Slashdot Mirror
Cybercrime Treaty Pushes Surveillance Worldwide
bs0d3 writes "As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties — the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime — is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Leaving out constitutional safeguards, gag orders in place of oversight, and forcing service providers to retain your data may all be coming soon."
There is no better argument for encrypting everything that can be encrypted than this.
Yeah, sure, most governments aren't going to do anything with that data NOW, but once they have it, they have it forever. And political climates can and do change. It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists who model their ideas on the surveillance state of Britain, or religious whack-jobs who will simply say "God's law is higher than Man's law" and start criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, titty-pictures and religions that aren't Christian, or frothing-at-the-mouth Greenies who formalize in law the already-existing mapping of "skeptic" to "heretic". And they will be sitting upon a treasure-trove of information to identify who needs to be put in their place.
That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Staying under the radar hoping they won't target you next ... that's not the same thing as fighting back.
The way to fix this is to make passing these kinds of laws even more detrimental to a career in politics, than, say, destroying Social Security.
Sometimes I think we should just hurry up and implement global fascism and get it over with. I'm tired of all the suspense. We can have neighbor snitching on neighbor for thoughtcrimes. We can have full-time martial law since that's cheaper than building enough prisons to house every man, woman, and child. Maybe we can make people fight their neighboring cities to save ourselves the transportation costs of fighting pointless wars overseas. That seems to be more like the society so many people really want to live in. That's why they keep swallowing the bullshit excuses for each baby-step towards its implementation.
Then when the whole thing collapses under its own weight we can all admit what we should have known from the very beginning: that the other way for politicians to feel secure is to be noble and to truly seve the people then they won't feel so threatened by unfettered exchange of information, that there was never a justification for fascism, for the nanny-state, or for ever telling consenting adults what they may do or how they may do it. Perhaps attempting to do so could be the only capital crime on the law books.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
I use to think Alex Jones of infowars.com was a hoot to listen to. Now days, I find myself surprisingly shaking my head in agreement sometimes.
Most people who are ahead of their time and can see things coming from a long distance away are regarded with ridicule and contempt. Especially when they were right.
But don't worry. The fact that this has happened so many thousands of times never stops anyone from climbing up on their high horse and dismissing without examination anything and everything that doesn't fit their personal orthodoxy. The satisfaction of feeling for two whole seconds like they're better/wiser/smarter than someone else is much too precious to them.
Also they sure as hell won't question their personal orthodoxy or how it came to be. That's too painful for cowards who derive their security from conformity to a group. The really scary thing is what they might discover: that it's not really theirs at all. If you want a biological model, consider a virus that injects itself from without and takes over a cell from within.
Taking over a nation by force is the old, outdated, obsolete method and it's much too messy and risky for the modern tyrant. The sophisticated aristocracy of today simply brainwashes the masses by exploiting their ignorance and laziness and anti-intellectual culture. Then not only can you take control without firing a single shot, but they will actually elect you themselves. Eventually they'll have to because no one else will be on the ballot.
I've been called a tin-foil hatter etc. plenty of times. I am only too familiar with the shallow narrow-minded mentality that never has the guts to put forth its own viewpoint, or attempts to do so and can only come up with some regurgitated talking points that came from a sound bite. That mentality is the foremost reason why nearly every major Western nation is decaying from within.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You assume that the U.S. military would be used by the government to put down any significant rebellion, but I do not think this is very certain; it may seem counter-intuituve, but the U.S. military culture has a strong streak of distrust of high authority. There is a lot of thought and language devoted to classifying orders as lawful and unlawful. Some few will no doubt go along with any order, but as a whole I think it's hard to say where they would come down in the long run.
The US is scary, but at least it has a real Constituion. This constituion is being ignored in many cases, but at least some people care about this.
Canada is currently less scary than the US, particularly if you are a Canadian citizen. But I live in a city with a zillion cameras, which I hate. What I hate even more (and what scares me even more) is that the cameras went up and no one seems to care. I don't know how much debate there was about them, but Canada has very little except tradition to prevent it from turning into a police state.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST