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British Foreign Secretary on Surveillance Worries: '"Law Abiding Citizens Have N
Bruce66423 writes "The government minister in charge of GCHQ, the UK's equivalent of the NSA, has used those immortal words, 'Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear secret activities of the British and US intelligence agencies.' From the article: '...In an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Mr Hague refused to say whether the British government knew of the existence of Prism before it emerged last week. “I can’t confirm or deny in public what Britain knows about and what Britain doesn’t, for obvious reasons,” he said. However, he implied that the revelations had not taken him by surprise.'" While many are concerned about the reach of PRISM overseas, the Finnish Foreign Minister says he plans to continue using Outlook for email.
That statement might have more credibility if it were not for the well documented use of RIPA powers for things unconnected to terrorism and serious crime.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Because no government has ever labeld an alternative point of view a crime.
..does not mean you have any business going through my life with a fine tooth comb.
The "Nothing to Hide" argument is a fallacy that falls apart upon examination:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110524/00084614407/privacy-is-not-secrecy-debunking-if-youve-got-nothing-to-hide-argument.shtml
https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
Interesting comment from Mr. Hague, a minister of the country that gave us the infamous Star Chamber.
From wiki:
The Star Chamber (Latin: Camera stellata) was an English court of law that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster until 1641. ...The court was set up to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes. Court sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing. Over time it evolved into a political weapon, a symbol of the misuse and abuse of power by the English monarchy and courts.
I'm sure the victims of the Star Chamber at that time were equally comforted by the thought that if they were innocent, they had nothing to fear from the men in power. Of course.
My point being that any proceedings undertaken in secret, and therefore without oversight from the public will inevitably lead to abuses of power.
I am also troubled by the fact that the present US administration appears to go to great lengths to hide their workings from the US public whom they claim to serve. Just look at the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership as an example. When even free trade agreements are being negotiated in secret, something is not right.
It seem too me that the capacities of surveillance tech has evolved much faster than public understanding and emotion on the issue. As a non-US citizen, I am disgusted by the idea of my emails or metadata derived from them are massively stored away if they pass through the US, or even my own country. I understand and respect that some level of this must exist in modern society, but we need to have checks and balances that can be vetted by he public.
And can it not be wrong, even though I have nothing to fear? Have I nothing to fear from this system even if I am not a criminal?
Ethically, it is limiting to my freedom that there exists a stash of information somewhere that might be abused when taken out of context. Does that not limit my freedom to express radical opinion in private discussions, or even do so satirically? Can I no long play with unpopular ideas using electronic communications? Can I no longer listen to the voice of my opponent without fear of at some point being labeled one of them?
Legally, how can it be that an email is less of my property than a letter I store in a deposit box in my bank, or send in the mail? Is it not mine or the recipients only? If the state had an army of people standing by to make copies of every letter sent, the situation would be perfectly analogous. Is that not ransacking me, or confiscating my property only to provide me a copy?
Safety wise, if a record of my life is aggregated in a single source that I have no knowledge of, how can I know that it is truly safe? How can I ensure politicians spend enough on it's safety? I keep my IDs safe to prevent identity theft. What happens the day my life is stolen, but the theft is classified?
And last but not least, what happens to the balance of power between a state and its people here? The state is the servant of the people, and it should always respect that. When the people become submissive to the state, nothing good happens. We've spend much blood in the past to put it where it belongs, but it always threatens to slip back. We need people like Edward Snowden to blow the whistle when that happens. The very fact that he is now in hiding shows how the power-balance has it's centre of gravity atm.
This is a conspiracy theory that a good friend of mine passed along. I have no reason to believe it is true, but I think it can still illustrate the problem with that attitude.
First off, to recap, Anthony Weiner was a member of congress from New York City. He accidentally tweeted a "calvin klein underwear ad" of himself on his official twitter feed. Within minutes he deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. He ended up resigning and the seat he held, which had been held by democrats for something like 80 years, went to a republican.
It turned out Weiner had two twitter accounts, a personal one and the official one. He had been regularly using the private account to send suggestive photos to women across the country. Not illegal, but douchey. Although for all we the public know, his (brilliant and hot) wife was fine with it, maybe they had a look-but-don't-touch agreement. Whatever it was, it was their business alone.
Now, just imagine that somebody at the NSA who was "friendly" to the republicans decided to do a little checking into Weiner and discovered what he was doing on his "private" account. Then they logged into his official twitter account using some back-door or even just something sloppy like a cookie they sniffed off the wire from his own most recent login. Once logged in, they "accidentally" posted the picture and then deleted it a few minutes later.
Viola, career ruined and republicans get a chance to pick up a seat they would never have had a chance at if nobody had been snooping on Weiner.
Like I said at the start, I have zero reason to believe that is actually what happened. He probably just forgot what account he was logged into - all the blood had left his brain for other parts of his body. But, what matters here is just how plausible this theory is. The only thing standing in the way of this sort of corruption is the personal integrity of basically everyone with access to these programs at the NSA. Imagine just how easily this kind of ubiquitous surveillance apparatus can be turned to political corruption. We have way too much of that already, no need to make it any easier.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
After all, you, as a law abiding citizen, have nothing to fear, right ?
And this surprises who, exactly?
Been expecting it ever since they voted in conservatives. Right wing governments always increase surveillance under the guise of "Law and Order" and decrease liberties with the by-line "Good citizens have nothing to fear". All of this is done "for the children". If the state declares the child to be the most precious resource of the state, the people will accept any deprivation of liberty. It's not like an ultra-nationalist German politician didn't write a book on this in the 30's (or a leftist British author wrote a satirical version in the 40's).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Yeah, that quote is really, really old and gets used by politicians a lot.
Lately, here in Germany, we've started throwing it back at them whenever they are hiding something from us. Like who gives them how much money or which companies they work for after their term, or who paid their campaign, or indeed their last holiday.
The "if you have nothing to hide..." should be told to them a lot more often, because they've been abusing it for a long, long time.
Also, since we know that sexual favours are as successful in swaying people as financial incentives, I would like a full record of who my politicians have been sleeping with during their terms. As there are more lies in this area than in any other, we should have 24/7 surveilance and automated reporting. What? You don't have anything to hide, do you?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My god you partisan idiots don't give up when silly season is over. It's like a special form of retardation to drag your partisan politics into every realm of life even out of season, without reason or cause - to make every news event your rallying cry. I wish you all would suffocate on your own bile.
The NSA was founded in 1949 by Harry Truman. It has thrived across so many different administrations and congresses of every stripe that it must be assumed to be immune to partisan politics.
And this isn't the only shadow agency in the US government. At my last count there were seventeen.
This is not a partisan thing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
How about stopping with bombing foreign countries first and taking their resources at gun point. People only become extremists if they don't have anything else left to lose.
Nihil in publicum sputa.
FTFY
And the USSR was right wing? You are easily fooled by propaganda. The leaning of the government is not relevent information.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
before mass prosecution of certain ( ethnic ) groups broke out, the government also told its citizens: "Ordinary German citizens in good standing have nothing to fear from GeStaPo or SD, which services are there to protect them".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
You cripple the security services at your peril. Unlike the IRA, al Qaida doesn't tend to phone in warnings before a blast.
Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.
Perhaps if instead of complaining about information disclosures, they disclosed the plots they had been able to foil, and had rather public trials, we'd trust them more, but at this point, they act more like a police agency. Police agencies catch bad guys after the fact, after you are already dead from being blown up or shot or stabbed or raped. You know, after the crime.
I'd prefer not to live in a police state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state since their track record at preventing criminal activity from occurring in the first place is generally piss-poor.
If you lose enough security you'll have difficulty enjoying freedom. Taking reasonable steps against terrorists is justified. Of course safeguards and parliamentary oversight need to be a basic part of the security arrangements. I have the courage to face both terrorist and government. You, on the other hand, seem to live in fear of government and ignore the dangers of the terrorist. That won't be a happy combination if widely emulated.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Like the GOP?
Woolwich stabbing attack.
FFS, The Woolwich murder was *not* terrorism - it was murder, plain and simple. Terrorism is inciting fear in the masses in order to elicit a political change - did a single murder cause the masses to become exceptionally fearful? I don't think so. Why does this murder do anything more to cause fear than any of the other numerous racially/politically motivated murders which are unfortunately reasonably common? It doesn't. I'm certainly not quaking in fear for my life - I'm far more likey to be gravely injured while being robbed than attacked for political reasons.
So we'll go back to the definition of terrorism - inciting fear to elicit political change. After every incident, the British Government keeps telling us that if we don't let them pass new legislation that infringes on our civil liberties then we won't be safe from "terrorists". After the Woolwich killing the Communications Data Bill was revived despite previously being demolished on its previous appearance. The justification was that if the security services couldn't spy on everyone then we would all be in grave danger of being killed by terrorists. In the case of the Woolwich murder it seems that this isn't in any way justified - the people who carried it out were already known to the security services; they didn't need any new legislation to spy on them, a court order would've done the trick just as well.
After the April Jones murder, the Online Safety Bill was revived by the government - because apparently all our kids are in danger of being murdered by kiddy fiddlers and that censoring the internet will somehow set all the nutters on the straight and narrow. And yet there seems to be no evidence to support this - it is supposition that porn leads to criminal behaviour, it could be equally possible that there would be more of this criminal behaviour if people *couldn't* relieve themselves through porn. I don't know the answer, but it seems a pretty bad idea to blindly enact laws without much evidence either way - most of the anti-kiddy-porn laws seem to be "I find what you're into distasteful, so you should be locked up" rather than actually designed to stop people getting hurt. To compound these problems, the politicians seem to be conflating protecting the kids from porn with preventing the adults getting at kiddy-porn, which are two separate issues; the Online Safety Bill is supposidly about protecting the kids from being exposed to porn, but its being pushed in response to an adult abusing a child - a completely separate problem.
So I ask, who are the terrorists? Who is inciting fear for a political end? I would say its the government - they are going out of their way to tell people to be scared after every incident in order to push new legislation that people would otherwise find unacceptable; surely _that_ is exactly what terrorism is?
When I was growing up, there were a fair number of IRA bombings and they were always played down to avoid stirring up fear. These days the people in power seem to have realised that they don't need to pull the trigger to benefit from the effects of being a terrorist, they only need to stir up fear surrounding existing incidents instead. The terrorists seem to be winning.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
The Act was mostly about terrorism, so when it was voted on in Parliament if you opposed it you were supporting terrorism. They tacked that bit on and were careful to word it such that it didn't only apply to terrorism. The House of Lords actually picked up on that but were unable to fix it.
It is a classic example of using terrorism to pass all kinds of bullshit into law by making it extremely difficult to oppose. We looked like complete dicks for using it against Iceland when it was clear to most people that that was never its intended purpose, or at least not the stated purpose of the Act when pitched to Parliament and the voting public.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC