted connections.
And which terrorist, pedophile or what-have-you with a brain using the Internet to communicate do so over unencrypted social networks?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This is the level of sophistication we're dealing with. They might catch some really, really stupid criminals. Like the ones that put their bank robbery's on youtube
True. But yet again, the declared purpose of legislation like this and its true aim are not the same - it is never intended as a serious form of catching real "terrorist" of the strap on some dynamite and get on a bus kind. To maintain power and control you need your Thought Police. The best weapon required is surveillance of the normal, general population - it allows the culture of fear to be maintained, allowing the status quo to maintain power.
Funny thing, they're just celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall...
The fact is, the Secret Service has spent time and effort keeping the populace blissfully ignorant of technology's pitfalls and it's backfired. The creme of those ignorami are now in government.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
The only people you'll catch with this are folks who have been baited, or don't know what's going on. Ever clicked on a TinyURL link and been presented with one of the "Unholy Trinity"? Well, all it takes is one prick to make it a link to a CP thread on 4Chan and *BAM* jail. Been sent an email from someone you don't recognise and Outlook auto previews an image in the same vein? *BAM* jail.
Pretty soon, I'll be ensuring that anyone I chat to either uses some kind of end-to-end encryption, or I'll just pipe anything apart from iPlayer and WoW through a VPN out of the country. At least that way, if I ever am conned into viewing something HM Gov says I shouldn't, I won't end up on a register for it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It appears the Guardian has just parsed the legislative process in a strange way to make it look like the Home Office has changed its position when it in fact hasn't.
What would happen if all of the major UK ISPs sued, or outright refused to implement this monitoring system? Would they be fined? Would the Gov. be able to get them to pay?
Would cutting the UK off from the rest of the world for a day (in protest) be an effective demonstration of how costly this would be?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Exceptions would be made for online banking and shopping using a dedicated system that can't be used for anything else.
Using encryption for other purposes - even SSH to your work, or SSL login to your admin account on a web service would require special government certification and installing a dedicated monitoring software on the machine you're on. Otherwise, even posession of encryption software would land you in prison.
Other than that - mandatory government-issued spyware?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Thought police? Surveillance? Culture of fear? I thought we were discussing the United Kingdom not East Germany.
Communism is dead; Long live communism!
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Used to live in Britain, now I don't. This is one of the reasons. I actually moved out of the EU with this in mind.
I do not know anyone who wants this.
I see idiot politicians on TV and read their interviews and statements on this in the news that this will be the best thing since sliced bread, it seems to me they are trying to repeat the lie often enough for it to become perceived as truth. In the UK they blame the EU for these sort of things, whilst it appears that the UK government is one of the main backers behind this (probably because they want to have it rubber-stamped through parliament rather than have to explain to the electorate). Actually, the UK often goes for the whole hog when an EU-directive comes around that threatens the integrity of the individual. Funny that.
"Being warned of problems with privacy?" Ya.... think?! That's either a nice way of saying that they bowed out of it due to public pressure or they are such blithering incompetents that it never occurred to them that this could harm anyone's privacy. Either way, the British need to wake TFU and bring this regime down. It's an embarrassment.
Actually they have caught people planning to blow up supermarkets who did discuss it over web email
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6692741.stm
TAYLOR: They then walked round the corner to Universal Video in Slough. Again, the spooks were on the case.
CLARKE: What they did was look at an email account on which were images of devises, electronic components which formed part of remote detonation.
Heroic British SIS officers, with a little help from the NSA were able to spy on the https connection to the web email service and also bug their car
TAYLOR: Omar's friend then had a touch of the jitters.
KUAJA: Bruv, just one thing, you don't think this place is bugged, do you?
OMAR: Nar, I don't think it's bugged bruv, at all. I don't even think the car's bugged. I was saying to XXX what we talk about sometimes, what we're doing, what I'm doing, yeah, bruv, if they knew about it, they wouldn't wait a day bruv, they wouldn't wait one day to arrest me, yeah, or any of us.
TAYLOR: At night, two days later, police specialists moved in to access to neutralise the threat.
Plus they got tips from helpful members of the public
ACCESS GIRL: [on telephone] Hi, is that the police?
TAYLOR: But the spooks also needed something else, luck.
ACCESS GIRL: We've got a suspicion about one of our customers.
TAYLOR: And there was good reason for the call, and this was it, a huge bag stored in unit 1118. Now the staff at Access had got no idea what was inside, but the warning that said oxidising agent was more than enough to cause them concern. In fact, the bag contained 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. That's around half a ton, and that's more than the IRA used to bomb canary wharf.
Later that night specialists from the anti terrorist branch gained access to unit 1118, the lockup where the bag was stored. They needed to establish that the substance inside the bag was ammonium nitrate ? it was. Alarm bells rang. The spooks had been hearing details of a bomb plot and now they'd found the explosive needed to make it. The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to come together.
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;
Good luck with that. All the ISPs simultaneously refusing to implement this? That sounds very unlikely to me, especially if the government just levels an "illegal collusion" charge of some kind. Cutting the UK off from the rest of the Internet? Again, fat chance -- it would cost too much money in lost trade opportunities and whatnot.
Palm trees and 8
A normal society would completely reject the idea that it has to be continuously monitored for its own safety. If anything, this doublethink only weakens the UK. This is exactly the same thing that we openly criticise in other countries, only carefully differentiated so that the blanket definition doesn't stick. It's like saying 'our secret police are less secret and oppressive than everyone else's, so it doesn't count'. So is it right or isn't it? In this weakened state of mind where we don't know ourselves, the hypocrisy of it is totally open to attack...
The budget for the snooping programme was allocated years ago, about £1bn ($1.6bn US) was made public - it was a nice small sounding figure, nothing heard of the scheme again for years. NOW there is an election looming where everything from lying about immigration to the politicians expenses claims have been leaked, they are claiming that the scheme is dead in the water, when the truth is anything but.
If the spies deny it, it is safe to assume they are lying to placate people
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8032367.stm
The UK's electronic intelligence agency has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement to deny it will track all UK internet and online phone use.
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) said it was developing tracking technology but "only acts when it is necessary" and "does not spy at will".
Known as Deep Packet Inspection equipment, these probes will "steal" the data, analyse and decode the information and then route it direct to a government-run database.
Or http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4882622.ece
Every call you make, every e-mail you send, every website you visit - I'll be watching you. That is the hope of Sir David Pepper who, as the director of GCHQ, the government's secret eavesdropping agency in Cheltenham, is plotting the biggest surveillance system ever created in Britain.
The scope of the project - classified top secret - is said by officials to be so vast that it will dwarf the estimated £5 billion ministers have set aside for the identity cards programme. It is intended to fight terrorism and crime. Civil liberties groups, however, say it poses an unprecedented intrusion into ordinary citizens' lives.
Aimed at placing a "live tap" on every electronic communication in Britain, it will dwarf other "big brother" surveillance projects such as the number plate recognition system and the spread of CCTV.
I will say that the politicians here like to say "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Strangely they don't subscribe to this maxim when you are looking into their criminal expenses claims, or government documents that are deeply embarrassing to the current government that were claimed to not exist - but exist, they just didn't want to release them. The UK police don't like the rise of photo and video cameras showing their abuses of the law, so the current corrupt UK government passes a law where is it's crime to photo / record a police officer. http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=839141
Take Nobody's Word For It.
No, its dictatorship, not communism. East Germany happened to be a communist dictatorship., but there are plenty of the other kinds
Bombers are not sheltered by communities, they may be sheltered by one or two people very close to them.
It is like claiming that fascist bombers are being sheltered by the white community (there has been one who actually platned bomds, and other who were planning to until caught in Britain).
The term "thought police" comes from Orwell's "1984", set in what "had once been called England or Britain", so it makes sense that it's happening here. And according to Orwell, "1984" was a criticism of the perversions of communism and fascism. Interesting that you pick up on the extreme left but not the extreme right...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Terry Gilliam made a really good documentry about:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
Illegal collusion? You're missing the point. How do the Gov. enforce a penalty for that, even? What length would the government go to? I have the feeling that a further day would have them backing down; That's two days of the LSE not trading.
It's really not hard to imagine.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
See that's a perfect summary of why I haven't watched Panorama in ages. It's become more and more like the US style of hypermentary: Tell the audience what you're going to tell them. Tell them they should be afraid / excited / awestruck. Play some bass noise. Talk in a Really. Slow. Earnest. Voice. Tell them what you're telling them. Tell them what you've told them. End forty minutes of drawn out information.
Honestly, I would prefer a nice tidy sequence of events and some more in-depth looks at the interesting parts. But I guess my aim is to get information and their target audience is those trying to fill their life with "entertainment". But I do miss being talked to like an intelligent human being.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
You are missing the point. What ISP is going to take the risk of having the government shut them down? The fear of losing their livelihood will keep them all in line; they are not providing Internet access because they think people should have it, they are providing it because it is a way to make money.
Palm trees and 8
Politics is circular - the actions once in power of the extreme right and the extreme left are identical. The only difference has been the lies they tell in order to get into power.
Really not interested in your view if all you did to fix the situation was bail out.
aware ness attack of the privecy.can be done then and then where you need more security.but here you means something else.i think.
Typical liberal trying to defend communism, by pretending the dark ages of communism in ~10 different countries never happened. The experiment with communism was tried; it failed. It's a flawed system that is doomed to turn away from its intended goal (freedom) toward tyranny.
While I agree that communism has definitely failed, you seem to be missing the point. The GP isn't defending communism. He (correctly) points out that the same tools are also used in other dictatorships. Several fascist states used very similar tactics and they were definitely not communist. This type of government plans needs to be opposed, no matter the ideology they're using to justify their actions.
Neither word is useful in describing the twisted new regime in Britain. They are not communists or dictators, but they are tyrannical opressive big government types.
Orwell envisioned them as socialists, but socialism run amok doesn't explain it all. It's capitalism running amok alogside that Orwell missed.
"those light skinned foreigners are just evil!"
the problem, is that the irish community needs to do more to out these factions. when these communities refuse to habor criminals who blow up buses, then we might actually get somewhere. take the london bombings, there's no way the people that made those bombs had their wives/family/friends/neighbours all fooled. someone close to them would have known something was going on, and could have prevented that attack.
until you start seeing real rejection of this from irish communities, you won't see any kind of understanding from the larger population.
Our American cousins should not gloat about this .... you already have your traffic monitored, and your ISP is not allowed to tell you if it is
A case is currently going very slowly through the courts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_v._NSA) on Warrantless surveillance conducted by the NSA where the ISP's were ordered not to reveal that they were assisting the NSA with monitoring or even that they had been ordered not reveal this ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
But I do miss being talked to like an intelligent human being.
And this is why you spend time reading slashdot.
That is why the concept of environmental nazi makes so much sense.
I don't think it's malice on behalf of the politicians. When you look at many prominent members of the Labour government you notice they're just not clever or intelligent people- Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears, Harriet Harman, Keith Vaz, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and so on. I get the impression there's a few who are a bit more smart and are more malicious like David Miliband, but for the most part these people are a little dormant when it comes to their ability to think.
These people really do believe they're doing it for our own good, that it's a valid solution and that it's the right thing to do. When people like Peter Mandelson can't even keep the fact he's corrupt to the core secret, having been caught red handed about 4 times now in the middle of dodgy backhand deals, and Hazel Blears apparently can't walk down the street without getting her shoe stuck in the pavement and looking like an idiot in front of the worlds media why would anyone believe these people would have the mental capacity to pull off a power grabbing plot?
Of course you could still be right- it may not be the politicians, they could simply be puppets of those in the security services who are telling them what "needs" to be done which is plausible and probably more realistic. In general though the political problem is certainly one of incompetence rather than an inherent evil. The politicians almost certainly do believe these measures will really catch terrorists.
So what your are saying is that the actions of my neighbour reflect on me. That sounds like guilt by loose association, which is one of the arguments used for the culture of citizens spying on and reporting each other in 1984.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>>>No, its dictatorship, not communism. East Germany happened to be a communist dictatorship
Oh sorry.
Maybe we ought to try Communism here in the US, UK, and EU? This time without the dictatorship aspect. What do you think?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's populism. The idea that government exists to give people money. It's an idea that dates all the way back to the Roman Republic.
As for the corporation aspect, well politicians are told "it's to protect the artists", so in their mind it's still serving the people.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I think the problem is people running amok. I blame unit testing. Before unit testing hit the big time mocking was a hard manual process. Now even Brown can do it.
Exactly, and the government want to drastically reduce the amount of money they make by making them inspect, analyse, log, and archive every single identifying byte of information which comes over their pipes, voice or data. As long as someone is communicating with someone else, they want it logged. You don't think that will seriously infringe on the CEO's Bentley fund?
Again, you've missed the point. The government can't afford to not have internet (and telephone) service, even for a day. The country cannot afford it. Any government which stops LSE trading for an hour will be met with investment bankers and stock brokers outside Parliament with brick and chain, and a chant of "referendum, referendunm, referendum"
If they could all agree to mount piledrivers over the UK - Mainland Europe fibre backbones, this idea would fall flat on its face in seconds. Too bad nobody has the balls to actually try it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
See that's a perfect summary of why I haven't watched Panorama in ages. It's become more and more like the US style of hypermentary: Tell the audience what you're going to tell them. Tell them they should be afraid / excited / awestruck. Play some bass noise. Talk in a Really. Slow. Earnest. Voice. Tell them what you're telling them. Tell them what you've told them. End forty minutes of drawn out information.
Have you seen Brass Eye? There are lots of jokes about this style of presentation.
Still this particular program is interesting because it shows what MI5 and the NSA are quite capable of. In fact at one point it is clear that they could read "dead letterboxes" - the terrorists wannabes in the this case didn't actually send emails because they knew they could be intercepted. They'd all share one account and put the emails in the draft folder, read them and delete them. Now there are a lot of webmail providers. Either they can spy on all of them or they can can decrypt https and read emails even if they are only stored on the server. Or both.
The other interesting thing is how much surveillance they do on "persons of interest". With these guys they read every email and IM they read and had bugs in place for 90% of the conversations.
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;
I always mentally read the show's title as 'Paranoia' whenever I see it.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The GP is not "pretending" anything, he's saying "thought police", "surveillance" etc. are signs of dictatorships in general, not exclusively signs of communism. He hints that the UK is an example of a non-communist dictatorship.
Take your witch-hunt elsewhere.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Bullshit propaganda.
You make a good point. I was reading about Romania's dictator and his wife. He was not terribly bright, and his wife was a peasant who dropped-out of school in 4th grade. She used her power to force people to write research papers, and put her name on them, but she was dumb as a doorknob.
It seems government attracts the not-so-bright to positions of power.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Er, I'm from Britain, and I don't want this.
The whole Terrorism Act itself is vile, if you care to read it: it does things like put the onus on the accused to prove they were NOT doing something to prepare for terrorism, and is overly broad - "anything that is likely to be of use to a terrorist" could mean anything. A bread roll could be useful in committing a terrorist act (after all, the terrorists need sustenence). Of course the government would argue "Oh, but it would NEVER be abused like that". How can they possibly guarantee that? How can they possibly guarantee some future government might not use 42 days without charge and overly broad terror laws to intimidate otherwise lawful opposition? Being held for 42 days without charge will, for many people - lead to ruin even if they are just let go at the end of it. In 42 days, many people will have lost their jobs, their homes, and now have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them.
Already the terror laws have been abused - the RIP Act is routinely used to spy on people for the henious crime of putting stuff in the wrong rubbish bin or trying to get their kid into a different school. It has already been used to supress speech from government opponents.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Your country wants to spy on everything you do (CCTV, GPS In your car, phone calls, emails, etc.), and your worried about what Americans think of you...
Just wow...
All large scale communist societies became dictatorships.
Therefore, all dictatorships are communist in nature.
I'm glad to see you studied logic in school.
Or to put it another way, you only get dictatorships and terrorists from extreme views.
You don't get moderates to justify taking away civil rights or to blow up crowded buildings.
Basically, we have a movement toward this in the USA, and the administration is far from "conservative". The last time we saw such strong fascism here was during the Wilson administration, when people were jailed for protesting our entry into WWI.* No one would claim Wilson was a conservative. Curiously, he also segregated what was a racially integrated military and made racially mixed marriages a felony! But these just shows that focusing on parties or "left" and "right" makes it harder for us to see the evil.
* Then again, fascism was pretty strong with FDR as well; it's just hard to tell whether it was more socialist or fascist.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This view is only possible if you look at all gov't policy as being on a single line Left----------Right .
It makes more sense, IMHO, if you separate economic policy from social policy so you have a Cartesian co-ordinate system instead.
More like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space
No, its dictatorship, not communism. East Germany happened to be a communist dictatorship., but there are plenty of the other kinds
Name one please. To my understanding there is no any communist regime that is not dictatorship for one simple reason, communism is against human nature. You cant force people to give up their material values only by reasoning with them. On other hand grandparent is wrong too. you can have dictatorship without communism. Take a look on modern Russia for example.
to stop child pornography. Maybe it was to catch copyright infringes
Yes, we must stop the digital copying of child pornography, because it will lead to an explosion in child pornography production.
And we must stop the digital copying of Hollywood movies, because it will lead to the cessation of Hollywood movie production.
Wait ... what?
I don't think fascism belongs on the right side of the scale.
There are different ways in which one can measure left-right distinctions. I was thinking of social rather than economic, and I see "an aggressive nationalism and often racism" as socially right wing. In terms of the movement towards it in the USA, as an outside observer I see the move towards (though not all the way to) "a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism" and "emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism" was more a tendency of the previous administration, with measures such as the Patriot Act (the very name of which suggests "aggressive nationalism"), and I think it would be fair to call that administration "conservative". Obama might turn out to be more inclined to be more inclined to "regimenting all industry, commerce, etc.", although I don't see it yet. I'd be interested to know what actions of the current administration fit your description of a move in that direction, because it's quite possible I've missed something.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It's not just the Brits, it's the whole EU. It's an EU regulation that pretty much all countries accepted.
No. Sweden, for example, tried to avoid implementing it completely. The Irish and the Slovaks also didn't like it. It was a British idea - they just realised it would have had a rough ride through the UK parliament so went to the EU to policy launder it (which in less polite circles is called "corruption").
Well so called Catholics (IRA) have blown up way more shit in the UK than any Muslim has.
the problem, is people like you who help propagate fear and hatred against your fellow human beings.
What you are really advocating is a Stasi state where neighbours inform on neighbours.
<sarcasm>
At least the UK doesn't have identity cards! We may be the most surveilled and recorded society in the world, with neighbors spying on neighbors, but we don't have identity cards. We elect conservative governments (of either party) who may put cameras everywhere, record where we walk and drive, and anal probe us at airports, but we don't have identity cards. Did I mention that the UK doesn't have identity cards and won't stoop to the communist and fascist continental depths of having identity cards? Yeah. The UK rules [not so much anymore].
</sarcasm>
An ISP stands to lose a lot more money if it is shut down than if it pays for the equipment the UK government requires it to buy. As I said, they are afraid -- none of them wants to be the ISP that takes a stand and is shut down, even though they could all stand together and defeat this measure. None of them wants to be the ISP that is shut down for colluding with other ISPs to break the law. The government knows this, and knows that nobody will stand up to them.
Nobody on the other side wants to try it because it would cost them money, and they do not really care if British citizens lose whatever privacy they once had.
Palm trees and 8
He meant there are plenty of other dictatorships which are not communist, not that there are many communist countries that are not dictatorships.
I think it's quite unfair to link Labour's creeping authoritarianism with the right wing. If you actually look in the Daily Mail or Telegraph, you will find that articles criticise measures like mass surveillance and detention without charge rather than applauding them. In fact, truly conservative people oppose these things as strongly as anyone; MPs such as David Davis, MEPs such as Daniel Hannan and writers such as Peter Hitchens are good examples of genuine conservatives. (Of course the so-called "Conservative" party isn't included in this.)
If government policy really were defined by the need to appease the right wing, then there would be closed borders, no possibility of EU membership, and immigration would be restricted to highly skilled people, as it is throughout most of the rest of the world. On all of these matters, government policy is the exact opposite of "right wing".
Bottom line is, it's simply convenient to blame the right wing for these measures, which the government wanted to introduce anyway. Remember that our government is full of ex-communists (see recent issues of Spectator). The right wing are simply scapegoats, wheeled out whenever the Government wants to do something authoritarian that might annoy their core voters.
Who said anything about left or right?
I just meant that a lot of people have been taken in by fear of terrorism and immigration, as well as fear of youth, and they welcome this crap. What the government's motives are I shudder to think, in fact I don't think for the most part that this shower of retards we currently have in power are really running anything.
I, for one, would love a classical liberal government. Social freedom, social responsibility (i.e. NHS and essential welfare are safe) and an attempt to create a minimal government within these parameters.
Excuse me sir, but fascism is left too. The fascist were nationalistic socialist. Mussolini was the leader of the communist party, he left because he wanted to independence from the Socialist International (Rusia) , but he continued being socialist.
USA free trade and no regulation and capitalism is right. Swiss banks are right. So Irak and Vietnam wars maybe are right fault, or the banking excesses, but fascism? right?
>All large scale communist societies became dictatorships.
I guess Vietnam's population of 85 million people is not large scale enough for you?
If I was a provider I would rather cut off the UK then implement their monitoring system. It is a slippery slope and a lot of historical examples come to mind esp in the former communist countries.
Personally I'd rather be completely unprotected from terrorists then have this type of protection. You chances of getting killed by a terrorist are somewhere between death by bees and lighting strikes. But a government with such power will make your life a living hell and the government will become a serious danger as it will go after people who criticize it. If you trade liberty for secuerty you deserve neither and will end up neither free nor secure.
Is that necessarily so? I don't think anyone has seriously attempted a democratic communist state.
When people learn that not all dark-skinned foreigners are Muslims that would be a step in the right direction too.
How can they possibly guarantee some future government might not use 42 days without charge and overly broad terror laws to intimidate otherwise lawful opposition?
It will be a suprise if this dosn't happen.
Being held for 42 days without charge will, for many people - lead to ruin even if they are just let go at the end of it. In 42 days, many people will have lost their jobs, their homes, and now have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them.
With the justification for this holding without charge making little sense. If someone really is part of a terrorist conspiracy arresting them will tip off any unknown conspirators. Indeed arresting people without proper investigation could actually precipitate a terrorist attack.
Unfortunately, most in the UK government probably think of themselves as moderates.
You've got the political spectrum wrong again. Both communism and facism are far left.
Just cut the government off.
We don't need a wall; we have seas.
Careful what you say there -- that comment's so inciteful I'm worried you're going to attract attention.
If you actually knew your neighbor was building a bomb to blow up a bus / train station / whatever (assuming you knew there was a good possibility it was credible, not just the six-year-old next door saying "I wish I could blow up my school!") and you did nothing about it, then yes, I would say you're guilty by association.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Because, of course, there are only two dimensions of overall government control.
"could someone please seriously enlighten me as to why the UK government believes this has a chance of succeeding?"
Right on. They should just do what the NSA seems to be planning to do in the U.S and record all traffic on the Internet backbones. Then you get everything and don't have to hassle with making all the ISP's be your reluctant spies. Why else do you think the NSA is building new multibillion dollar facilities in Utah and Texas with yetabytes of storage.
@de_machina
On a lighter note, Doctor Who is on again soon.
If the government does somehow force the ISPs to obey, the ISPs should add an item to their bill, in large letters and a different font, labelled something inflammatory like "Us being forced to spy on everything you do and say on-line even though it won't stop terrorists". Since virtually everyone has a home internet connection, that should be enough to get a huge number of voters angry about it.
Thought police? Surveillance? Culture of fear? I thought we were discussing the United Kingdom not East Germany.
Orwell's 1984 was set in London
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
You are so spot on. The BBC and (UK) government are in cahoots to dumb (some of) us down, re-program us and then take absolute control. In Oxford on Monday, a (foreign) man and his wife/partner were accosted by two PCOs (? community officers) and the man fined (wait for it), £80 for (wait for it), dropping a match. Meanwhile, many very serious crimes occur across the city and are rarely solved. The UK government is now also hiring people as young as 18 to spy on their neighbours to crack down on relatively minor crimes. We are really really a police state. And it's disgusting how our Prime Minister can turn up at rememberance day celebrations when those people we're celebrating fought against the very evils the UK is now adopting. The British have a history of ignoring horror until the very last moment. Someone or something will awaken them from their slumber eventually. However, in the mean time, many of us are leaving the country. It is very very frightening. I have never felt scared of my own government before, but I do now. Help!
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Privacy vs Surveillance Feed @ Feed Distiller
Ugh, sweet Jesus on a broomstick.
I'm not talking about privacy, I'm talking about feasibility. The sheer financial burden of implementing a reliable and comprehensive monitoring system is just unimaginable without throwing cash at it ad infinitum (hence it's a Government idea). We're not talking "Great firewall of China" blocking, which is easy, but actually allowing the connections, and logging each and every one of them, in a forensically secure manner.
Retaining personal privacy is a by-product of this system being completely idiotic to even suggest. I wouldn't dare try and fight the personal liberty point on this, as we both know neither the ISPs or the Government care about it. They do, however, care about money, and the ISPs need to figure out that maintaining a system like this, bearing in mind the rapid increase in broadband speeds occuring (ADSL2+ and fibre-to-the-home rollout) has already saturated the equipment they have right now without monitoring overheads.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
And that axis is also circular. All possible sociopolitical axes are simply a balance between radical ideology and practical moderation.
snig
It's a sad and frightening thing that a society needs no individual evil mastermind or set of masterminds in order to stumble it's way into dystopia. The banal personal agendas of everyone, from those in political and economic power to your neighbors, are all that is required.
snig
Does Vietnam have a multi-party system? No. Does it have a privileged class of people tied to the communist party? Yes. Has Vietnam implemented the parts of the declaration of human rights concerning the political rights and those of a citizen? I don't think so. Are the people of Vietnam generally happy? That is irrelevant.