Slashdot Mirror
EU Surveillance Studies Disclosed By Pirate Party
Spliffster writes "The German Pirate Party has disclosed some secret documents on how the EU is planning to monitor citizens. The so called INDECT Documents describe how a seamless surveillance could (or should) be implemented across Europe. The use of CCTV cameras, the Internet (social networks), and even the use of UAVs are mentioned as data sources. Two of the nine documents can be downloaded from the German Pirate Party's website (PDFs in English)."
... loitering has been classified as a "dangerous activity" in the EU.
I wonder if forcing every single human being to read George Orwell's 1984 would prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Perhaps it's just that people don't realize what could go wrong with an Orwellian government in place. Perhaps they just don't see it, they don't think anything can go wrong if the government watches your every step.
Then again, perhaps people just don't care. As long as it's not them (and by "them" i mean the generations that currently live) who suffer it, they just don't give a damn.
I can tell from personal experience that many people don't care about stuff like that even if you tell them the consequences. Perhaps Big Brother is precisely what we, as a civilization, need in order to realize that it's a horrible thing to live like that. After all, experience is a good teacher.
Would you rather see everyone as a criminal and with that screw the innocent or see everyone as innocent and allow crime to fluorish?
Regardless of what people say, any politician openly stating that they prefer the second option will have his carreer ended by the public.
What I just don't understand is why, if crime rates have been going steadily down for some decades now, do they feel like they need to be more invasive and offensive in their fight against crime. Maybe it's all related to politics (and that "maybe" answers only to scientific precision, though I'm pretty sure that's the reason behind it all).
I've skimmed through the first pdf. It looks like they are trying to build an Event Control system. Designed to control and identify people at large events, like soccer games. Some countries in Europe have a real problem with soccer hooligans. Or just plain riots, like the ones in France last year. It's the cops who want a system to identify the rioters. Seems logical to me, Jim.
But the government could mis-use it for anything they want. And that scares me, as a E.U. citizen.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_social_network_spy_system_brief,_INDECT_Work_Package_4,_2009
Some deep ip, friend of friend of friend hunting software triggered by phrases, word use and IM connections.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I don't see how you can equate CCTV in the UK with the mess that the US has got itself into. Firstly, the oft-quoted 4 million cameras is a figure made up by one of the far-right tabloid newpapers based on the number of cameras in about a quarter mile of the main street of a fairly rough part of London. If that figure was even remotely accurate, you'd pass a CCTV camera every 50 metres or so on every road in the UK right down to farm tracks.
Here's the kicker. Every major city in the US has got just as much CCTV surveillance as London! Yes, you're "spied on" just as much in New York as you are in London, and you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you, too. It must be awful living in the US, with that constant threat over you all the time.
What happened to innocent until proven guilty? A system like this makes anyone a suspect (a potential criminal), this is very 1984 like!
My government is not allowed to survey me until a judge order so. The described goals are to survey everyone. The authors of INECT are absolutely aware that they would trump human rights (and they see it more as an annoyance than an problem), this is why INECT is trying to keep this shit secret.
To some of the commenters above; this has not much to do with Germany itself but the EU. It was just the German Pirate Party which leaked the documents.
-S
and you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you, too. It must be awful living in the US, with that constant threat over you all the time.
Sadly, this is true and one of the main reasons I'm afraid to move back to the US. The police are horribly corrupt. Cops can beat you, shoot you, steal your things, whatever. There is absolutely no recourse either, and the worst that can happen to a cop is for him/her to get paid leave.
Two things : 1) The UK is hardly alone in being under the umbrella of Echelon.
2) Echelon now has about the same level of secrecy as Area 51. i.e. it's virtually entirely public knowledge at this point, and has been superseded by systems you have never heard of.
People everywhere are under attack by the armed gangs otherwise known as government.
Argh! Get a life already. You sound like one of those Tea Party Tossers who can see nothing good about society - in the "good old days" you guys seem to be longing for, you would have been called misfits or weirdos.
Try using your brains for once, assuming you've got some: Being seen by others is part of life, unless you are a recluse on a desert island. "Surveillance" as you call it gives you many benefits: if you crash with your car, chances are that you'll be helped by those nice folks known as paramedics; if you get mugged somewhere or your business is broken into, having a few CCTV cameras around can help put the bastards away, and so on.
It is not the monitoring that should worry you, it is the secresy. When information is kept away from public scrutiny, that is when criminals start infecting things. IMO monitoring is OK, but make the information freely available to the public; seeing how crap like Big Brother, Twitter and Facebook attract crowds, such a scheme might prove hugely popular.
The royal family don't really have anything to do with government. They're more of a tourist attraction. I prefer the zoo, myself.
I don't know about the UK but here in Australia the constitution is a thin booklet which basically says The Queen is in charge of Australia and may or may not decide to take advice from a Parliament which may or may not exist.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Huxley thought he was describing a dystopia, and failed. When I read BNW as a nerdy teenager I thought it was a really good idea. In Huxley's world, nerds get to live with other nerds on islands and build their own ideal societies, unbothered by the power mad, conformists and the stupid. Mustapha Mond, the world controller, is practically a Platonic philosopher-king. BNW is only a dystopia if you are conventionally religious, or have inflated ideas of the importance of the human race.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Guarding certain events and proforma data monitoring of anybody is not the same. Did you read the PDF files (well this is slashdot)? I am the original poster, I did before submitting it to slashdot.
The royal family is a 'family' and no control can be exerted over them - they marry whomever they marry...
... unless of course they marry a Catholic or an American divorcee, in which cases they lose their claim to the throne...
It doesn't matter what you do to get the police to trample all over your rights. The problem is that the police can trample all over those rights in the first place, and can do so with practical impunity. That makes the country essentially a police state. (Whether it's effectively a police state depends on to what extend the police actually makes use of that power.)
I live in China. This week, a friend of a friend left a large sum of money in a taxi. My friend's staff went down to the police station and came back with a record of surveillance video, all the stops the taxi made, a route the taxi took in Google Maps style format, the taxi driver's home address, ID card scan, and mobile phone number. This is coming to a nation near you, if it's not already there. It's funny, one of the ways you can tell if street construction is almost finished is when they install the surveillance cameras on poles.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In addition, by some strange coincidence, any time the police in the UK have been accused of misdeeds, (such as brutalising innocent members of the public) the relevant CCTV cameras have always been found to have been wiped/malfunctioning/looking in the wrong direction.
If street criminals have even 10% of the luck of these accused police officers, then the CCTV system is basically useless and pointless. We'd be better off relying on members of the public and ubiquitous phone cams. At least *they* have caught the occasional police brutality incident. That makes them superior to the CCTV system in my opinion, and cheaper too.
Well, that statement is complete bollocks, I can think of several high profile cases where a police officer has been caught 'brutalising innocent members of the public' on CCTV in cases that made it all the way to court. Here's one that happened within the past week:
"A police officer has been jailed for six months after he was caught on CCTV throwing a woman into a cell, badly injuring her.
The footage also shows Sgt Mark Andrews dragging Pamela Somerville, 59, through Melksham police station in Wiltshire."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-11214026
Another one from last year...
"A police watchdog is investigating an alleged attack on a man by three officers in Wigan, Greater Manchester.
In video obtained by the Sunday Mirror the man - said to be Lance Corporal Mark Aspinall - is shown being pinned to the ground and repeatedly punched. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7757229.stm
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're thinking of when they executed the King in the mid-1600's (executed in 1649) and replaced him with a Lord-Protector, a King in all but name. True that parliament was in charge in theory but their army kept the opposition party out. I guess you could call it a republic but puritan dictatorship would be more accurate.
In the late 1600's was the glorious revolution where parliament kicked out the current King (James II) and replaced him with a Dutch man and his Wife, the daughter of the King.
This was when Parliament became supreme, the coronation oath was changed to one where the monarch swore to upheld the laws of parliament and they even passed a bill of rights in 1689.
Since then the monarchy has has very little actual power.
This is why it is always funny when Americans talk about George III being a tyrant, it was Parliament that created the laws by then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
If you had the courage of your conviction you'd eliminate your regency altogether.
What, so we can replace it with a politically motivated head of state? Fuck that! The queen is our last line of defence against corrupt politicians, should things get bad enough she can refuse royal assent and the shit hits the fan. At that point if she doesn't have the overwhelming backing of the populace the monarchy is over, if she does have the backing then we can expect a general election. That's why it's a better system than an elected president likely to metaphorically wave his dick around for political purposes, it's irrelevant for day to day affairs but when you really, REALLY need it it's there.