Slashdot Mirror
Secret UK Plan To Appoint "Pirate Finder General"
mouthbeef writes "A source very close to the UK Labour government just called me to leak the fact that Secretary of State Lord Mandelson is trying to sneak a revision into the Digital Economy Bill that would give him and his successors the power to create future copyright law without debate. Mandelson goes on to explain that he wants this so he can create private copyright militias with investigatory and enforcement powers, and so he can create new copyright punishments as he sees fit (e.g., jail time, three strikes)."
No, you need new politicians. Which, in the UK's case, means you're due for another round of governance by the Tories. So you're basically fucked.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
But this is exactly up Darth Mandelson's alley. He truly and passionately believes in the utter dominance of the State over the individual. Of course, he plans to be a most benign dictator.
For those not in the know, Lord Mandelson is the de facto ruler of the United Kingdom, and one of the chief architects of the European super state under the (also "benign") dictatorship of the unelected, unaccountable European Council of Ministers.
He is the #1 threat to individual rights and freedoms in the UK and possibly in the whole of Europe. Think Palpatine, only with fruitier ties.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
But you need more than new politicians. You need "your" politicians. You need more influence, and it will only change when people who profit from peer to peer are financing campaigns and getting people elected. It will only change when the political atmosphere changes. The old timer curmudgeons rule the political arena and until you put new minds not just new faces into these positions it will not change. Keep in mind that bribery/quid pro quo is how things get done and corruption is how things work.
Considering the proud history of the British navy, it would make sense of them to appoint a person in charge of finding pirates on the high seas. I don't see how this is relevant to Slashdot, though. Nor do I see why they should keep such a role secret. Keeping our oceans save is a noble job.
If pirates and piracy is measurably affecting ocean travel and commerce, someone should get on doing something about it. If not, then this ocean pirate hunter idea seems kind of pointless.
I'm sure they have reliable data from the people who use the oceans which affirm that ocean piracy is a big issue.
face recognition following their every move...
We don't have face recognition in public CCTV systems, I don't know where you pulled that one from. I agree we have massive surveillance problems here in the UK, but we don't need to make things up to make it sound worse. It's bad enough already
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
...what does the government think they're doing appointing Sith Lord Mandleson?
Has it ever occurred to you that they might know exactly what they're doing?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Yeah - perhaps they could could better worry about the analogue pirates off the Horn of Africa.
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
What part of "successful" do you not understand?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Politicians are offered incentives to fuck over human beings, but face no consequences for doing so. Now, I'm not normally one to consider people as pure incentive-following machines - but politicians aren't people in the strictest sense. They are psychopaths.
Look at Tony Blair. He lied to start an illegal war which killed probably hundreds of thousands of people. He left office when he chose to, and is now living comfortably, despite what he did. Why wouldn't a British politician simply do as they will? They know they are fucking untouchable.
I'm trying to think of sane and enlightened ways the people can deal with this situation, but the only thing running through my mind is sic semper tyrannis. They need, somehow, to fear the consequences of their actions.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Actually I think the people of Great Britain need new governance that doesn't think that Aldous Huxley had the right idea.
FWIW, a lot of the proud history of the British navy is due to their support for pirates. Privateers were a sizable portion of the British navy that sunk the Spanish Armada (of course, a timely storm helped a lot with that one). They were also a very important tool in the economic war with Spain that QE I was waging. I read a very good biography of Drake that goes into detail... suffice it to say the Crown fully supported piracy, as long as it wasn't targeted at British vessels. So much so that QE I entertained Drake as a suitor to ensure his support of Her.
There's some kind of analogy here... if the high seas, as a chief method of commerce of the time, can be equated to the internet, as a chief method of commerce in our time... then perhaps Brtain should consider sponsoring these pirates instead, and riding their coattails to a new era of economic dominance? And maybe Dark Lord Mandy should consider dating one of the pirates?
OK, it's a bad analogy. But I haven't seen Bad Analogy Guy in a while, so I'm doing my best to fill in.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Straw and Blunkett were amateur blunderers. They made the mistake of going through the motions of doing consultations and producing detailed legislative plans, which really hampered them.
Mandelson has spotted that instead of bothering with this tiresome "laws" nonsense, he can just churn out two or three absolutely bonkers dictats per week. The sheer volume of administrative evil makes it hard to oppose him; by the time you've mounted a defence to any of his plots, he's busy announcing the next one.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
[Mandelson is] an out-of-control power-crazed sociopath and should never have been allowed back into government.
We didn't allow him back in. In fact, he resigned twice already under dubious circumstances. Then he got appointed to Europe, and now he's been appointed to a very senior position in Parliament after being appointed to the House of Lords. Note that the term "appointed" here implies that the people never got a vote, he was put into those positions by the Prime Minister and his chums. Oh, and the Prime Minister was appointed as Tony Blair's successor, in direction contradiction of a Labour Party manifesto promise to voters at the last general election, which they won with such a huge majority because of funny electoral math and not popular support (having actually lost the popular vote in England to the Conservatives, in fact).
Basically, these guys don't even have a shadow of a mandate for what they're doing in the first place, but since they're already a lame duck administration they seem to feel they have little to lose by wading in with the most illiberal, draconian legislation they can shove through in the final parliamentary session before the general election. Thus we get resistance to court rulings on cleaning up the DNA database, a roll-out of trials for an expensive ID card scheme that both the major opposition parties in England have long since pledged to scrap, and now this.
My personal favourite from this week's Queen's Speech was the bill to make it a legal requirement to half the budget deficit within four years, which would conveniently mean that having destroyed our economy themselves, they could then pass a poison pill to their successors when they inevitably lose the next general election. Presumably they will then claim in four years that whoever won the election has broken the law by being unable to do the impossible, and pretend that in some alternate reality Labour would somehow have been able to fix the problems they were unable to prevent in the first place.
The various extreme anti-copyright-infringement policies flying around at the moment sound like much the same thing: having mostly ignored or actively gone against the recommendations of their own Gowers Review when it comes to IP laws, they are now setting up back channel ways to suck up to big business while they still can, knowing that if they tried to push these things through Parliament properly they would face stiff opposition (not to mention probably losing even more votes, since post-Gowers they pretty much know that people overwhelmingly oppose things like copyright term extension).
As a final note, the Open Rights Group are pretty dumb if they think invoking the recent XBox cut-offs supports the case against this. I haven't seen a single report that suggests there were people cut off by Microsoft inappropriately (i.e., not after breaking the rules), the cut-off only affected their use of the XBox and not unrelated Internet services, and even the BBC carried an article based on one such person, who admitted freely that he was ripping off games illegally because it saved him money, which is exactly what the cut-off was intended to obstruct.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yes, but at times the House of Lords is the only thing standing between the House of Commons (the elected one) and some truly asinine, knee-jerk legislation.
By being unelected and essentially in the job for life, they don't have to worry about pandering to the populist cause of the moment and can (theoretically) take a more level-headed view on things.
Why do you think NuLabour has spent so much time and effort slowly chipping away at the Lords? They're tired of being forced to introduce less batshit insane laws...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
All I know is she couldn't be stupider than say, Reagan, or Bush
Sarah Palin accepts your challenge.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
That's the thing the politicans don't understand.
We celebrate Bonfire night not because he failed to blow up parliament but because he had the idea.
We're all just waiting for the next guy to come along and pull it off
Your ignorance of UK politics is amazing..
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Yeah, 'cause you Yanks can sure show 'em a thing or two with your handguns against squads of armored SWAT teams with grenades and automatic weapons, helicopter support, and the latest in anti-riot gear. Worked well at WACO. Good luck with that.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
If the government wants to oppress the people to the point where they'd fight back, the armed forces would get involved. Either the armed forces will be on the side of the government, in which case the people are fucked regardless of how many guns they have, or they're on the side of the people, in which case the peoples' guns are not needed. They might split down the middle, but then the guns in private ownership will be like a fly trying to take sides in a fight between two bull elephants. Guns in private hands don't do anything but make people targets. No overweight accountant on his roof with a rifle is going to cause problems for an apache attack helicopter, or a tank, or even a humvee with some soldiers in it. I'm sure guns make people feel safer, but they won't help. Explosives, on the other hand, would make a difference. And anyone anywhere can make those. IEDs are what cause issues for people forcefully oppressing a populace, not shooters. It's easy to identify someone with a gun, kill them, and remove the gun from circulation. It's impossible to stop people from making explosives. I know it's tempting to think that as soon as the balloon goes up, everyone will scarper into the forest and go all John Rambo, but that's a dream. In reality the crack-down would be brutal, and those with guns who made a stand would die very quickly, very violently, while causing very little collateral damage to the oppressors. The sensible folks will keep their heads down, appear to cooperate, but in secret create, distribute, and use explosives against well-chosen targets.