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Norwegian Police, Seeking Info On 2 Bloggers, Take Data From 7,000 Accounts
xiando writes "Norwegian police were asked by officials in Italy to get personal information about two bloggers who were using a server in Oslo. The police decided the best thing to do would be to take the server's hard drive, along with personal information from about 7,000 other users (Google translation of Norwegian original). Other ISPs say this is standard operating procedure in Norway these days."
Some time back, there was a judgment that allowed police to trawl through the entire contents of a hard drive if they had a subpoena for one person's data from the drive, so I was wondering if the following scenario would work:
Police get a subpoena for electronic bank records of an individual. They go to the bank and the bank offers to provide the relevant data. However, the police say: "No, this subpoena is not limited like that. Give us all the hard drives that might contain data on the subject". The bank is compelled to hand over thousands of hard drives. Now the police can trawl through bank records of millions of people unrelated to the original subpoena.
Could this happen? Will it happen?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"Not something that only happens in the U.S."
Wonderful sub-headline in the linked article. Great example of our worldwide reputation nowadays.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
autistici.org has NOTHING to do with Autism...
If your data is stored in a cloud, then it is bound to get trawled through multiple times per year due to subpoenas for other people.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Socialism is not a form of government. It is an economic model. Tyranny does derive from economic models. Tyranny derives from the way in which a government approaches them.
Socialism is extraordinarily far from causal in this situation.
If you think that only "socialists" do these things, you are desperately naive. Unless of course you're using the definition of socialism which seems to be quite popular among so-called conservatives these days, "any policy I currently don't like."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Your quote:
What can you say except welcome to Socialism at work? Trust us, we're the government, we know what's best.
I'll counter your Troll with a fact from the article:
In pursuit of two bloggers who have been critical of a right-extremist group in Italy, the Norwegian police seized about 7,000 people.
So no, this is not about socialism, this is about Conservatism. People who join the police and the military tend to be Right Wing, so it's not surprising that anybody critical of the Right Wing would be targeted by police. This is why anti-war and human rights activists are often harassed and spied on by governments and police forces around the world.
a theory of Political Economy, and includes both an economic model and a political/government model. In particular, it postulates government's executive powers that for "public good" can transcend many rights of individuals, not just rights to own property. Most historical forms of Socialism actually postulated the so-called "tyranny of the proletariat" as a necessary condition of enduring Socialist ways in the society.
Socialism has invariably led to expansion of government's power even where it did not result in straight-up tyranny. Just ask Julian Assange how far into Swedish bedrooms of consenting adults it currently extends.
Having come of age in a Socialist country, I heartily recommend the theory writings of prominent Socialists (the study of which was mandatory both in school and and in college). Even "moderate" Fabian Socialists like Shaw advocated government censorship, including but not limited to censorship of "harmful" scientific theories (see his take on Lysenko vs Russian genetics, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/shaw/works/lysenko.htm
GP's simplistic drivel about "socialism" certainly does sound like what contemporary conservatism has reduced itself to; but there is an incongruity: empirically speaking, contemporary conservatism practically worships the power and authority of the state security apparatus. The people who trust the state to run prisons; but not schools. Who think that taxation is tyranny but torture is not.
Maybe he is a larval Randroid, or one of those people who thinks that "libertarian" means "authoritarian who hates paying taxes"...
What can you say except welcome to Socialism at work? Trust us, we're the government, we know what's best.
Actually it sounds like fascism to me.
One of socialism's (purported) goals is to reduce levels of government and government power overall in place of individual or collective power.
all across the Eastern Bloc. If you do not know this, *you* are hopelessly naive. The difference between Socialists and others is that under Socialism the overwhelming power of the State (which it supposedly wields for the "public good" and in the "defense of the commons") rightfully supersedes individual rights, which are presumed to proceed from the "society" anyway. Other theories of government recognize other sources of rights, such as natural rights of the individual.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Is it the Bush era and legacy of expanding government and trampling on rights of the individual in the name of "public good" (war on terrorism). Was he socialist?
Conservativism today means: I take any govermental service as long as my boss doesn't have to pay taxes.
It's the completely fucked up idea that one has to protect the rich and the powerful, because one could one day be rich and powerful too, and then one might not like to pay taxes. But the idea that one day one could be poor and unable to help oneself gets refused because if that is something that only happens to other people.
The problem with socialism in America is this: It only applies to the rich. Socialism is allowed and indeed encouraged for the rich with "too big to fail" bailouts, TARP, lowering the "burden" on the top 1% through both tax breaks and the looking the other way at tax dodges like the "double dutch". But socialism for the poor such as free or low cost medical care, ensuring that all have adequate food, shelter, and clothing, help for the indigent, these things are frowned upon and looked upon as somehow bad or evil. Personally after seeing how bad the corporatist mindset has run this country into the ground I'd be all for socialism of the second sort.
As for TFA, cops do what they want, film (and excuses) at 11. Here in the USA we have ICE and the FBI used as a private "copyright police" while being paid for by the taxpayers, we have cops that do truly heinous crimes (just look up "police abuse" on Youtube to see how prevalent it is) and walk away with a slap on the wrist if they get anything at all, and thanks to 9/11 we now have Constitution-Free Zones that cover 2/3rds of all US citizens.
News flash: All cops WILL abuse their authority if left unchecked, full stop. For every decent cop you probably have 4 "bully with a badge" types that thanks to the code of silence will be protected by their fellow cops no matter what they do. Until we demand of our elected officials and the MSM that police have to follow the constitution and laws we citizens have to abide by along with REAL punishment for those that run roughshod over peoples' rights then stories like this will sadly be all too common.
Too many have been allowed to get away with too much for too long and it is time to start reining in their power or ALL of us in the west will end up in police states.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Funny thing, though, is that his kind of thinking is the result of 60 years of McCarthyist brainwashing.
How hard would it be to rig the systems so that pulling the drives physically out of the servers rendered them unreadable? I'm thinking some kind of encrypted striping on the individual drives, and the whole array running through a second hardware encryptor hooked up to GPS and a passphrase... maybe also an internal sensor linked to something inside the wall of the server room. Move the encryptor box out of the room and it scrambles the key, rendering the array useless even if the correct passphrase is given. Restore it to the room, and re-enter the passphrase, and it can be used to read the array again.
Anyone wanting to access the data on the array would have to either do so with the hardware in situ, or demand a copy be run off for them. Confiscating the hardware would net them nothing. And unless they demanded that the keys to the kingdom be handed over, they couldn't trust the information they were getting.
There could also be a system set up so that if an organisation's access to its own data was compromised in this way, one of the required decryption keys could be remotely scrambled and the original only known by someone overseas and outside of the local authorities' jurisdiction. Run that link through sufficient obscuration methods and it might become impossible to find out precisely who has that key and where they're located, or at least extremely difficult and time-consuming.
The norwegian police was asked by the italian police to retrieve this data. The norwegian police is eager to comply with requests from foreign police, as they themselves may need that kind of help abroad later. The loophole is that apparently no norwegian court is involved in the decision and norwegian laws are not consulted.
The bottom line is that you are not protected by your own country's laws when it comes to confiscating data. It's enough that someone in one of a hundred countries can get a police officer to send a request. Charges that would never hold in your own country is no barrier. Low corruption in your own country is no barrier. Bribe an italian police officer, hire an american lawyer and you can get at anything on servers in the western world.