Is the West Building Its Own Iron Curtain?

New submitter pefisher writes "The British are apparently admitting that they track their citizens as they travel the world (through information provided by intelligence agencies) and are arresting them if they have been somewhere that frightens them. 'Sir Peter, who leads the Association of Chief Police Officer's "Prevent" strategy on counter-terrorism, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that those returning from Syria "may well be charged and investigated, but they will be put into our programmes".' The program seems to consist of being spied on by the returnee's cooperative neighbors."

Comments

No

[sideslash]

The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes. This article is just talking about prosecuting people who have been fighting for terrorists, and scrutinizing those suspected of hanging around with terrorists. It has auras of creepy surveillance, but definitely is not an Iron Curtain.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

There are certain places in the world that if you go you should be setting off alarm bells.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iron Curtain itself was only possible because of information networks like these surveillance efforts. A modern version of it would not take the same form, but could meet the same ideological ends (keeping people from making any moves not condoned by their regimes, including leaving them).

Just saying they're not the same right now isn't good enough, even if they will never be exactly the same thing.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Like the United States. They start or get involved in many, may wars, spy on every other nation on earth and even track their own people like dogs with microchips under their skin.

If you're traveling to the US your intentions surely must be questioned.

Re:No

[Mister Liberty]

Dimwit. The oppressive regime is yours.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot some pertinent facts: The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot some pertinent facts:

Indeed I did.

The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.

Indeed they do.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what your definition of terrorist is.
Right now, according to those running these programs it's "There is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt."

Re:No

[Aighearach]

If it is an "iron curtain" is a whole different question that, "would it assist the implementation of one if they tried."

I would argue that if you're worried about that happening in the future, being honest about the current situation is more valuable than hyperbole and propaganda that intentionally overstates the situation.

Re:No

[LifesABeach]

Then we must all persuade those who are visiting, or working in the U.S. to leave. The sooner the better. It's to fight terrorism; and save their babies.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

And I would argue that few people will even have a discussion until they are drawn to it by hyperbole and/or propaganda. But I do agree that Slashdot is full of people who miss the point altogether and just focus on the narrowest and most useless parts of the conversation, so it might not be the best place to start the discussion with hyperbole.

Re:No

[gmuslera]

Fighting for terrorists? Like the ones sending drones to schools and weddings? The club may be far bigger than you think.

Re:No

[Shakrai]

The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.

Nation-state acts to further its own perceived self-interests. News at eleven!

Oh, I'm sorry, did you want more than a sarcastic one liner? Geopolitics make for strange bedfellows. Democratic Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany during WW2. That doesn't make them Nazis. My country has done some very regrettable things throughout the course of history, some of which were understandable in the context of the times (particularly the Cold War, something few people around here can truly relate to), some of which weren't. Either way, we didn't do anything every other nation-state hasn't done and continues to do.

Realpolitik is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? When you're fighting for national survival you're going to side with the despot that will ally with you over the democracy that won't.

Re:No

[epyT-R]

True.. the US did the dirty work of NATO, so europe could have someone to blame if/when it goes bad. The russians also tried their hands at 'nation building', and failed spectacularly as well.

Re:No

[crutchy]

The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes

oh you mean like the united states government

This article is just talking about prosecuting people who have been fighting for terrorists

oh you mean CIA operatives

scrutinizing those suspected of hanging around with terrorists

oh you mean congressmen

Re:No

[Charliemopps]

Oh, it's an iron curtain... it's just that this new and improved one encircles the whole of the world.

Re:No

[Jane Q. Public]

"There are certain places in the world that if you go you should be setting off alarm bells."

I see. Guilt by association is now okay? That's news to me.

I don't give the slightest damn where people go. It's what they do when they get there that matters.

While it might not be like an "iron curtain", per se, it certainly IS like a dictatorial police state.

Re:No

[amiga3D]

I always wonder what Milosevic and Mladi would be up to today if the US had just stood back and let Europe deal with the problem. How many millions would have died before someone summoned up the balls to do anything besides wring their hands and go "oh my, wont someone do something!"

Re:No

[NatasRevol]

According to the laws too...

Re:No

[amiga3D]

Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery. If you didn't know that it's because you choose to be ignorant. People who go to a shithole where there are radical people that want to blow up everyone they disagree with are always going to be looked at. As long as they aren't water boarding them it's going to be generally accepted too.

Re:No

[Curunir_wolf]

There are certain places in the world that if you go you should be setting off alarm bells.

Colorado seems to be at the top of the list these days.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes. This article is just talking about prosecuting people who have been fighting for terrorists, and scrutinizing those suspected of hanging around with terrorists. It has auras of creepy surveillance, but definitely is not an Iron Curtain.

That was basically the excuse the Soviets used.

Internal security kept the revolution safe from traitors, hooligans, and the mentally-ill (i.e., those who refused to accept Party dogma as fact), and the Berlin Wall was actually built as a border fence designed to keep the hordes of poor, starving hordes of capitalist-oppressed Westerners out of the glorious, equitable, and peace-loving East. At least, that's what the propaganda from Moscow said.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

"What difference does it make! - - Hillary Clinton when ask about Benghazi.

Good people mean nothing to the government in DC.

Re:No

[tftp]

Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery.

And so was burning of witches. But we got better.

There are plenty of people in Syria, and they have relatives who live in other countries. Should those relatives be waterboarded in UK if they go to safe areas of Syria just to see their dying parents?

Re:No

[melted]

Which side are the "terrorists" though? To me it seems like the "rebels" are. To you it might seem it's Assad's people.

Re:No

[sideslash]

Both?

Re:No

[amiga3D]

Read the whole comment now. I said looked at and not water boarded. Certainly they'll look at them and if they have dying parents that should be pretty much the end of it. It's reality and the world we live in. It's an unfriendly world with plenty of anger and resentment on all sides. To not look at people traveling to a part of the world that hates us would be failing to practice due diligence. Torture of course is an entirely different ball of wax.

Re:No

[ignavus]

You forgot some pertinent facts: The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.

Yes, but they are OUR terrorists, OUR coups, and OUR ENEMIES' democracies.

And we are RIGHT!

Moral choices are so much easier when your country is always right. It's practically like you don't even need to think.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being ridiculously blind to our actions, making a blanket statement they were necessary for the very existence of the U.S.A. rather than often bone-headed moves that not only were against our supposed morals (e.g., freedom, democracy, not-mass-murdering) but also ended up biting us in the ass and incurring loss of life that otherwise wouldn't have happened. If we actually acted as a country in a way that we say we believe in, we'd probably had a much better last 50 years.

Re:No

[PPH]

Which side are the "terrorists" though?

Whichever side your country doesn't like. And these days, the USA, and by extension its lap dog Britain, have skin in every game around the world. There are no more situations like the Spanish Civil War, where volunteers could go and fight for whichever side they chose. And then return home free from prosecution.

You can still go overseas and support the politically correct side. But be forewarned that our government has a position on practically every conflict on this planet. So you can haul suitcases of money or export technology to Israel, for example. But try to volunteer some resources to help Palestinians in Gaza or the est Bank and be prepared for the third degree when you get home.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Good people mean nothing to the government in DC.

Good people are like twonicorns in DC. They've never seen one, because they don't exist, so of course they mean nothing.

Re:No

[Concerned Onlooker]

"You forgot some pertinent facts: The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies."

True, but I think all that was just practice for undermining our own democracy.

Re:No

[ne0n]

So true. Definitely not home of the brave after remotely bombing so many children and innocents.

Re:No

[tftp]

Certainly they'll look at them and if they have dying parents that should be pretty much the end of it. It's reality and the world we live in.

The reality of the world is that US or UK police cannot possibly prove or disprove that Mr. X went to Syria to see his relatives or to play a soldier. How do you propose to "look at them" if they were in a war-torn country? Should they just ask politely? What kind of an answer will they get?

There is even no way to prove that someone from UK went to Syria. The border between Turkey and Syria is wide open, and you can take a taxi from one country to another. There will be no records, no visas, no stamps in the passport. Once you are out of UK you can go anywhere and do anything you want. Short of being photographed, none of that can be proven. Many fighters keep their faces covered (which is not a bad idea in a desert anyway.)

The monitoring net, done poorly (as you can do it only poorly,) will only snag innocents who are stupid enough to admit that they went to Syria or other hotspots. The bad people will lie to you, and you can't do anything about it. As result, you not only have bad people against you, but also you push the innocents into the hands of bad people if you mistreat them. If you do not want people to go from UK to Syria, why do you admit Syrians into the country in the first place?

Re:No

[Kasar]

It's national survival to ship crates of arms to Syrian Islamists, then ship more weapons to Iraq's government to counter those arms, because Jihadis don't stay in one nation? I realize it must've been a shock to the government that this is the case.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

...This article is just talking about prosecuting people who have been fighting for terrorists, and scrutinizing those suspected of hanging around with terrorists. It has auras of creepy surveillance, but definitely is not an Iron Curtain.

The problem with that stance is that one man's terrorist can be another man's freedom fighter - after all, even terrorists have to get their support from somewhere.

It is so easy to forget how many of our pillars of democracy were born. Consider that some of our now legitimate governments that were once labeled as terrorist organisations: starting from the fight for liberation from tyrannical British rule by the American colonies in the late 1700's to the fight from liberation from apartheid in South Africa.

Terrorism is like porn (I am paraphrasing Mr. Justice Potter Stewart's judgment on obscenity in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964)). I can't define what is terrorism (certainly not from an air-conditioned office in London or Washington). "But I know it when I see it."

By trying to own the definition of what is or is not terrorism, Washington and London have often found themselves at odds with other NATO allies, who have come to the same conclusion as Justice Potter Stewart did with regards to porn. In terms of the definitions we have used in the past, the rebels in Syria are terrorists (and this is the definition that the Syrian government is using to classify its opposition at terrorists). In line with this definition we should expect the Ukrainian government to start referring to the violent revolt against its decisions as terrorism as well. And yet most sane and logical human beings realise that the situation in Syria and Ukraine is complex and trying to pigeon hole all the players in a violent conflict into neat little compartments that allow us to pick sides to back or oppose can be dangerous.

So, coming back to the Iron Curtain topic... I agree, the Iron Curtain that divided Germany during the Cold War was designed to keep people in as much as keep prying eyes out. Keeping track of suspicious citizens or citizens who have recently engaged in suspicious acts or associated with known unsavoury groups seems like a logical thing for any state security establishment to do... at least until it satisfies itself that the subject of their surveillance does not harbour any ill-intentions against their fellow citizens.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.

Nation-state acts to further its own perceived self-interests. News at eleven!

Relying on a thought-terminating cliché is not a good way to make an argument.

I realise pointing out that the land of the free specialises in removing and reducing freedom wherever possible is a source of cognitive dissonance, but you really should actually consider the implications rather than just trying to make the headache go away.

Re:No

[Jane Q. Public]

"And so was burning of witches. But we got better. "

Well, it seems that some of us did.

Re:No

[dbIII]

It's more a case of rogue agencies with internal agendas acting to further their own perceived self-interests.
For the fully documented stuff proved beyond question we have idiocy like one part of the CIA running guns to Castro and another opposing him. We also have an agency in the US selling weapons to Hezbolla less than a year after they had killed off more than one hundred US Marines. That sort of thing made the USA look very weak. It's the sort of thing that showed Bin Laden that he had a chance.
After that we've got less well documented stuff with extremist middle east groups, hard core Islamists that stand against everything the USA stands for, getting US weapons, just to make some Saudis doing backdoor deals with US companies happy. That sort of thing, and the far better documented Iran-Contra, are directly opposed to the interests of the nation state but are of benefit to individuals. I don't know what to call it, because treason now means playing chess against the wrong person or exposing abuses to the constitution. Selling weapons to declared enemies with a recent high body count of your own people is now seen as the act of a "patriot".

Re:No

[purpledinoz]

Like Detroit, or South Central LA?

Re:No

[dbIII]

Guilt by association is now okay?

In a lot of places yes. In my city a librarian with no prior convictions has been locked up with bail refused because she was seen having a drink with a biker.

It's why authoritarians are incompatible with democracy and the rule of law in general. They think such things as guilt by association is perfectly OK and that someone who is "one of us", as in not one of the plebs but an associate of the ruling party, should also get innocence by association. The best bits of Magna Carta do not make sense to these people - they think there are some that should be above the law and some that should be below it.

Re:No

[r.freeman]

Sadly, USA has a history of creating democracies - but democracies are often a bad solution and instead liberating people they just make majority (or even worse - a non-honest, corrupt or stupid) leader oppress current minority (and "minority" rights are "helping" often only a tiny fraction of population and often not really helping).

Re:No

[r.freeman]

Also you forgot them creating many internal-wars, where the police acts like terrorists against people who harm no one, by pursuing people "responsible" for various victimless "crimes".

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Iron curtain. Alarm bells. Iron bells. Loud sounds. Everything seems to be in order. Iron scoop might work as well.
I'm personally little afraid of the Canary Islands and the risk of a landslide. And Ibiza. Perhaps British authorities should put the people visiting the islands into their programmes. The envious of olive tan neighbours joyfully cooperate with the surveillance program. They call it: the Geordie Shore.

Re:No

[schnell]

The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes

oh you mean like the united states government

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but this just pissed me off way too badly. Whom has the US kept from escaping its regime? The US has had thousands of willing expatriates over the years to Communist countries.

Do you seriously want to draw an equivalency between the NATO (US and European allies) policy on expatriation versus that of the Warsaw Pact countries? Are you utterly ignorant of the Refuseniks? Do you really dishonor the memory of the Berlin Wall dead so badly in the name of your political hatred of the US?

I grow increasingly ashamed of continuing to read Slashdot, based on the sadly decreasing quality of commenters.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Finland may have been "fighting for national survival" and forced to choose a questionable option when it was their only option.

However, it would be weird to try to justify anything the US has done with this argument. At no point has survival as a nation been under threat. We are mostly talking about petty little self-interest that has benefitted a petty little group of people. The general population would not have noticed either way. In Finland they would have.

Re:No

[Maritz]

Yeah. Witches before that. Should get good mileage out of the Terrism though. That'll be around a good while.

Re:No

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I've been trying to tell people this for years now. Mujahedin? The CIA armed them. Benghazi? Classic CIA fubar. "Edge of the knife" my ass...the only thing the CIA is really good at is eventually getting that knife to slice our own throats. Three CIA directors in one year? No wonder their operatives where able to run rampant in the ME.

If we knew the "true facts" about Syria, it would probably show how the CIA egged on the rebels there, gave them the weapons they where rounding up after the "regime change", and had "Special Activities Division" teams on the ground there. I wouldn't be surprised if some CIA agent was involved in the chemical attacks somehow, probably by accidentally giving some old Russian chemical rounds to the wrong people or having them hijacked like what happened to the weapons used against The Annex.

Re:No

[crutchy]

why are you drawing comparisons in the past when TFA is talking about a future trend?

if anything it highlights how different the future of the west is from its past

how do you think the repressive regimes around the world began? do you seriously think that people were completely free one day and then woke up the next to brutal oppression?

i grow increasingly ashamed of ignorant fools (both democrat and republican supporters alike) with their heads buried in the sand... wake up and smell the tyranny

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

My country ... didn't do anything every other nation-state hasn't done and continues to do.

I live in Luxembourg (*). The country is time-sharing a seat on a fighter jet. It has plans to buy one fighter jet within the next 3 years.
Yes, your country does do things that this country hasn't done and will not do. Not because they don't want to, but simply because they can't.

(*) for the geographically challenged: a sovereign country between Belgium, France and Germany.

Re:No

[hawkinspeter]

That sounds ludicrous - have you got a link to that librarian story?

Re:No

[flyingfsck]

Well, you can't very well let these terrorist librarians run wild can you? They just might start reading Karl Marx instead of Adam Smith and then you have a real problem.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes obviously funding Irish terrorists in England was part of the Cold War.

Re:No

[dunkelfalke]

That particular conflict was just a turf war between two rival gangs. When USA interfered, they took sides for one of the gangs. That caused problems later when this gang invaded a neighbour country.

So, it could have been even for the better altogether if US had just stood back - the gangs might have blooded themselves out.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because witches murdered somewhere between 30 million and 100 million people in the 20th century alone.

Were you dropped as a child, or is your dementia a recent development?

Re:No

[dbIII]

Guilt by association does lead to utterly ludicrous outcomes.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...

I should point out that the "Life And Death motorcycle club" is no "Hells Angels" and has no negative reputation (or really any reputation outside it's small number of members) with the police or general public. This is not about organised crime. It's pretty stupid political gameplaying demonising groups of people really.

Re:No

[crutchy]

Whom has the US kept from escaping its regime?

google "indefinite detention"

then consider gitmo, bagram, the TSA, mandatory detention in the war on drugs, drone strikes, NSA spying, IRS targeting, executive overreach (Bush and Obama especially), corruption in the banking system which relies on the government, FDIC and IMF for bailouts, wall street and politicians in bed with each other, the Federal Reserve & money printing, etc.

then think of the shrinking of middle class taxpayers (who could conceivably leave the country if they wanted to) being converted in the rapid expansion of the class of citizens that are entirely dependent on government support/welfare (who couldn't leave the country even if they wanted to)

the iron curtain isn't necessarily a reference to physical boundaries or keeping people from escaping (as in the Berlin Wall)... open your mind a little
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Throughout the Cold War the term "curtain" would become a common euphemism for boundaries – physical or ideological – between communist and capitalist states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

After the socialist revolution, the life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s, when the life expectancy in the Soviet Union surpassed that of the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

In the 1960s, nearly all Soviet children had access to education... Citizens directly entering the work force had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.

seems to me an aweful lot like what the United States in particular is heading towards, and is possibly more to do with what TFA was on about (comparing intelligence gathering of western nations today with that of the soviet union)

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing I got from your post is that you are in full agreement and lockstep with powers that say one thing and do another. Congrats to you.

http://www.southparkstudios.co...

Re:No

[just_a_monkey]

As result, ... you push the innocents into the hands of bad people if you mistreat them.

And as a result the secret police must get more funding, and less restrictions and oversight. Or the terrists will kill your children.

Re:No

[Savage-Rabbit]

Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery.

That does not make it OK. It used to be that royalty and the aristocracy could walk all over commoners until a bunch of rag-tag colonists in the Americas got fed up with it, a few years later the French took this idea to the next level an culled their elites. Let's hope it won't come to that this time but eventually people will get fed up with the surveillance society and march on NSA HQ and Thames House like the East Germans did in the 80s except this time they won't be chanting 'I want my Stasi file!', they'll be chanting something like 'Delete my surveillance profile and tear down the cameras!'

Re:No

[hawkinspeter]

I can't believe Queensland has allowed that law to stand - shocking.

Re:No

[serviscope_minor]

I grow increasingly ashamed of continuing to read Slashdot, based on the sadly decreasing quality of commenters.

I only read slashdot for the comments. Specifically, I only read for the "I'm disappointed in the comments" comments with a side order of how things used to be better back in the good old days,

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

How many were murdered by the democratically elected governments toppled by the USA? None.
How many were murdered by the totalitarian governements subsequently installed by the US? Millions.

Did you not learn about American history in school? Oh, of course not, you're American.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

^This. My country (Argentina) worked as a test tube case for all the economic moves USA and Europe are undergoing now. What happened to Greece and Spain happened down here about 20 years ago. Also, the moves Obama implemented to save the Detroit industry (nationalize the companies' debt for example) was done down here at the 70s by a military regime the US (via the CIA and AmCham) helped putting in place. This way the fortunes of the richest guys in the country grew at the expense of the nation. They took debt with foreign loaners with the Economy Minister (which by the way was a close friend of Henry Kissinger) and then declined to pay it. That money they took wasn't put to work at their enterprises, but rather transferred directly to they personal fortunes. And we are still paying that debt, and our sons will probably continue to pay it.

Any resemblance with what happened at the so-called "crisis" back in 2008 in the US isn't a mere coincidence. The economic powers standing behind all the decisions taken by the American government (which makes the average redneck so proud) applied the same logic they devised 35 years ago because they have been planning to transfer the public income to their own assets ever since.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad example. The American Colonies were far less severe in their pursuit of witches than the Old World regimes of the time.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither they were. Many people who fought for the Spanish Republic had serious problems back home. At the very minimum they were labelled as communists and kept under vigilance. Many of them were simply imprisonated.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly they'll look at them and if they have dying parents that should be pretty much the end of it. It's reality and the world we live in.

The reality of the world is that US or UK police cannot possibly prove or disprove that Mr. X went to Syria to see his relatives or to play a soldier. How do you propose to "look at them" if they were in a war-torn country? Should they just ask politely? What kind of an answer will they get?

There is even no way to prove that someone from UK went to Syria. The border between Turkey and Syria is wide open, and you can take a taxi from one country to another. There will be no records, no visas, no stamps in the passport. Once you are out of UK you can go anywhere and do anything you want. Short of being photographed, none of that can be proven. Many fighters keep their faces covered (which is not a bad idea in a desert anyway.)

The monitoring net, done poorly (as you can do it only poorly,) will only snag innocents who are stupid enough to admit that they went to Syria or other hotspots. The bad people will lie to you, and you can't do anything about it. As result, you not only have bad people against you, but also you push the innocents into the hands of bad people if you mistreat them. If you do not want people to go from UK to Syria, why do you admit Syrians into the country in the first place?

The town I live in has been an arabic immigration destination for well over 100 years. We have major public figures with Arab surnames and a lot of these people have come from places that are now "terrorist havens" even if they weren't when great-grandad brought the family over originally.

Using the guilt-by-association rule, each and every person - presumaby including the big political donors, lawyers, doctors, councilmen, mayors, senators and so forth merit investigation should they want to visit their relatives back in the Old Country.

Of course, if you want to go that route, the Cubans visiting their relatives should also be investigated. And the people of Irish descent. And then there's the new wave of Russian, Lithuanian, Serbian and other former Communist immigrants who will almost certainly rise in the local political and social infrastructure in years to come. We know for a fact that some people from there know how to make bombs and use them.

Anybody can have relatives of bad moral character. It isn't something that you have to have on the other side of the planet. Could be the other side of town - especially this past month.

Adopting the NSA-style "suspect-them-all" approach isn't going to do it. You lose the guilty in the crowds of innocents and you punish the innocents for the sake of relatively few guilty.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you explain how funding a terrorist organisation (the Iraq) throughout the 70s and 80s that was operating against the government of a so called close ally (UK government) as in the interests of the US?

Re:No

[Bogtha]

Whom has the US kept from escaping its regime?

Perhaps you missed it, but there were a bunch of people who didn't want to be part of the USA back in 1861, and the USA fought a war to force them to stay. Your country is literally defined by its unwillingness to let people leave.

Re:No

[coastwalker]

It took us a decade to allow Nato to sort the thing out. The Europeans would have done it long before if they didnt have to ask permission from our American paymasters. The only reason

Americans get involved in everything is frankly because they have most of the weapons and soldiers that exist on planet earth. Its surprising that the American tax payer hasn't figured out that the reason they have shit schools and hospitals is because all the tax gets spent on cluster bombs and drones.

Re:No

[sociocapitalist]

You forgot some pertinent facts: The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.

Yes, but they are OUR terrorists, OUR coups, and OUR ENEMIES' democracies.

And we are RIGHT!

Moral choices are so much easier when your country is always right. It's practically like you don't even need to think.

Go Team America!!! FUCK YEAH!!!!

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iron Curtain itself was only possible because of information networks like these surveillance efforts. A modern version of it would not take the same form, but could meet the same ideological ends (keeping people from making any moves not condoned by their regimes, including leaving them).

Just saying they're not the same right now isn't good enough, even if they will never be exactly the same thing.

The Iron Curtain was a deliberate figurative and sometimes literal (think Berlin) forcible isolation of the people of the nations in question from the outside world - and vice versa. The surveillance was part of the whole philosopy, but it wasn't the "chilling effect" that was the primary goal any more than the discouragement of internal travel was. The primary goal was to physically lock people in and out of the country.

Modern-day examples can be seen on the Southern US borders and in Israel, to a lesser degree at the Canadian border, and in the relatively recent additions for the need for a passport and/or fingerprinting when arriving from countries where you used to be welcome from, no questions asked.

We're becoming everything we despised in the old Soviet Union and claiming that it's to "protect Freedom".

Re:No

[AmiMoJo]

So presumably you think it is okay for other nation states to do likewise, perhaps starting a coup to overthrow the Obama regime and install a more friendly and less corrupt government?

Might does not make right. The US is just a bully that seems to revel in war and conflict, mainly because it is extremely profitable.

Re:No

[TheRaven64]

Why would they need to stage a coup? US elections are almost invariably won by the candidate who spends the most on advertising (one dollar, one vote, although I think at the last election is was closer to $10/vote, but that's inflation for you) and the Supreme Court recently removed the checks that made it easy to block foreign funding of candidates. It's still technically illegal, but it's now basically unenforceable. Given the amount of money the US hands out around the world, buying an election would probably be quite a good investment. The $5-10bn of up-front investment can easily be recouped with a couple of favourable trade deals.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The librarian was also a bikie and she was wearing her club colours even though its illegal. You can definitely spin it to sound draconian but to be honest the alternative is much worse - are to you against getting rid of these criminal organisations? This is the first time any measures have appeared to have an effect; and I don't feel at all less free simply because I cant go around wearing a bikie jacket and meeting other bikers in public (so don't bother quoting any Benjamin Franklin ;)).

Re:No

[khallow]

That particular conflict was just a turf war between two rival gangs.

Which apparently generated a million refugees and 5-10k deaths of civilians.

That caused problems later when this gang invaded a neighbour country.

A problem which incidentally was almost an order of magnitude smaller than the original "turf war".

So, it could have been even for the better altogether if US had just stood back - the gangs might have blooded themselves out.

Or they might have not. How many generations are you willing to wait?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is just talking about prosecuting people who have been fighting for terrorists, and scrutinizing those suspected of hanging around with terrorists.

Isn't that the exact sort of logic that was used for the 'Iron Curtain' itself?

Perhaps you should play your political propaganda games elsewhere, where you won't be questioned.

Re:No

[ultranova]

Nation-state acts to further its own perceived self-interests. News at eleven!

So do muggers. Does that excuse them?

Realpolitik is a bitch sometimes, isn't it?

"Realpolitik" is usually used as an excuse for extremely short-sighted stupidity, which ignores both the enemies you're making and the geopolitical climate you're creating. US made its choices, now it just has to live with the consequences, such as its soiled reputation.

When you're fighting for national survival you're going to side with the despot that will ally with you over the democracy that won't.

And when you aren't, it's stupid to engage in such desperate gambits.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

then think of the shrinking of middle class taxpayers (who could conceivably leave the country if they wanted to) being converted in the rapid expansion of the class of citizens that are entirely dependent on government support/welfare (who couldn't leave the country even if they wanted to)

Wrong. Even the poorest always have the ability to 'leave their country' unless the border is kept closed somehow. Poor Mexicans simply walks into the U.S. hoping for jobs. Mexico is not holding on to them - some make it past border patrols that try to keep them out. Africans travel to Europe with similiar hopes.

Americans too can walk into their neighbour countries, or get some shitty job on a boat and jump ship in a foreign harbour. Or visit a loan shark to get money for the one-way plane ticket.

The U.S. may be destroying itself - but poverty will not prevent anyone from fleeing when it gets bad enough. A border closed from the inside may stop them, or neighbours that don't want the influx. It is not that bad yet - american immigrants are still in the 'useful' category.

Re:No

[dunkelfalke]

Well, maybe the civilian death toll would have been less if NATO has not intervened. You see, when a foreign invader comes, even these who would have stood back otherwise, will try to devend their homes.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying we shouldn't prosecute criminals, because "they are only acting in their own self-interest". Do you support that, too?

For criminals is what these people are, more often than not. I don't care one whit how profitable it might be for the U.S. to stage a coup to overthrow a democratically elected government - that kind of action is still despicable, immoral, and illegal.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an unfriendly world with plenty of anger and resentment on all sides. To not look at people traveling to a part of the world that hates us would be failing to practice due diligence.

My, what a warped view of the world.

Really, the terrorism scare is nothing more than fear-mongering. Terrorism simply isn't that dangerous, and the "war on terror" is causing much more damage than the terrorists themselves. Your freedom has been taken from you and you have lost already, but it wasn't the terrorists that did it.

Re:No

[smooth wombat]

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." - - George Bush on Bin Laden in March of 2002

Re:No

[GameMaster]

So, what you're saying is that when the US government used the CIA to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Guatemala in 1954 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) they did so because if they hadn't helped the United Fruit Company continue to make large profits from a cheap source of bananas it would have lead to the fall of the United States? Or was it because they were concerned that their ideology of democracy might spread across the American continents and corrupt our American way of life? Sounds to me like your willful ignorance of history is making you the bitch in this discussion...

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more a case of rogue agencies with internal agendas acting to further their own perceived self-interests.
For the fully documented stuff proved beyond question we have idiocy like one part of the CIA running guns to Castro and another opposing him. We also have an agency in the US selling weapons to Hezbolla less than a year after they had killed off more than one hundred US Marines. That sort of thing made the USA look very weak. It's the sort of thing that showed Bin Laden that he had a chance.

More recently we have the incident in Benghazi in which weapons may have changed hands and for which a US consulate was attacked, people killed and Al Qaeda groups were clearly involved. And our government badly botched the cover up.

Re:No

[Xest]

The bulk of America's dirty operations like assassinations, coups, and insurgencies were in South America. Why would Europe have given a fuck about that?

It was entirely because America was shit scared of having communism gain a foothold on the same strip of land on this Earth that America sits on. Why would that have been Europe's problem? It was entirely about American paranoia of communism and self-preservation.

Re:No

[ultranova]

Your country is literally defined by its unwillingness to let people leave.

Funny, I thought that was the defining trait of the Confederacy, at least for non-integral values of "people".

Re:No

[Xest]

What? carrying out HumInt on people with extremist Islamic beliefs who have just been overseas training and where they're likely to see increased radicalisation and where they are likely to get their first taste of real actual blood is precisely the sort of thing internal security services should be doing.

There's nothing dictatorial about it whatsoever. Dictatorial is NSA/GCHQ style spying of entire populations regardless of risk, THAT is dictatorial. What MI5 are doing in this case is exactly what they're there for, exactly the sort of thing all internal security services should limit themselves to in fact.

The worst part is it's like you even actually get it but are blowing it up as something it isn't regardless. You say it's what they do there that matters. Well guess what? they're not spying on people working for the Red Cross/Crescent, they're not spying on chemical weapons inspectors, they're spying on people whom they have intelligence that have crossed the Turkish border or whatever into Syria without being part of any group. This is standard security procedure for any nation, just as someone heading to Russia during the cold war without a reason such as business would be checked out as a possible spy, someone smuggling themselves illegally across the Syrian border without being there as part of a charity or whatever will be checked out for being an extremist threat.

There's no guilt by association, because there's no accusation of guilt, there is however suspicion, so unless you completely fail to grasp the justice system in most of the Western world then you'll understand that police and security services can have suspicions based on evidence of individuals without them declaring they're guilty. If there was accusation of guilt, or punishment as if guilty then that would be dictatorial, but that's not even close to what's happening here.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Which apparently generated a million refugees and 5-10k deaths of civilians.

A problem which incidentally was almost an order of magnitude smaller than the original "turf war".

Doesn't matter. You have to understand you're now on the receiving end of the typical "government can't do anything right" argument. Whatever number of deaths and suffering you think the government prevented by sending in the troops, it will always be compared to some fantasy libertarian option where less suffering and death would occur if we let free market handle everything.

Do note that free market doesn't have to mean "do nothing". In a free market, you can have private mercenaries who can be hired (by private individuals, not government, I'm not talking about Pinkertons) at a competitive price to fight. Those private mercenaries, being private, will surely be more efficient in fighting than government, saving more lives and refugees and achieving objectives quicker and for less monetary cost. Best of all the taxpayers aren't forced to pay the bill. Just like private charity, only those who wish to contribute will pay for mercenaries.

Re:No

[operagost]

It doesn't need to be an Iron Curtain. Now that the west is as authoritarian as the old Soviet Union, there is no place to which to escape.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Our society is welcoming people with a nice, soft velvet glove. Pay no attention to the iron fist inside.

[Hey, it's no more of a twisted metaphor than the original article trying to turn our surveillance state into an "iron curtain"]

Re:No

[operagost]

All this Anti-American sentiment in an article about oppression in the UK. It seems we've hit a nerve.

Re:No

[asylumx]

We're only right when my party is in office! Everything we do is wrong when your party is in office!

Re: No

[um... Lucas]

We only learned how to do what we do from our parents (the British). And every other empire or attempted empire in history would have used the tools available just like we do. Besides, doesnt Britain (or maybe just London) have more cameras than people at this point?

Say what you want, I'd rather be here in the us than so many other places... China, Russia, any of the "istan" countries, any Arab country, Israel, any where in Africa, and so forth.

Not to minimize our wrongs (and if you're bored enough to look at my old xomments you'll see I'm consistent at calling them out) but there are plenty of other countries that are far worse than us. Yeah, some do it with our support but plenty do it without.

I just get perturbed, here and other places (ahem... Reddit!), where people act like the US is the singular most evil and oppressive country in the world, when the fact of the matter is that that we can even say such things without worry of reprisal means that we have it far, far better than huge swaths of humanity.

Could we be better? Of course. Could we be worse? Frighteningly more so.

Re:No

[ganjadude]

perhaps starting a coup to overthrow the Obama regime and install a more friendly and less corrupt government?

we can all dream cant we?

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe we must stop talking about governments, or even countries. Who really rules our world is a small set of the richest people on Earth. They decide who gets a Peace Nobel prize, even when that said person endorses atrocities such as Guantanamo, or robot planes killing innocents in forgotten places. Or even who gets to be the Pope. All in the name of keeping the people calm for a couple more years...

Re:No

[Richy_T]

First they came for...

Re:No

[Richy_T]

Just under Washington DC.

Re:No

[RocRizzo]

One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. When they keep track of their people's whereabouts, they might as well be "keeping them from escaping."

Re:No

[Richy_T]

Nostalgia comments aren't as good as they used to be.

Re:No

[TangoMargarine]

Seriously, we had to come up with a new, rarer version of a unicorn because we run into too many unicorns walking down the street or something?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the Serbian nationalists prepared the conflict with years of propaganda. Saying that the mafia did it is little narrow view, unless the claim is that the whole nations are working under those organizations.

Re:No

[Kelbear]

Can you elaborate on that? Why does Luxembourg want to rent a fighter jet? What threats is that jet meant to protect against? I get why larger countries need military forces as a defensive measure, but given Luxembourg's scale, it seems like there's no military force short of nuclear weapons that they could raise that would present a deterrent against potential aggressors.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the Cold War era Soviets also tracked their citizens everywhere.

Re:No

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yeah, more of a Wi-Fi curtain than an Iron Curtain.

The Iron Curtain was largely physical, depending on massive manpower and in many places concrete, razor wire, and other physical barriers, to maintain.

This is just citizen tracking. And mostly virtual.

Re: No

[Urza9814]

I just get perturbed, here and other places (ahem... Reddit!), where people act like the US is the singular most evil and oppressive country in the world, when the fact of the matter is that that we can even say such things without worry of reprisal means that we have it far, far better than huge swaths of humanity.

Depends on your perspective. Internally, yes, we're bad but not THAT bad. Externally though we're pretty awful. How many countries go around slaughtering toddlers in other countries, which they are not at war with, and won't even provide a reason why they do so?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Weapons yes, Soldiers not so much. Look at China for sheer number of reserve soldiers ~ 2.25 million for China compared to 1.5 million US.

Re:No

[C0C0C0]

No. *NOT* like the U.S. The Iron Curtain kept people in and information out, In no part of the West is this the case. Seriously, folks. I get not trusting the government. I get being skeptical. But a knee jerk instinct to constantly bring up all the mistakes one's country makes isn't particularly healthy, either.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

We're already there.

In UK 800 000 kids have had their fingerprints recorded and put into digital database to "check who have paid their school lunches"..!! There is also an anti-pron filter in the same country on the internet which "accidentally" blocks sites as f*cking Amnestu International and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Re:No

[Algae_94]

On the contrary, if all the confederates wanted to leave and go to Europe, that would not have been a problem. It was the idea of them taking US property with them that was frowned upon. That property being the land all the confederate states were on.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Colorado set off alarm bells? Nobody there but dope smoking hippies and rich tourists.

Re:No

[amiga3D]

You know how these things work don't you? They interview people and they ask questions. Most of the questions they ask they already know the answer to. If you lie to them that's when they start to really get interested. Thousands of people like this get interviewed and mostly nothing ever comes of it. You may think it's a waste of time and hell, you might be right. The authorities attitude is that if they do it enough eventually the odds will play out in their favor.

Re:No

[amiga3D]

I actually sort of agree with you. For the most part these terrorism attacks are flea bites. With an occasional exception like 9/11 they mostly are just a minor annoyance. On the other hand a lot of this craziness from people screaming we're under dictatorship and our rights have been taken away are just as overblown. People love to blow things out of proportion to support their own viewpoints.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what democracy is that.
The one that puts blacks in prison for coke or the one that lets a politician quit his job for coke.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

A minor pedantic nit: don't use "whom" unless you know how. Not "whom has the US kept" but who the US kept. You're trying to look sophisticated and educated and come off looking like an ignorant fool, a faux-intellectual. Just stop it.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been to DC?

Re:No

[amiga3D]

I'm all for letting Europe handle it's own problems as are most Americans. We watched for years as Yugoslavia tore itself apart and no one did anything. Thousands of bodies paraded on the nightly news here with lots of stuff about "ethnic cleansing." They finally drummed up enough support to get action on it. I wasn't for it as I felt like it was their civil war and it should run it's course. By the way, we spend more per kid on schools now than we ever did and we get less education. It isn't all about money. I'd put our hospitals up against anyones though.

http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u...

http://hospitals.webometrics.i...

Re:No

[tqk]

Your country is literally defined by its unwillingness to let people leave.

No, that's a trait common to many civilizations, nor is the US an exemplar of the practice.

Re:No

[TangoMargarine]

Once, yes, a number of years back. Is this some in-joke that I haven't heard?

Re: No

[darkwing_bmf]

The reason we point out the bad things about America is we're American. Other countries are irrelevant.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

No joke...something doesn't compute in that statement. Where I come from, a "biker" is someone who rides a bike (or perhaps a motorcycle) and a librarian is a person who has a particular job in the public sector. So why would someone be arrested for this? I fail to see even what pretense could be used for such an arrest.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you be ashamed you slow-boiling frog. How can you have a whole history, tons of books, movies and what ever, covering totalitarian states, covering their methods, MO and still be so blind?

It may be that we have no refusniks, or people killed at some random wall, even if there are different opinions about that. Yet. But you have to be willfully stupid if you don't realize that there's a problem if the biggest difference is that there are no concentration camps yet, other than Gitmo. Shame on you.

Re:No

[kenshin33]

demoracies???
iran? Congo? Chile? Argentina?

Re:No

[akozakie]

I had no idea about this, but it doesn't seem one bit strange to me. You're thinking in the categories of nation states at war. A small country like Luxembourg has absolutely no way of effectively protecting itself in that scenario - it needs to rely on politics and economy as its strong points. But there are other uses of a military, not against a nation-state aggressor - and for those one fighter makes sense.

Imagine something like 9/11 in Luxembourg. Given the country's scale, the losses would be tragic (for the US as a whole the actual losses were negligible, the effect was largely terror and its political consequences). Now think - what if they got a threat one hour in advance? And had ONE fighter ready for action? The difference between one and none suddenly looks a lot different.

That's why it would also make sense to maintain a small but highly trained special force. A couple of armored vehicles (perhaps even a light tank or two). For tiny countries at the shore of a sea or lake, or even with a large river - some armed boats. This kind of army won't keep you safe against an invader, but works well against a small extremist group, a crazy man with a home-made "tank", a couple of well armed criminals who would tear your regular police force apart... It is potentially very useful. And relatively cheap.

Now, versus nation states... One thing I would consider would be to train most able-bodied citizens in guerilla tactics and have well trained special forces ready to disperse at first threat of invasion. That kind of thing can make occupying even a very small country a very costly and frustrating experience. If your neighbours know you've been doing this for years and you have good diplomats... You might get to stay neutral. You're so small, you're just not worth the trouble.

Re:No

[Jane Q. Public]

"What? carrying out HumInt on people with extremist Islamic beliefs who have just been overseas training and where they're likely to see increased radicalisation and where they are likely to get their first taste of real actual blood is precisely the sort of thing internal security services should be doing."

And that's what *I* wrote. It doesn't matter where they go. What matters is what they do when they get there. Thoughts don't matter. Even "dangerous" thoughts, ideas, and discussions don't matter. Where people are from, or where they go, doesn't matter. It is what people DO that matters.

--
"The true test of whether people believe in the idea of freedom of association doesn't come when you allow people to be free to associate in ways that you think they should. It comes when you allow people to be free to associate in ways that you find despicable." -- Walter Williams

Re:No

[Shakrai]

At no point has survival as a nation been under threat.

I guess you're too young to remember the Cold War. This nation was less than 60 minutes away from ceasing to exist from roughly the late 1960s until the fall of the Soviet Union. From 1949 to the late 60s we weren't threatened with total destruction, but the Soviets still had the ability to do enormous damage. It wasn't until the late 60s when they caught up and surpassed the US in the ICBM race that they really had the ability to effectively destroy the United States. They retained that ability until the fall of the Soviet Union. Heck, the Russians still have it, though the geopolitical situation is different these days.

Point being, it was a different mentality. The policymakers who were in office on 9/11 came of age during the Cold War and responded to that threat accordingly. They didn't see an isolated terrorist attack on 9/11. They saw an existential threat and responded accordingly. Part of this reaction was scenario fulfillment (Google it if you're not familiar with the term), the other part was pure panic and fear. Days of Fire has an interesting takeaway from one of the many interviews the author did with George W. Bush, something about Bush watching the towers come down and thinking to himself that he just watched more Americans die in a single moment than any President since Lincoln.

You're free to criticize the choices that American policymakers have made over the years, but you'd do well to remember that you've got the benefit of 20/20 hindsight while doing so.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Two sources;

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-24/librarian-is-first-woman-charged-under-anti-bikie-laws/5218212

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/brisbane-woman-accused-of-being-a-motorcycle-giant-participant-charged-after-meeting-two-men-at-pub/story-fnihsrf2-1226809726293

Re:No

[crutchy]

Even the poorest always have the ability to 'leave their country' unless the border is kept closed somehow

have you seen any US border crossings lately? they are crawling with feds... you can't even fart without providing ID, and good luck going anywhere if you're on a government watch list

google "boat people"

poor people can't even get to the border let alone afford visas and whatnot to leave the US and be accepted in the target country

Re:No

[Xest]

Right, so why did you then jump on to the conclusion about it being dictatorial and police state like if you accept that when something people do matters in terms of needing investigation that it's chased up?

It's that bit of your post that didn't make sense relative to your realisation that it's okay for authorities to investigate people if they do something that is suspect like illegally cross a border into a warzone?

Re:No

[hawkinspeter]

When I first heard about that, I thought someone was making it up.

Unbelievable!

Re:No

[khallow]

Well, maybe the civilian death toll would have been less if NATO has not intervened.

And why would that be the case? Keep in mind that the trigger for NATO intervention was the massacre of civilians by participants (particular, the Serbian side).

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Moral equivalence is such a tiresome branch of political correctness.

Still with the naivete of someone who has never lived outside the US we can expect no better.

Re:No

[Vitriol Angst]

What you describe here is that no "guilty person" with an ounce of intelligence would be caught going directly to Syria or be tracked.

So basically, the only person they are going to get are the high anger, low information people who are disgruntled, or the odd tourist.

As usually, absolutely nothing of real intelligence or security is involved. England sounds like their security services are as useless as ours.

Re:No

[Vitriol Angst]

As result, ... you push the innocents into the hands of bad people if you mistreat them.

And as a result the secret police must get more funding, and less restrictions and oversight. Or the terrists will kill your children.

So it's a Win/Win for state security -- no wonder they create these pointless programs.

Re:No

[Vitriol Angst]

You know how these things work don't you? They interview people and they ask questions. Most of the questions they ask they already know the answer to. If you lie to them that's when they start to really get interested. Thousands of people like this get interviewed and mostly nothing ever comes of it. You may think it's a waste of time and hell, you might be right. The authorities attitude is that if they do it enough eventually the odds will play out in their favor.

Meanwhile they anger 99% and create resentment, and people who lose jobs start considering becoming part of whomever is fighting the power.

The BEST WAY to have security is an equitable distribution of opportunity, education and human rights. It worked great in America until all the "work in the shadows" and play with army toys when nobody is watching types like Rumsfeld got someone to listen to their Dr. Strangelove ramblings. In the US, it's old codger Billionaires and the PNAC that is a major source for this; "must kill all the enemy" attitudes. They were clueless to prevent it, or they caused it -- either way the Security State is as much a creator of bad guys as it is a hindrance, if not more so.

Re:No

[Vitriol Angst]

Kind of like the four British soldiers they caught in Iraq -- not sure if they were in Sunni or Shi'a garb and blowing up the other factions mosque. Whichever side they were inciting -- it was clear they were "making more work."

I still don't know if it was idiocy that made them padlock and keep Saddam's weapons depots, send all the soldiers home with weapons and no jobs, and design the government along religious factions and send Heritage Foundation "experts" still wet behind the ears and full of Libertarian economics as consultants to "improve" and utterly break the country. It's either idiocy or smart people using idiots to create a civil war and extort Production Sharing Agreements (let same companies run the oil wells as before Saddam).

Small government arguments don't seem to pay enough attention to all the disparate spook groups running around with no oversight and unlisted agendas. I think they are worst threat because nobody has them on a watch list and they should.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Realpolitik is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? When you're fighting for national survival you're going to side with the despot that will ally with you over the democracy that won't.

If the despot allies with you but the democracy doesn't, you're already doing something wrong.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they need to stage a coup?

For a contemporary example, watch Quantum of Solace and pay attention to the deals Mr. Green makes.

Re:No

[Jane Q. Public]

"Right, so why did you then jump on to the conclusion about it being dictatorial and police state like if you accept that when something people do matters in terms of needing investigation that it's chased up?"

Because they weren't being investigated for something they DID (i.e., some sort of activity related to terrorism). Instead, they were simply investigated for somewhere they went. That's not responsible security investigation! That's discriminatory profiling, which doesn't work.

As someone else mentioned: maybe they have relatives in the area. Who knows? But the point is: investigating people for such superficial things as what country they visit is a pointless waste of time. Or maybe even damaging. I compare it to internet filters that prevent college psych students from even researching child molesters. It's counterproductive.

If you look at Israel, for a very good example: in their airports they don't profile people for where they come from or where they're going. (Even though -- if it actually worked -- they would have more reason than most to do so.) They profile people by how they behave. What they do. It's the only important thing.

Re:No

[Xest]

But they were being investigated for what they did, that's the point.

You can't get into Syria legally without being an aid worker, a diplomat or similar. The people being investigated could only have got there in the first place by smuggling themselves across because it's not those crossing legitimately that are being investigated.

It's not like Syria has a tourist visa programme right now. You still seem to miss the obvious though, you cite Israel as an example saying they go purely on behaviour, tell me, how do they deduce people's behavior if according to you they're not allowed to do any kind of investigation such as asking people near them if they have witnessed suspicious behavior? That's exactly what's happening here, it's absolutely no different.

I think you've been suckered by the sensationalist headline and have completely missed this for what it is, because it's no different to what you're saying is okay, hence why your arguments make zero sense. You're saying something is ok when Israel does it but not Britain.

They're not profiling on where these people have come from, there profiling on whether they've been reported by bordering nations like Turkey as having been caught crossing into or out of Syria illegally. If they were profiling on where someone had been they'd be examining reporters, aid workers, diplomats and OPCW inspectors. They're doing no such thing, and that's why you are wrong to suggest this has anything to do with simply where people have been.

For everyone who said "what do you have to hide?"

[SecurityTheatre]

In discussions about government spying and surveillance, there is often a vocal group who says "if you don't have anything to hide, then this spying should not bother you."

The counter argument is that governments have tended to take information they are given and when the right person is in power, or the right sentiment strikes the public, those programs are expanded and distorted beyond their original intent.

I'm sure in the 1970s and 1980s when these programs were first beginning to be set up, they had noble intentions of only ever targeting known criminals and spys, and eventually were justified by saying that if makes people feel more secure in a post-9/11 world.

But the reality is, even without these programs, we live in the safest time that humanity has ever seen. The odds of dying of a freak accident like choking on a grape are more real to the average person than terrorism, or crime.

This is not the right solution to this invented problem.

Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

That Britain is the place where 1984 actually happens.

Re:Irony

[AdamColley]

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

More seriously, it is getting a bit that way here and the idea that you can be held simply for travelling to a country the government of the day doesn't like is outrageous.

For a start anything you do outside the country is none of their damn business. Secondly people may well have very legitimate reasons for going, perhaps they have friends/family there, perhaps they're working for an aid agency, amnesty, independent media or doctors without borders? This country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Additionally, this scumbag government is trying to get rid of the human rights act and withdraw us from the european convention on human rights, the tabloid fodder they're using to justify it is that prisoners may get the vote if we stay in. (which they should have anyway, they're supposed to lose their liberty, that is all, not be tortured/raped/beaten in private prisons or detention centres and not disenfranchised.)

Re:Irony

[Bing Tsher E]

Well, George Orwell, who was British, wrote the novel.

Re:Irony

[LifesABeach]

I believe it was refered to as "Airstrip One"

Re:Irony

[gmuslera]

This Britain is where 2014 is actually happening, and is making 1984 look outdated, and optimistic.

Re:Irony

[dwater]

Wikipedia says he was English, but born in India.

Re:Irony

[hjf]

Some countries (i think the US) have laws against sex tourism. So if you go to another country, where it's legal, and have sex with a prostitute, you could be prosecuted for that. Yes, I know, the point of the law isn't that. It's about discouraging sex tourism to places like cambodia where people go to have sex with children. But really, even with that, it's really a bit too far fetching. The intentions of the law may be good... but punishing people for what they do outside their own sovereignity isn't the way.

The problem with laws is that they're just words written in paper. And the constitution is just another law. They could just as easily make an ammendment to the constitution allowing for "secret laws" you have to follow, but you can't know about (based on the principle that ignorance of the law is not a defense). Like the soviets did.

Re:Irony

[Guy Harris]

This Britain is where 2014 is actually happening, and is making 1984 look outdated, and optimistic.

So a boot stamping on a human face forever is better than the UK now?

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Current day britain is bad, but 1984 still is way worse than it. We should be afraid of getting closer to 1984, not assume we already passed it.

Remember, however bad surveilance is here, at the end of 1984 it was shown everything was under surveilance as well, to a further degree than they imagined.

Re:Irony

[JustOK]

That's what they say for every Scot.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Some countries (i think the US) have laws against sex tourism. So if you go to another country, where it's legal, and have sex with a prostitute, you could be prosecuted for that. Yes, I know, the point of the law isn't that. It's about discouraging sex tourism to places like cambodia where people go to have sex with children. But really, even with that, it's really a bit too far fetching. The intentions of the law may be good... but punishing people for what they do outside their own sovereignity isn't the way.

The problem with laws is that they're just words written in paper. And the constitution is just another law. They could just as easily make an ammendment to the constitution allowing for "secret laws" you have to follow, but you can't know about (based on the principle that ignorance of the law is not a defense). Like the soviets did.

So, traveling to the "foreign" state of Nevada and partaking of legal prostitution there can land me in jail when I get back to America? Prostitution is a States issue not a Federal one in the U.S..

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, George Orwell was the pen name of the author. His real name was Eric Blair, and he was born in Bengal in 1903.

This is taken directly from the first page of my copy of the 1984 edition of the novel 1984.

Re:Irony

[blackraven14250]

Actually, the US doesn't have laws against prostitution at the federal level. It's regulated at the state and local levels, which is why it's only legal in Nevada (under very strict regulation, only in brothels), and still illegal in some counties in Nevada. The federal government would only get involved if there's a human trafficking or prostitution ring that spans multiple states, or tax evasion.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the US doesn't have laws against prostitution at the federal level. The federal government would only get involved if there's tax evasion.

FTFY

Re:Irony

[Richy_T]

The federal government would get involved if they felt like it

FTFY

Re:Irony

[Richy_T]

at the end of 1984 it was shown everything was under surveilance as well, to a further degree than they imagined.

Wait, I though you were saying that we shouldn't assume we already passed it.

If you go to Syria, then rats will eat your face.

[Anonymous Coward]

You will love the Party.

Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

The notion of this being an Iron Curtain is a bit silly IMHO.

However every country on Earth has laws against their citizens defecting to the enemy, and serving as enemy combatants. Why should Muslims get a free pass, because it's currently unfashionable to call them out on antisocial and illegal behaviour (under the rubric of "anti racism")?

You don't, as a Muslim or anybody else, move to the land of milk and honey, take advantage, and then go and wage war against your country's interests. If you do so, then your adopted country is well within its rights to deal with you as they would any traitor.

Re:Iron curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's what this article is trying to point out. The west opposes assad. These guys oppose assad. Shouldn't they be given a hero's welcome?

Re:Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

They are, by and large, joining al Qaeda-affiliated militant groups.

If that doesn't constitute treason, then I don't know what is.

This hasn't been lost on the good proportion of our elites, who have wisely seen this, and have decided that Syria is best left well alone. A self-cleaning oven, if you will.

Re:Iron curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how joining the rebels in Syria as a Brit makes one a traitor. So long as your actions are not directed against the UK, it would not be treason, at least in the classical sense.

Re:Iron curtain?

[top_down]

A hero's welcome ha ha.

What would the festivities be like? Letting them bomb a few buses?

Most people in the west oppose both Assad and Al-Qaeda.

Re:Iron curtain?

[greenbird]

The notion of this being an Iron Curtain is a bit silly IMHO.

You're right. What they're doing is far more oppressive and effective than anything the creators of the Iron Curtain ever dreamed of.

However every country on Earth has laws against their citizens defecting to the enemy, and serving as enemy combatants.

Those laws are supposed to be applicable when the country is at war, at least in a country with rule of law. I wasn't aware that Britain was at war with Syria.

Why should Muslims get a free pass, because it's currently unfashionable to call them out on antisocial and illegal behaviour (under the rubric of "anti racism")?

So now what you're saying is that "antisocial behaviour" is the equivalent of serving as enemy combatants.

The Western Democracies are so far down the slippery slope people like you can't even see the top anymore. They've got their propaganda machines cranked up to a level that would leave Goebbels in a highly admirable daze.

As someone further up posted, your chances of dying from choking on a grape are far higher than dying from a terrorist attack. Yet here you're defending the government monitoring and oppressing a group simple for have what you define as "antisocial behaviour".

Re:Iron Curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

Mod parent up.

Re:Iron curtain?

[crutchy]

They are, by and large, joining al Qaeda-affiliated militant groups.

If that doesn't constitute treason, then I don't know what is.

try telling that to john mccain

Re:Iron curtain?

[dkleinsc]

Why should Muslims get a free pass, because it's currently unfashionable to call them out on antisocial and illegal behaviour (under the rubric of "anti racism")?

Because the vast majority Muslims who either enter or leave "the land of milk and honey" are not enemy combatants or terrorists or intending to fight any kind of war. For every genuine terrorist in the Muslim community, there are approximately 250,000 who have nothing to do with it. What you seem to be arguing is that we should oppress 249,999 innocent people in order to catch the 1 bad person.

My guess is that you don't know any Muslims personally. I've known a few over my life, from a bunch of different areas of the mostly Muslim world (Kurdistan, Bosnia, Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, and home-grown American). They fundamentally want what you want: A nice place to live, a good job, education and opportunities for their children, political freedom, and hope that their lives will be better in a decade. And to think otherwise is simply bigotry.

Re:Iron curtain?

[dwater]

> what you define as "antisocial behaviour".

Perhaps he/she was just being literal - I think it is literally correct, no? Perhaps he's English who are famed for their use of 'understatement'.

Re:Iron curtain?

[Mr. Slippery]

They are, by and large, joining al Qaeda-affiliated militant groups.

U.S. servicemen in WWII fought on the same side as the Soviets. Therefore, joining the U.S, Army is joining a Communist-affiliated militant group.

"Many news outlets and analysts frame all foreign fighters as terrorists or al Qaeda-aligned. The reality is more complex. As mentioned above, not all rebel forces in Syria are jihadist in orientation, nor are all the jihadist groups linked to al Qaeda. Furthermore, not everyone who has joined a jihadist group has been motivated by a fully formed jihadist worldview.... Based on the sheer scale of recruitment that is currently taking place, European security services are well advised to monitor the situation closely and adopt an intelligence-led, highly discriminate approach towards dealing with returning fighters." -- http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/european-foreign-fighters-in-syria [emphasis added]

Re:Iron curtain?

[NatasRevol]

Try telling anything thing to that asshat.

Re:Iron curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we are able to post these words, especially as an AC, it shows that there is still freedom in the West. The apparatus that tracks terrorists is overreaching, to be sure. Even so, we are not oppressed, nor are we being jailed for stating that the US government scares the hell out of us, when in days past they make us proud. You can live where you want, work in the field you want, and watch whatever you want to on TV or on the web. Cry as much as we do, we are nowhere near being behind an aluminum curtain, let alone an iron one. You may be tracked. But, you are not shot at when trying to leave the US. You are still free. Enjoy it by bitching about it all you like.

Re:Iron curtain?

[pspahn]

A self-cleaning oven, if you will.

That's a pretty fucked up way to put it. +1

Re:Iron curtain?

[dbIII]

If that doesn't constitute treason, then I don't know what is.

Supplying weapons to those al Qaeda-affiliated militant groups because someone in Saudi Arabia asked nicely?
Oh wait. That's the US not the UK. Either way the treason label can't be applied so easily to that situation even after 9/11.

Re:Iron curtain?

[crutchy]

yeah good point... mcain is merely john kerry's butt boy

Re:Iron curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

but, hanging out with al Qaeda learning how the west is all infidels that should die, learning to use weapons and explosives, been in combat and possibly killed
is serious cause for concern

Re:Iron curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who trained Al Qaeda again?

Re:Iron curtain?

[jabuzz]

And illegal; al Qaeda are a proscribed terrorist group in the United Kingdom, so simply hanging out with them as a U.K. citizen anywhere in the world is an offence for which you can be arrested and imprisoned.

This is nothing new, the Terrorism Act 2000 which is the current relevant legislation pre-dates 9/11 by well over a year.

Re:Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

Sometimes, you have to choose your battles.

Every dog has his day. Just wait.

Re:Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

Indoctrination, basically.

If you go and fight, you build trust and a deep bond with the people you're fighting and dying with. And you'll very likely take on their world-view, especially if you see your friends being blown to pieces/raped/tortured by "kuffar". If that world-view means "waging war against the kuffar until Islam rules the world", then the West, I think, is justified in considering anybody returning from fighting with al Qaeda to be just a little bit suspect.

Remember that the Western countries have their own interests, culture and way of life to defend. Many people here are proud of their culture and way of life, and want to see it defended with all the means available.

We are completely within our rights to defend ourselves against hostile elements, and I support any action my government takes to act robustly in a defensive way.

Re:Iron curtain?

[dbIII]

A problem here is that rogue agencies have gotten the US involved in more than one side, so it's not being "left alone" at all. So the "elites" didn't get any say.

Re:Iron curtain?

[Antique Geekmeister]

> You're right. What they're doing is far more oppressive and effective than anything the creators of the Iron Curtain ever dreamed of.

I strongly suspect you've not discussed this with anyone who actually lived behind the Iron Curtain, such as Estonians, East Germans, Poles, or Russians. I've known engineers and scientists from all those nations, before and after the Iron Curtain existed. It was worse than what we're seeing now, as a matter of degree and as a matter of neighbors and colleagues reporting on each other.

It's not that western nations haven't _tried_ for that level of censorship and monitoring: It just hasn't been as broad, nor as successful.

Re:Iron curtain?

[greenbird]

I strongly suspect you've not discussed this with anyone who actually lived behind the Iron Curtain, such as Estonians, East Germans, Poles, or Russians.

I know a few people that experienced it. No one had every contact they made with with anyone recorded and stored forever. A very limited number of people had their location tracked constantly 24/7. There is no need to rely on informants reporting on their neighbors. The technology will track everyone and everything. Just wait until facial recognition becomes reliable. What people don't realize is the exceptional level of power and control provided by the misuse of the technology available today. We are at a crossroads right now. The technology available today could provide a level of knowledge, freedom and prosperity never before experienced or it could be the tool for the greatest level of control and oppression every established. The "free" western democracies should be championing the former. Instead they're rapidly moving towards the latter.

Re:Iron curtain?

[Shimbo]

Because the vast majority Muslims who either enter or leave "the land of milk and honey" are not enemy combatants or terrorists or intending to fight any kind of war.

Yes, but that's not the point is it? We're not talking about the vast majority of Muslims, we're talking about the ones that have just returned form a war zone.

Re:Iron curtain?

[houghi]

Move there? Many of the people are born there and some even for many generations. New born Muslims.

Re:Iron curtain?

[greenbird]

Since we are able to post these words, especially as an AC, it shows that there is still freedom in the West.

That's just not true. With the level of monitoring and control they're trying to establish they don't have to overtly oppress every modicum of dissent. Far better to let the sheep bleat. When they can track and have a record of every place you've gone and every person you've contacted it gives them the ability to let dissension go until it actually gets to the point it is seriously disruptive or has a chance to change things.

You can live where you want, work in the field you want, and watch whatever you want to on TV or on the web.

I can only watch on TV what they put on TV. If you don't think the corporations running TV are in bed with the government you really need to open your eyes. In a lot of the western democracies you can no longer watch what you want on the web. And they can track everything you look at on the web. We don't really know to what extent they are already doing that. That's not freedom. There are so many laws in the US the friggin Library of Congress can't even tell how many there are. No one can possibly know when or if they're breaking a law. If the government decides they don't like you they can find a whole host of charges to bring against you. Just ask Aaron Swartz. That's not freedom. If you report on illegal activity by the government you're at the least hounded out of your job and taxed with unbearable legal expenses. If your smart you just end up exiled, persona non grata. That's not freedom.

You may be tracked. But, you are not shot at when trying to leave the US. You are still free.

Wow. Just Wow. So unless they shoot at you you're free? They track where you go and imprison you if you go someplace they don't like. Yeah, that's freedom alright.

You're evaluating the control and oppression exercised by the government in terms of the historical past. To put in in military terms you're fighting the last war. The technology has advanced to the point that the tools of the past are no longer relevant. Hell, Winston Smith had a higher level of freedom than we're going to have once facial recognition becomes effective. At least he could move around with some level of freedom. The way they're going now every security camera will be tracking and recording your every movement.

Re:Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

You guessed wrong. And my impressions are wholly justified. Most of the many muslims I've run into were simply not very nice people.

Re:Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

The physical location of one's birth doesn't confer any extra rights or any extra virtue over and above the immigrant. All citizens are equal in the eyes of the law.

If I were to go to Syria and join al Qaeda, I have my waterboarding coming just as fast as any brown guy with a European passport.

Re:Iron curtain?

[benjfowler]

+1.

I had close relatives who came from behind the Iron Curtain.

It was no joke.

Re:Iron curtain?

[dbIII]

What do you think of the problem of alternately backing several dogs though - including some rabid ones?
People are being tracked by their governments because they are fighting for people that their governments are arming.

Is this article a bunch of nonsense?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Nuff said

Re:Is this article a bunch of nonsense?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this insightful? Sometimes a question is just a question, and the point is to have a discussion. If anything, ending this with "nuff said" shows just how intellectually bankrupt you are. I guess you just weren't fast enough to say "first post!", huh?

Abuse of power... always

[Anonymous Coward]

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said "The objections to despotism and monopoly are fundamental in human nature. They rest upon the innate and ineradicable selfishness of man. They rest upon the fact that absolute power inevitably leads to abuse."

Look at what happened to people's politicians like Tony Blair and Obama, or government goons like Clapper and Alexander who defile the Constitution and flip us the bird. History as far back as we know it shows absolute power is always abused, to the point now where politicians and government workers are never held to account. The answer is to roll back government to the bare minimum necessary: I have no need to be led. People have to stop letting those who abuse power off the hook so easily and to punish those who violate our rights severely and decisively with impeachment.

This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[mi]

The Iron Curtain's primary goal was to keep the information (about West's superiority) out — and own citizenry in.

As long as the British are free to leave their country, things are Ok... Letz, I believe, once said: "A country you can leave is the country you can live in."

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[Anonymous Coward]

What? That's the only bar you set? Being able to leave your country? What does it matter if you're being spied on no matter where you are? Welcome to the new millennium.

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[Aighearach]

You fail to comprehend that there can be something bad that isn't an "Iron Curtain."

Other bad things have different bars. That is expected.

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[Anonymous Coward]

Then might I suggest wording your statements next time to not sound like an Iron Curtain is the only thing that will stop British folk from leaving their country? Or that anything (bad or otherwise) can happen and it would still be fine as long as British folk could leave Britain? I don't think it's my comprehension that's failed here, it's that you failed to communicate your actual thoughts.

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[dogandpants]

Perhaps not. But there are similarities and is that not enough to tell you that the West has changed in an evil way? I think it does, and I also think that similies aren't meant for close inspection. The NSA and parallel happenings in Britain *do* remind *me* -unhappily- of the vilified (rightly so) practices of East Germany and the USSR.

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[Anonymous Coward]

To put it another way: "A wall big enough to keep them out is also big enough to keep you in."

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[mi]

But there are similarities and is that not enough to tell you that the West has changed in an evil way?

I don't like where the West is going for the last 15-20 years either. But to calling it "Iron Curtain" is getting close to tripping the Godwin's Law...

Re:This does not make for an "Iron Curtain"

[Solandri]

Bingo. I think a lot of people too young to remember the Cold War look at China, see that it's Communist, and figure the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain was like that. It wasn't. The Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War was more like North Korea.

Next Up: NSA Youth

[l0ungeb0y]

All children between the ages of 6-18 should be allowed to volunteer for our patriotic service program where they can learn to surveil and report on friends, family and neighbors to help keep our country safe and protect our freedoms.

Well, duh...

[PopeRatzo]

Is the West Building Its Own Iron Curtain?

Gee, ya think? What has it been, like over a decade since the Patriot Act and people are just now figuring it all out?

I'm glad that the totalitarian impulses of the global elite are finally starting to penetrate peoples' realityTV-addled brains. Maybe pretty soon they'll figure out that it's just a mechanism to promote the redistribution of wealth upwards.

Then it will get interesting. I can't really fault people for taking a long time to figure out that ubiquitous surveillance and a corporate/government surveillance regime is a bad thing. I didn't want to believe it myself until around the middle of last decade, when it became impossible to deny.

But it's one of those things that once you see it clearly for what it is, you can never un-see it. Now, it's impossible to see practically any major news story without seeing the effect of developed, industrial nations turning into gulags.

Re:Well, duh...

[Aighearach]

I can't really fault people for taking a long time to figure out that ubiquitous surveillance and a corporate/government surveillance regime is a bad thing. I didn't want to believe it myself until around the middle of last decade, when it became impossible to deny.

Considering that there is still substantial disagreement and debate about if it is good or bad, I don't think you're going to persuade anybody by telling them that their opinion is impossible.

I think a better approach is to communicate why it is bad. You're probably going to need to figure out how to get that message into a "Reality TV" format in order to get through to most people.

Re:Well, duh...

[cold fjord]

I'm glad that the totalitarian impulses of the global elite are finally starting to penetrate peoples' realityTV-addled brains. Maybe pretty soon they'll figure out that it's just a mechanism to promote the redistribution of wealth upwards.

So you are suggesting a scheme along the following lines?

1) Track people going to terrorist training camps / fighting alongside terrorist groups
2) Arrest them when they return home
3) ???
4) Profit!

I'm not sure what #3 is, and how it leads to meaningful profit for the "global elite."

Does arresting something on the order of 40 people for this over the last 2 years really make Britain a gulag?

Re:Well, duh...

[ewibble]

Here you go
1. Track people
2. If they do anything that you don't like arrest, them terrorism is a convenient starting point Really a very small problem.
3. Track any exchange of information, knowledge, can't have the people owning knowledge that is the domain of super rich. Evil pirates you know.
4. Charge people for using, that information
5. Anybody who runs for political office against you have a convenient database of information against them and/or their family.
6. If that fails you know exactly where they are and what their habits are so you an arrange an accident.
5. Profit.

This is all for the good of the country, we don't want those, communist, terrorist, insert current group you don't like here, running the country they will ruin it, its worth sacrificing a bit of freedom.

I am serious about the last part I believe that these agencies truly believe they are doing it for the good of the nation.

Re:Well, duh...

[cold fjord]

There isn't much profit to be made in trying to corner the market on training to fire an AK assault rifle.

I think very few people that fight along with al Qaida are going to be running for office in either the US or UK. There isn't much profit in trying to exploit them either.

Re:Well, duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit how does drivel like this get +5 insightful? Clearly, you have no conception of what the Iron Curtain was like. This is what the Iron Curtain was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pUmfKX3C04

We're a long way from that. If you think otherwise get a clue and get off the computer for a change.

Re:Well, duh...

[PopeRatzo]

Clearly, you have no conception of what the Iron Curtain was like.

I have lived behind the Iron Curtain and met my wife, who was born in such a place, there. I still visit an ex-Soviet satellite state every year. So I have family who can fill in the details that I did not experience first-hand.

The difference between that and this is that the technological tools of repression and surveillance are much more advance today.

Re:Well, duh...

[PopeRatzo]

Considering that there is still substantial disagreement and debate about if it is good or bad

So we are told.

Re:Well, duh...

[PopeRatzo]

Does arresting something on the order of 40 people for this over the last 2 years really make Britain a gulag?

The story didn't say we had an Iron Curtain, but asked whether or not we are building one.

Have you ever heard the expression "soft tyranny"? Well, it's getting harder. Ask people whose political web sites are being blocked by Britain's "porn filter". Or people who have found themselves on a no-fly list in the states, who are offered a fair hearing to be taken off the no-fly list, as long as they are able to travel to the US, which they can't because they are on the no-fly list.

The UK has been something of a pioneer in surveillance state adoption. But it appears that all of the Western nations are pulling together in this regard today.

Re:Well, duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ehh.. this isn't about terrorism or anything you silly fool...

This is about total and complete control over everyone to keep yourself in power..

You see, if you have enough information on every living being in your country, you can use that as weapon to erradicate everyone that opposes your "vision". You know - everyone that questions your behaviour must surely be an terrorist, sex offender or anything they could find (true or not) in the pile of data that is collected on you. It is an coonvienient way to dispose opponents and strengthen your power (until it's absolute)..

Won't happen? Just wait my friend. I still can remember that people could not believe we ever would be in the state we are now...

It is happening.. right under your nose...

Re:Well, duh...

[Aighearach]

Indeed. Hearing people debating something proves that it was debated.

How many other things can be sure of just by hearing it? Very few.

Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

House neighbours or country neighbours?

Curtain?

[Anonymous Coward]

We must ascertain whether the curtain matches the drapes.

british citizens detest zionist nazi facism too

[Anonymous Coward]

as do the genuine isreal folks & the rest of us billions of unchosens. only the greed fear ego based WMD on credit perfect baiance genocide cabals require gestapo tackdicks everywhere

Re:british citizens detest zionist nazi facism too

[Aighearach]

Sorry, but I'm not sure your English is good enough for me to take seriously you telling me what British citizens do or do not detest.

Re:british citizens detest zionist nazi facism too

[dwater]

Wow, I was thinking the same thing. The punctuation is terrible and makes it painful to read. I have to parse a few of those points at least twice - I didn't bother after the first few.

slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[julian67]

There are British citizens or residents who, in a private capacity, engage in armed conflict abroad, often due to alliegance to ideologies and religious beliefs that deem their home country to be a target, and they come to the attention of the state, and other states who also fear being targeted by the same people for the same reasons. They may have to explain themsleves on their return home, and may be arrested if suspected of criminal activity. In the mind of some slashdot submitters and editors this can apparently be equated to the imprisonment of hundreds of millions of people, and the killing of many hundreds or even thousands simply for trying to travel abroad.

Dear fucking cretins at slashdot,

here is a small hint: there was no equivalent of Heathrow or Gatwick airports or Dover or Southampton ferry ports in the DDR, the USSR, or any of the other "people's" republics. If you're British and you want to travel abroad do you know how hard it is? You go to the ferry port and get on a ferry. You need some money and some ID such as a driver's license. That's it.

I'm pleased that people who train for and engage in murder and kidnapping are actually faced with the prospect of being held to account, whether they do it here or in Syria or Pakistan or Ulster or anywhere else.

So if you think just getting on a boat or aplane and crossing a national boundary should amount to a license to do as you please and some kind of immunity then just fuck off and get a clue or if that is too difficult maybe you can ask mommy, but please stop whining and regurgitating your misunderstandings, half truths, and flat out lies.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Aighearach]

Yeah, this is no different than Americans traveling to Northern Ireland in the past, and having their finances examined when they get back to check if they gave money to terrorists.
I say that as a Celtic-American with Irish Republican sympathies. I can imagine being on either side of this sort of issue, in the right circumstances. My country should check me out if I come back from a conflict region. That is simple and practical.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Shakrai]

I have the same name as a well-known GOPper nutcase so the bureaucrats that run that part of the government that are typically Democrat did not want to give me permission to travel

I'm calling BS on this. I'm holding my DS-82 in my hands right now, just gotta get the photo done before I send it off for renewal. You're compelled to release your SSN when applying for a passport, in part to prevent such incorrect identification. Your passport was probably held up for bureaucratic reasons, I highly doubt there was a deliberate attempt to do you harm.

In my case I don't even have any immediate travel plans, but mine expires in March and I'd like to have it current just in case something comes up. Ya never know. :)

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 'get a brain morans'. Get it right.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Anonymous Coward]

So...just need your "Papers, please"?

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. It is way too hard in this country to get permission to travel. We should not have to get their permission to leave just as we shouldn't have to to get married, but the Democrats are supporting more restrictions, more fees, and more oversight of marriage. Some of the marriage "freedom" proposals like the one here in CA contained hundreds of new pages of laws. Yes, they are correctly supporting gay marriage, but they are also much more greatly limiting and adding more government control to marriage. I wish the Democrats would just stay the fuck out of our rights to travel and to marry.

I was first granted the right to travel during the Clinton administration. That was a fourteen month battle that required dozens of phone calls, about $4k in legal fees, and two trips to the office in Atlanta, GA. The first trip was a waste because they said my required "proof of travel" wasn't strong enough. I just looked at their web site.(http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/passports/information/where-to-apply/agencies/atlanta-passport-agency.html), and it still states that they will refuse you a passport without sufficient proof of travel. That problem still hasn't been fixed. Even after all of that, I still had to pay a $60(IIRC) expedite fee. That really pissed me off. Paying extra for an "expedite" fee when it took fourteen months was just over the top.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[hubie]

I've been through a passport application and two renewals. All it took was filling out the form and sending it in with a couple of pictures. I never needed to ask permission to travel, and all three times I sent in paperwork, I did not have pending travel. I am not sure what you mean by "get permission to travel." From whom are you asking permission and why?

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS. First off, it you don't already have your passport it's no big deal to get one. Second off, if you want to travel without a passport, grab your ID and your credit card. Go to Mexico. From there you can go to just about any Central or South American country with a few greenbacks.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[misexistentialist]

Makes no sense, unless your real position is prostration to government, whatever it decides to do to you. True, it's very simple and easy

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Anonymous Coward]

> Go to Mexico.

That is not legal without either the permit showing you have the US government's permission to travel(passport) or an enhanced drivers license. They will not let you across the border without one of those two items.

Also, you simply cannot fly out of this country without the permission booklet. The airlines can't legally let you on a plane. The iron curtain around the US was constructed by Bush in 2005. I used to enjoy going to Vancouver, BC for the weekend to visit my girlfriend, but I can no longer go.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[will_die]

Yes they will, it is no problem. They may ask for drivers license or passport when coming back, I showwed them my regular 9 year old driver license, non-enhanced and was right in. Othertimes coming back in they see the US license plates and we get waved right in.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Alioth]

Now try travelling direct to Cuba as a US citizen. You'll find that indeed you need permission to travel to some places.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[cazzazullu]

Exactly. In the Netherlands and Belgium, there have been hundreds of youths recruited to go fight in Syria. Dozens of them have been killed already, often by fellow fighters or competing groups. They mostly end up with the most radical factions, related to Al Quada, adhere to strict Sharia law, and are too extreme for all other groups (citizens and "decent" rebels alike). These are the guys that send back videos of them decapitating innocent elderly people, playing football with their heads, raping and mutilating anyone who dares cross their path. Recently, a bunch of these guys were found in a large villa with a pool, living in luxury, in some conquered village in the north of Syria. Their passtime: kidnapping, raping and killing innocent women. There were 30 bodies already...
We do NOT want these people to come back to the west. They are DANGEROUS, and I fully agree that whoever goes to Syria right now gets at least some questions on return.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[hubie]

I won't disagree there might be a few isolated places, but that post seems to suggest that you need to get official permission to travel anywhere, and that getting a passport is tied to this permission. If that was the case for that person, then my guess is that there were some out-of-the-norm circumstances that was not mentioned.

Re: slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[Anonymous Coward]

most of us are not saying it's THAT bad yet, what we are saying is if we keep letting them create laws like this than it _will_ get that bad.

Re:slashdot: idle speculation for ignorant morons

[thrich81]

julian67 -- I broke my vow not to post any more on Slashdot in order to congratulate you on the greatest ever title to a Slashdot comment. The comment itself was good, too.

Brown Curtain

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that was the idea behind the border fence/patrol. To keep all the southern nig^H^H^H Mexicans out.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[tapspace]

Spot on. I just lost my modpoints, or I wouldn't be commenting, I'd be promoting.

Like all rational policy, there needs to be some sort of risk/reward analysis objectively performed on the "security" aparatus in the West. For 100 years of claiming superiority as the "first" world, we seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater at an alarming rate seemingly in reaction to the various growing pains in the "second" (and, in some cases, "third") world. What happened to our example? Even more frighteningly, what WILL happen? The massive security aparatus of the West (and, obviously, the US first and foremost) represents an enormous risk to future security of the freeman. And, it counters an absolutely miniscule risk in comparison. This is no sensible policy. I pray to God (literally) that this is reversible.

Well, we had a good run

[Anonymous Coward]

After WWII, technology grew by leaps and bounds, and lots of naive optimism about how we'd have a leisure society or end world hunger. Instead we're regressing to how humans have always behaved: high school students with armies.

Re:Well, we had a good run

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking the same thing. You'd think with all this amazing technology The World would be becoming a better place, but it seems quite the opposite. Makes me wonder if we'll ever graduate to adulthood

It may have already started

[novar21]

Start looking into the P20 council. Here in the states, they track you from the time you enter preschool. Adds a new meaning of permanent record - lol. Here is a link to get you started: http://www.ecs.org/html/educationissues/HighSchool/highschooldb1_intro.asp?topic=p-20 Link

Iron Curtain?

[mbone]

Iron curtain, no. Stasi, maybe.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Aighearach]

The US is not "first and foremost," the UK has 100% information sharing with the US. We are fully and entirely the same team in this.

is the west...

[Anonymous Coward]

You still need to ask?

Democracy can be totalitarian.

[hessian]

Do you have freedom?

There are ideas that get you thrown out of your job, ostracized by others and possibly arrested or publically censured.

If you don't toe the line and you lose your job, you probably don't have the money to hold out for long.

We have the same totalitarian state as the Soviets, we just found a decentralized method to control it.

The UK is such a repressive country...

[Anonymous Coward]

I truly hope it falls to ruin.

NSA Youth

[o_ferguson]

Already a thing: http://www.nsa.gov/kids/

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds of dying of a freak accident like choking on a grape are more real to the average person than terrorism, or crime.

"Stay tuned for the weekend weather, but first: Silent Killers could be Lurking in your Kitchen, waiting to Strangle you and your loved ones. As troops receive a warm welcome home, the President is actually calling for an increased budget to prevent what Leading Threat Analysts call a War on gRape."

Ghandhi Jesus impersonator from Canada shackled

[Deliveranc3]

Just got deported from Panama for challenging their gender politics during an election, fortunately I didn't challenge any of their other fundamental failings. They were very upset the men I riled up killed several women which I knew nothing about. I was there to meet a non-vocal indigenous tribe, very un prime directive but entirely my fault.

Anyway something that felt a lot like the hand of government came down and scooped me up and put me custody. I can take questions at deliverancelev 4 2 hotmail dot com. And will be writing a book on it over the next few days if you'd like to hear about it. Check out information regarding Bocas Del Torro and Changinola revolution over the last 5 days. My revolution wouldn't have been violent but I was too locked up to help.

Re:Ghandhi Jesus impersonator from Canada shackled

[Anonymous Coward]

take your 'gender politics' somewhere else.. people are tired of the 50+yo 'women are repressed' refrain.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Shakrai]

The counter argument is that governments have tended to take information they are given and when the right person is in power, or the right sentiment strikes the public, those programs are expanded and distorted beyond their original intent.

You don't even have to look at surveillance programs to prove this point. My favorite example? The US Census was used to assist in the rounding up of Japanese-Americans for internment. It was also given to General Sherman during the Civil War and helped his Army identify productive areas of the South to destroy during the March to the Sea. Neither usage was condoned by the laws in force at the time the data was collected. The usage to track down Japanese-Americans wasn't even legal at the time and remained secret for decades after the war.

I get my census form and they get one piece of information: X number of people live here. Race? "Other: American"

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

I pray to God (literally) that this is reversible.

I see. Well, thanks for nothing. Some of us are trying to do something about it. Maybe you could help instead of chatting to your invisible friends about it...

We should Reconsider it's Immigration...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really think we should reconsider I policy of allowing the less crazy people to emigrate from difficult countries. We are in many cases allowing a condensation of people we are irrational and hate us. We then wonder why this countries get worse and worse every year and more people want/need to leave this countries because it's gotten too crazy for them. Another problem is that some of the truly crazy come in a family package or some of them come in-order infiltrate but most of them are people who just want to escape into a more peaceful life.

3......2......1

[Ol Olsoc]

What is the average number of comments before any problem can be blamed on or deflected to the US? Must be something like 3 or 4.

Re:3......2......1

[GrahamCox]

That many? But it's obvious that basically ALL problems are the responsibility of the US, so it may as well be first post.

Yes, I'm kidding, but only a bit.

Re:3......2......1

[Ol Olsoc]

That many? But it's obvious that basically ALL problems are the responsibility of the US, so it may as well be first post. Yes, I'm kidding, but only a bit.

It sort of reminds me of the old joke:

A guy walks up to another guy who is looking for something under a streetlight.

"What you looking for buddy?"

"Oh, I lost my keys"

"Wherabouts did you lose them?"

"Over about a hundred feet away."

"Then why are you looking over here?"

"The light's better here!"

Fun for some to blame the US for every problem, but it won't fix the problems that have nothing to do with us.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

I did that in 1990, and they called me back on it.

Betteridge's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is within my rights as a commenter (or even if it isn't), I request that slashdot stop it with the headlines written in the form "absurd accusation framed as a question." It's starting to feel like Gawker with all that sensationalist dreck.

Re:Betteridge's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd also like to add a request that Slashdot posters stop being asinine about posts phrased as questions when they are, in fact, questions. Especially ones that are trying to provoke discussion. Invoking Betteridge's law in this case makes you look even more childish, like somebody who really just wanted to say "first post!" but missed their chance.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to our example?

In the good old days, the feds seized and read all communications entering or exiting the border. All people of Japanese ancestry were sent to concentration camps because some of them may have had sympathies to the Emperor. Obscenity and sedition were crimes as they always had been, and the Supreme Court recognized them as exemptions to the First Amendment. Homosexuality was a crime as God intended. Need I go on?

Getting back to the topic, anybody who came back to the US or Britain after volunteering for the Wehrmacht in the middle of the war would have been shot after a very short trial.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

... the UK has 100% information sharing with the US.

riiiiight. mini me, you complete me!

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us are trying to do something about it. Maybe you could help instead of chatting to your invisible friends about it...

Just so as you are aware, sounding off all indignant on Slashdot (and coming off sounding all ignorant) is about as productive as chatting to invisible friends.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[dwater]

what happened then?

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[dwater]

iinm, something similar happened in the UK too, if you can count the Isle of Man as the UK :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
"Isle of Man church service marks Manx link to Holocaust"

"The Manx Holocaust memorial service is a "poignant" reminder of the Isle of Man's role as an internment centre during WW2, said organisers.

Between 1940 and 1945 thousands of Jewish refugees were held as "enemy aliens" in six island internment camps."

Shameful. Kind of reminds me of Gitmo...

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[dido]

Very well put. What I like to say to people who say that they have nothing to hide is a quote from Cardinal Richelieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." This massive trove of surveillance data can and will be used against anyone whom the powers that be don't like, and it is very easy to twist casual remarks and jokes out of proportion, to destroy the credibility of someone who may rock the boat. God forbid you are actually be doing something perfectly legal that isn't socially acceptable. If you stay one of the proles, sure you have nothing to fear, but if you try to do something useful like, oh, try to run for public office with a mind to changing how the government does things, those six million lines and counting describing everything you've ever said and done will be examined, and they will definitely find something in them which will hang you.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[hjf]

How about the one of... i don't know what country, which recorded peoples' religions so they could give them proper burial. Until they were invaded by the nazis. You know how germans love efficiency, you can only imagine what a happy day it must have been for them.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Mr. Slippery]

Don't know what happened to the poster to whom you're responding, but I always answer the census form only with the number of people here. I've gotten personal visits from census takers; I tell them, "I've told you all I'm going to tell you, good day." I have not yet been dragged off to Gitmo for doing so.

The Constitution authorizes an enumeration, not an interrogation. Other demographic information that the feds may legitimately desire -- it is useful to base policy on data, after all -- can be obtained via voluntary anonymous surveys.

Tell that to the Uighur of China !!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes. This article is just talking about prosecuting people who have been fighting for terrorists, and scrutinizing those suspected of hanging around with terrorists. It has auras of creepy surveillance, but definitely is not an Iron Curtain.

Please tell that to the Uighur of China !

China is also using the same "terrorism" excuses to suppress its Uighur population.

Isn't that a bit too hypocritical for the West to criticize China while they themselves are preparing to do the same thing to their own Muslim citizens ?

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[NatasRevol]

Lots of countries have 100% information sharing with the US.

It's called strongarming/bribing/blackmailing/flat out threatening.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

ianal but last time I looked up the laws there wasn't any penalty for non-cooperation

there is a $500 fine (unknown if it was civil or misdemeanor) for providing false information (unknown whether or not there is an intentionality clause)

so the correct answer is always to provide nothing, since there is no penalty for just ignoring them

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's never "100%" There's always phase lag, transcription errors from data reformatting, and simple deceit in what is transmitted to other country's security forces.

Advanced version ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Iron curtain, no. Stasi, maybe

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201...

Even a true-blue Stasi operative (retired) couldn't help but to marvel at the level of sophistication the Western Stasi has in their possession.

Wolfgang Schmidt, 78, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Stasi, lamented that during his stint in the Stasi organization, their listening devices could only spy on 40 telephone lines at once. Targets had to be prioritized, and to take on a new spying subject, an old one had to be let go.

Re:Advanced version ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The STASI aspect is the neighbours spying on neighbours aspect.
I guess it could fix the jobs problem though. just make everyone spy each other as a job(it doesn't fix import/export problems for said country though).

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[ignavus]

In discussions about government spying and surveillance, there is often a vocal group who says "if you don't have anything to hide, then this spying should not bother you."

Answer: "So, if that is the case, then you won't mind giving me your name and address and phone number. After all, `if you don't have anything to hide, then this spying should not bother you'."

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Aighearach]

That is the old days

They have direct access, it is different than getting a copy in their email.

Yeah, right

[PPH]

Just try traveling to North Korea for a nice pickup game of basketball and see what happens to you when you get back.

Re:Yeah, right

[will_die]

From the standpoint of the USA and for most Europian citizen the problem with traveling to North Korea is getting North Korea to allow you in.
Now when you get back,provided you got in, we have plenty of examples of what will happen and that is NOTHING.
Now if North Korea was hosting a bunch of training camps for various known and identified terrorist groups and you went to one of those for weeks or months you would have some problems when you came back.

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of journalists have done just that. When they came back, they wrote boring articles about only getting to interview 'approved persons'.

People with genuine communist sympathies have travelled there too. When they came back, they were spied on but no more than before their trip. And they wrote boring articles about the 'workers paradise' they visited.

So it seems visiting NK results in boring articles. Worthy of prevention perhaps, but an iron curtain is expensive. . .

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Mexico

Without a passport (you know, the US government's permission to travel), you can't legally fly there. You can't legally fly anywhere outside of this country without it. I know you Democrats call that not a big deal, but keeping people in this country at gun point is a pretty damn big deal. I'd love to visit my daughter in Panama, but I was denied a passport.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Drive.

Mexico doesn't care if you have a passport. I doubt Panama cares much either.

It may be slightly more annoying coming back without one, but it's not illegal, you can't be arrested for it.

And don't you EVER forget that this was a Republican idea, started by Bush.

If it took Slashdot this long...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and if it takes Slashdot this long to figure it out, with the paranoia that is common around here, imagine the rest of the world...

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

It counters a very severe risk:
People could vote against the corruption of the idea that government exists to serve the people. Right now the trend in 'Western' government has been generally towards enacting ever larger tax breaks, copyright protections, and corporate-welfare schemes to enrich the wealthy while slashing consumer protections, environmental protections, safety protections, social benefits and such.

In the past...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past (Canada) locked up people who arrived from parts of the world the country or its allies were at war with (Ukrainians and other 'former subjects of Austria-Hungary'), likewise Japanese during the second world war (Germans were under suspicion). The US did similar things during world War 2. People acting as 'soldiers of fortune' during the Spanish civil war were treated with suspicion, and those fighting in wars in the middle east clearly have strong intentions for one side or the other, and if they return to a peaceful country and keep their warring ways, the peaceful country is no longer peaceful. Take for example the two men that --at random-- beheaded a British Soldier . Clearly its in the public interest to stop people from acting in a war-like manner, and if they are returning from a war zone, they are either do-gooders, or soldiers. Do-gooders, show us what you did, we can support you. Go to war? Please don't mind if we detain you.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[rastos1]

While I like your post and stance, I have to say something: I live in a country of about 5 million people. From that it is estimated that about 400 000 are gypsies. And it is estimated that at about 100% of them are on unemployment benefits and social welfare (which is a significant cost for the state). But those are just estimates. We are not allowed to track the race or ethnicity by law here and so we don't know any of that for sure. We don't know how many schools need to have teachers speaking their language, we don't know how many social workers we need or what health care issues they have. We don't know what crime rate is related to them, or what is the literacy rate. We don't know the fertility and mortality rates are so we don't know if the problem grows or shrinks, etc. etc. The country on the other hand receives hundreds of millions of euro from European Union to support those that are in disadvantage due their ethnicity and prejudice - and we don't know if that money was spent efficiently or whether it was blatantly "misplaced" at advantage of some corrupted bureaucrats ...

So on one hand: yes, the dangers of misusing such data is big - as the history taught us (I mean right here in this very country - which is actually the reason for the tracking ban). On the other hand not having that data causes real problems to the whole society.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it. Risk analysis has been made but it's not about citizen's security. It's about chances to be elected. Never forget the primary goal of politicians. It's having a job, not doing your interest. So security theater and mass surveillance.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[dbIII]

It's also one way. Even PFC Manning had access to a lot more than people with a high clearance level in allied nations. That's mostly due to a fuckup in classification levels and bad defaults but it happened and probably still is.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[dbIII]

Australia did the same thing, and with a twist held the Jewish refugees under far more rigorous conditions than the actual prisoners of war. My parents had a lot of contact with Italian P.O.W.'s who were let out unsupervised on day passes.
The UK and British Commonwealth had a similar suspicious attitude back then to Jewish refugees that is being shown to Moslem immigrants now.

Erg

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting to remove moderation mistake.

News at eleven

[Anonymous Coward]

> Geopolitics make for strange bedfellows [...]

And we should approve of all this because?

Listen. I can understand why a Palestinian who has lost half of its family to Israeli bombings blows himself up taking with him a bus of Israeli schoolchildren. *That doesn't mean that I approve of that!*. It stays an horrible act and shouldn't have happened.

I can understand that Oliver North, Keith Alexander or whoever does the nasties he does. *But still, as a citizen, I stay firm that those are no-nos and they should be chased off their positions, because they're harming democracy*

Re:News at eleven

[Joce640k]

The Palestinian doesn't have a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to back him up and he does it himself, not by sending other people to do it for him.

Re:News at eleven

[Anonymous Coward]

The Palestinian doesn't have a trillion dollars of another nation's taxpayer's money to back him up and he does it himself, not by sending other people to do it for him.

FTFY. In other news, Netanyahu vows to fight to the last American.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

In discussions about government spying and surveillance, there is often a vocal group who says "if you don't have anything to hide, then this spying should not bother you."

Yes, your privacy is all there is to it. No need to enquire about where we get the authority to act in this way. None at all - only terrorists and child perverts would ask questions like that!!

Neighbor against neighbor...

[mysidia]

The program seems to consist of being spied on by the returnee's cooperative neighbors.

Isaiah 3:5

“I will make mere youths their officials; children will rule over them.”
People will oppress each other—man against man, neighbor against neighbor.
The young will rise up against the old, the nobody against the honored.
man will seize one of his brothers in his father’s house, and say,
“You have a cloak, you be our leader; take charge of this heap of ruins!”

But in that day he will cry out, “I have no remedy. I have no food or clothing in my house;
do not make me the leader of the people.”

Jerusalem staggers,
Judah is falling; their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence.
The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom;
they do not hide it. Woe to them!
They have brought disaster upon themselves. "

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

But the 100% is usually one-way. The U.S. only give what they feel like giving.

Fuck the fucking muzzies

[Chrisq]

if terrorists are attacking you keeping them out is NOT building an iron curtain, which was mainly to keep people in. If you want to see an iron curtain look at pakestan trying to stop persecuted Hindus and Christians from leaving.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

Is belief in an invisible entity with magic abilities an admirable trait? And can not having the same superstitious belief be categorized as 'sounding all ignorant'?
There is no empiric proof for any deity, despite thousands of years of trying.That's why it's called belief. Same category as Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. Making fun of anyone who still believes in one of those is not indignant nor ignorant. It's called 'growing up', 'telling the truth', and 'being realistic', and is in my view an act of kindness. The sooner this planet is purged of its superstitious beliefs, the better.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

> But the reality is, even without these programs, we live in the safest time that humanity has ever seen. The odds of dying of a freak
> accident like choking on a grape are more real to the average person than terrorism, or crime.

I disagree. I live and work in Brussels. As so many others, the sky high housing prices have driven me to rent a small studio in one of the suburbs. My car has been vandalised so many times that I gave up my license plates. My studio has been burgled 2 times in less than 5 years. Many of my coworkers that live here as well have seen (or were part of) agression on the street. I don't leave my home after 9h evening. I do my shopping in the supermarket on the other end, because the chance of being attacked outside one the local stores is too high. My story equally applies to other major European cities. Just tell me where these "safe times" are exactly?

When the British owned India..

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, there are Brits born all over the world.

Because we owned most of it at one time or another....

You don't understand what the Iron Curtain was

[Anonymous Coward]

I know people that have crawled under the real Iron Curtain, and they would regard your question as laughable.
I've been into East Germany twice, and was in Berlin the week the wall came down. There are so many useful questions you could have asked; this question is more-or-less irrelevant.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Didnt East-Germany do that with secret police?

Funny how easy it is democracy to slip into fasist state.

Re:Queens SUBJECTS

[Anonymous Coward]

British subject hasn't applied to native British since the British Nationality Act 1948

Please get a fscking clue before posting?

If you're British and you want to travel...

[Justpin]

It isn't that easy actually, in the past few years the British government has bee pissing off a lot of foreign governments, and as such they impose restrictions on entry. Russians and much of the former USSR imposes restrictions on Brits such as only being able to apply for Russian visas in London. Anybody else aside from US citizens can apply at any consulate. TBH the thing is it is over hyped, as once you leave the UK how exactly do they know where you have been? other than tracking your ATM withdraw? The UK passport sure has an RFID chip but these break within a year. For instance my 2009 trip, no passport checks all the way to the Serbian border. Then no passport checks until the Albanian border which was a simple glance. Then Turkey had a passport check, this check consisted of paying $10 for a stamp and $20 for motor insurance. They didn't write anything down. A couple of others who split from me went to Syria and again visa on border written in a paper ledger. Crossing into Georgia they wrote down my passport number on a paper ledger, same with Azerbaijan (the border guards were more interested in bribes). Kazahstan same written in a paper ledger. Russia entered into an ancient computer system which didn't look networked as there was just a power cable out the back. But you do have to register with the cops in Russia. Mongolia paper ledger and a photocopy. Korea stamp on arrival no scanning no recording of numbers. North Korea stamp on a bit paper, China, they looked at it stamped the pre bought visa and waved me through. On return to the UK in 2010, the border guard scanned my passport, found the RFID chip was broken opened the first page and tapped in the number manually, he didn't even look at the pages of visas I'd used. So its scaremongering.

A fiscal iron curtain for 46 million Americans

[An dochasac]

I've been through a passport application and two renewals. All it took was filling out the form and sending it in with a couple of pictures. I never needed to ask permission to travel, and all three times I sent in paperwork, I did not have pending travel. I am not sure what you mean by "get permission to travel." From whom are you asking permission and why?

I live abroad and have been through several passport applications and renewals. But for many of my American friends and family, the cost is prohibitive. They will never be able to visit me and they can no longer visit other parts of North America.

The cost of an adult US passport book and is currently $140 plus a $25 "execution fee." Add the photo, paperwork and postage and you're getting near $200 add another $150 for a file search if the person can't produce evidence of citizenship. Minors (under 16) are $95+$25. So for a family of four living in, say Niagara Falls, NY or Detroit, Michigan it can range from $570 to $1170 for the right to cross over to a better neighborhood on the Canadian side. You might say, "What's $570, that's only the cost of an iPad or iPhone?" But for many, this is two paychecks, a month's rent, the family car or a medical bill for a minor visit to a medical center. The US has an iron-curtain but it applies to the 9.9% of white Americans, 12.1% of Asian-Americans, 26.6% of Hispanic-Americans and 27.4% of Black-Americans who live below the poverty line.

Political freedom for all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, just look at all the political freedoms after the Arab spring. Freedom for all!

Oooh wait that's not what happend at all anywhere...

Re:Political freedom for all.

[dkleinsc]

That is exactly what just happened in Tunisia: They approved a constitution that specifically protects the rights of women and religious minorities. It was also the country in which the US and Europe interfered the least in what was going on, which I don't consider a coincidence.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[tapspace]

Deep, man. You're like enlightened.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

In discussions about government spying and surveillance, there is often a vocal group who says "if you don't have anything to hide, then this spying should not bother you."

I always reply with, "then you won't mind if I stand here with my AK-47 in the voting booth with you. Just to make sure you are safe when voting."

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't say that this is the only thing he does. And what's wrong if he gets a bit of personal relieve by praying?

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[drinkypoo]

It's called strongarming/bribing/blackmailing/flat out threatening.

We learned from the best. We are the child who has surpassed the parent. The UK doesn't get to get all whingey about it now. They literally created us, first by colonization and then by subjugation of people who would not be subjugated. Taught us some very bad lessons, they did. Now we've learned them. Can't cry about that.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[drinkypoo]

ianal but last time I looked up the laws there wasn't any penalty for non-cooperation

IANAL but I know how to use google. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2010/03/count_me_out.html

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an impressive douche

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[EasyTarget]

Lots of countries have 100% information sharing with the US.

It's not really sharing, in the traditional form of the word.

More like paying protection money, to be honest. I mean, you might get back something you can use against your political enemies (so long as they are Americas enemies too), but mostly you have to hand it over and not look them in eye; and all the while some thug is poking under your head of sate saying thing like 'this parliament looks a bit old to me, positively a fire hazard really, be a shame if it burned down.. what do you think?'

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[EasyTarget]

On the other hand not having that data causes real problems to the whole society.

Yes; in particular it makes it very hard for Hungarian Nazi Wannabees to round everybody up in one go.
I think I can help though; that '100% of gipsies are claiming welfare' figure was shat out of a bigots arse.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait. I thought the Germans (at the time) were evil, because they sent innocent jews to concentration camps.

Now, you're telling me that either the Germans controlled a far bigger part of the UK than I was taught, OR both sides were evil, and WW2 was not about good vs bad, but about strong vs stronger.

Stupid revisionist history books...

Yeah, I knew about the Japanese Americans (though I think I learned that later, and the history books back in school skipped that part too), but not about this.

At least the Americans had the excuse (not that it's a valid one, but they had one) of being at war against the Japanese. The UK was supposed to be at war against the people who were putting jews in concentration camps.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

Very well put. What I like to say to people who say that they have nothing to hide is a quote from Cardinal Richelieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." This massive trove of surveillance data can and will be used against anyone whom the powers that be don't like, and it is very easy to twist casual remarks and jokes out of proportion, to destroy the credibility of someone who may rock the boat. God forbid you are actually be doing something perfectly legal that isn't socially acceptable. If you stay one of the proles, sure you have nothing to fear, but if you try to do something useful like, oh, try to run for public office with a mind to changing how the government does things, those six million lines and counting describing everything you've ever said and done will be examined, and they will definitely find something in them which will hang you.

You're right. Once I had a co-worker whom screwed up a major project affecting the security of the personnel of the organisation. He filed a complaint claiming I was being too hard on him - for expecting him to carry out his mission so to speak. After his screw-up was dumped in my lap to fix I made the off-hand comment to the effect that if we were an operational unit I would have put a bullet in his head. He retorted with, "We are an operational unit." The last thing he saw was a handgun and the sound he heard was a single shot fired into his head. I sat down at my desk and resumed my work.

Not 'free' to leave Australia...

[beaverdownunder]

Australia has exit border control. You have to contact immigration even if you leave by boat. They will ask you your itinerary, residences overseas, and contacts overseas.

You can be prevented from leaving if you are an Australian citizen or permanent resident and the authorities think you'll be negatively affecting Australia's international interests while abroad.

You can also be arrested and placed in detention if you don't have a valid visa (even if you're leaving!)

So no, the idea of a western country keeping people in, or tabs on them when they leave, is not unheard of.

WTF? Please Explain.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is going on with Oz law? Motorcycle clubs are outlawed? Why? What about bowling clubs, golf clubs, or yacht clubs?

A search "turned up a number of illicit items, including a snake." I'm all in favor of eliminating snakes, but is owning a snake really illegal in Oz, or was this a particular banned deadly snake? Again, WTF fuck is going on with Oz law?

Re:WTF? Please Explain.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is going on with Oz law?

Maybe you should ask the Wizard of Oz. ;-)

Re:WTF? Please Explain.

[dbIII]

There was no enemy for the type of scare politics being played so one had to be created.

A little clarification

[voss]

The internment of Japanese-Americans was immoral and unnecessary, the use of census information in wartime to track enemy aliens was less problematic than the internment of Japanese-Americans who were American citizens. The law allowing the use of the census data was passed in 1942 and repealed in 1947.

http://www.scientificamerican....

However, Sherman had every legal right to get census data on farmland (not persons) in any even he used information from state of georgia quoting sherman
"I had obtained not only the United States census-tables of 1860," Sherman wrote in his Memoirs, "but a compilation made by the Controller of the State of Georgia for the purpose of taxation, containing in considerable detail the 'population and statistics' of every county in Georgia" (Sherman)."

http://proceedings.esri.com/li...

Re:A little clarification

[Shakrai]

The law allowing the use of the census data was passed in 1942 and repealed in 1947.

I said that the usage of the data wasn't condoned by the laws in force at the time the data was collected. Detailed information provided during the census is supposed to remain completely secret until 70 years have passed from collection. There is no law currently in place that allows exemptions from this confidentiality requirement, nor was there on 7 December 1941. Passing such a law after the data has been collected is a bit of bad faith, wouldn't you say?

Sticking Point

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with the sentiment of your post, you undermine your argument, at least amongst the myopic "nothing to hide" types with this statement:

But the reality is, even without these programs, we live in the safest time that humanity has ever seen. The odds of dying of a freak accident like choking on a grape are more real to the average person than terrorism, or crime.

It is argued, and there is likely a fair amount of validity in the argument, that today's record level of safety is directly attributable to the very programs that you are railing against.

Let's not kid ourselves. These programs have existed for a very long time. People were aware of them decades ago, but those people were frequently dismissed as conspiracy theorists and paranoid cooks. What has changed is an increased effectiveness/reach of these programs, thanks to advancing technology. As well, as a heightened awareness/acknowledgment of the existence of these programs thanks to recently disclosed proof of their existence and scope.

Re:Sticking Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, would you like to buy my tiger-repelling rock?

Yes you did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anywhere near every other nation state has done the dirty deeds that the US has. Yes, some has - but not anywhere near all.

Citation: Census used for illegal profiling

[Anonymous Coward]

Courtesy of Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[rastos1]

I think I can help though; that '100% of gipsies are claiming welfare' figure was shat out of a bigots arse.

Excuse me, do you live in that country that I talked about? What is the basis for your opinion?

Re:If you go to Syria, then rats will eat your fac

[Richy_T]

It's pronounced "Parté"

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[tqk]

And what's wrong if he gets a bit of personal relieve by praying?

I'd only wish a false sense of well being on an enemy.

Jesus H. Christ!

[Anonymous Coward]

The librarian was also a bikie and she was wearing her club colours even though its illegal. You can definitely spin it to sound draconian but to be honest the alternative is much worse - are to you against getting rid of these criminal organisations? This is the first time any measures have appeared to have an effect; and I don't feel at all less free simply because I cant go around wearing a bikie jacket and meeting other bikers in public (so don't bother quoting any Benjamin Franklin ;)).

Please tell me this is a troll. Please!

What happens when we substitute the word "bikie" with "rugby players". Do you still not see the problem? What about substituting "bikies" with "ignorant douches in their Mom's basement"? Still no issue?

How can motorcycle clubs, even gangs, be illegal? Do you really believe that being in a club, wearing colors, and/or riding motorcycles is a criminal activity? How does combining them make it criminal?

West's Iron Curtan, really UKs?

[bbsalem]

Lets be careful to distinguish the UK from other Western countries. The UK is not the USA or France, thank God, although USA seems to be drifting down the same slope the UK has leaped down. I don't know if it is racism or class war or both that motivates the Tories to go so far right, it may be the same urge as the American tea Parties which are being discredited. The UK has a far greater investment in keeping its institutionalized classes separate, at least in the US we can ask "What have you done for ME, lately?" which is the current new question and the watchword of the emerging class war in America.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[SecurityTheatre]

I don't know statistics for Europe.

In North America, most crimes are near historical lows from the late 1950s. Some crimes (like minor property crimes such as petty vandalism) are somewhat higher than the 1950s, but I think when we're talking about stripping liberties, the conversation seems to center more around crimes that involve massive harm (death, complete destruction of multiple items of property, etc).

But as for Brussels, a brief google search for "crime in brussels" revealed this in the first link:

Brussels has, by northern European standards, a high petty crime rate and it is top of the European league when it comes to domestic burglaries but is one of the safest capitals in the world – and possibly the safest in Europe – when it comes to violent crime, particularly murder. And despite the current media stampede, in the first half of 2009 Brussels registered the lowest crime rate in almost a decade.

So, yes, sure Burglaries seem high, but violence is low.

Murder rates in Western Europe as a whole are about 1 per 100,000 people, which is among the lowest in the world, and also among the lowest in the HISTORY of the world.

Granted, Brussels has one of the highest crime rates in Western Europe and has 10 murders per 100,000 people. Today that puts it in "average city" status in the world, but given today's crime statistics, it would would have been considered one of the safest cities on Earth as recently as 1989.

Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they think we feel "safer" when we know that the government is constantly spying on us? The NSA says they do it for our safety. How is it safe if we have to endure the equivalent of the NSA peeking through our bedroom window 247, building up a profile of our lives? And since when did the Constitution say that we could have secret courts?