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Russian Leader Putin Signs Controversial 'Big Brother' Law (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Today Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the controversial "anti-terrorist" legislation adopted by the lower and upper houses of parliament in late June, despite the flurry of criticism from opposition-minded circles and the serious concerns expressed by Russian telecom and internet companies. As reported earlier by East-West Digital News, the new legislation -- which Edward Snowden has called "Russia's new Big-Brother law" -- is not only severe against those involved in "international terrorism," its financing or non-denunciation. Law-enforcement agencies will also be granted access to any user's messages without any judicial oversight. Several key provisions will directly affect the internet and telecom industry. In particular, telecom operators and internet resources will need to store the recordings of all phone calls and the content of all text messages for a period of six months. They will be required to cooperate with the Federal Security Service (FSB) to make their users' communications fully accessible to this organization.
if they have an argument with their spouse about any past conversation they can settle the argument by just calling up the kremlin and asking for a transcript
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"Law-enforcement agencies will also be granted access to any user's messages without any judicial oversight. Several key provisions will directly affect the internet and telecom industry. In particular, telecom operators and internet resources will need to store the recordings of all phone calls and the content of all text messages for a period of six months. They will be required to cooperate with the Federal Security Service (FSB) to make their users' communications fully accessible to this organization."
We will marvel at this here in the US, but it's on the way here as well. It won't just be terrorism fears, it'll be cries from the other side of the aisle about political corruption and tax evasion and everything else.
Unless we resist it, government will always be seeking more power, as will the half of the political spectrum that is always seeking ever-more government.
Access to every communication with no judicial oversight? The question isn't "will this be abused" but "how quickly will this be abused?" Also: "Will we ever know that it has been abused or will the Russian government cover it up?"
Bonus question: Will the Russian equivalent of Snowden flee his country with files detailing the abuses this law allows, publish the information drawing the ire of the Russian government, and flee to the US for sanctuary? Also, would the US grant him asylum or use him in a trade for Snowden?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Verizon does it for 90 days. The Russians do for 180 days. What's the difference?
90.
Fact #1: The republicans and democrats have dominated US politics together over the past century. Neither has dominated alone; they have shared roughly equally in the domination of US politics.
Fact #2: The US government of today dwarfs the US government of a century ago, in terms of both revenue (adjusted for population growth) and power over the people. In that time period, the US government has grown itself into the largest and most expensive world empire in human history, with a military presence in some 200 foreign countries. By any measure, the US government is the largest and most powerful government this world has ever seen.
Now consider the common view of the republicans being the party of small government, and the democracts being the party of big government. If that were true, wouldn't we expect their political efforts to roughly cancel each other out, resulting in a US government roughly the same size as a century ago, measured in either revenue or power over the people?
The problem is that it's not. In fact, it's not even comparable. The US government of today absolutely dwarfs the US government of a century ago. What can we possibly conclude from this except that neither the republicans nor democrats have been fighting for smaller government? If they had been, we wouldn't be sitting in the middle of the largest, most far-reaching, most expensive, and most powerful government in world history.
Phonetically writing the Russian sounds using /. compatible western characters, it comes out like this:
Vse vashi bazy prinadlezhat nam
And Google translate is apparently smart enough to still translate this properly, so I should have just done it this way in the first place. D'oh!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
As we have seen by Russia's aggression against its neighbors (Georgia and Ukraine specifically), with Putin in charge they have sunk back to the old ways of repression and oppression. This law is only one of many designed to give absolute power to the one in charge, reminiscent of days past when the person in the Kremlin had the final say on anything.
The Soviet Union is dead yet Putin is insistent on trying to resurrect it, attacking its neighbors, sending in little green men to capture land, disruption of those who have left the oppression of Russia or those trying to crawl out of the hole dug for them by sycophants of Russia.
As we have seen in Crimea, where Putin has decreed the Tartars are not allowed to speak their own language or have schools which teach the Tartar language, where Tartars are beaten for speaking out against the indignities thrust upon them, where his oligarch minions have swooped in to steal at gunpoint the businesses people have built up, where the only news broadcast is what Putin says can be broadcast, everything possible to suppress people is being done all, ostensibly, to protect them.
Yet how protected can they be if their own government treats them as vassals? When Putin orders the murder of those who point out the endemic corruption in his government (such as Boris Nemtsov), when his estimated net worth, based on those who directly worked for him and managed his accounts, to be in the billions of dollars despite his salary, when he denies the deaths of thousands of soldiers when they invaded Ukraine, when he denies his own troops who admit they have been captured during the aggression against Ukraine, even going so far as to make it a crime for the mothers to talk about their son's deaths, it is quite clear he cares not for the Russian people but only himself and his legacy.
This law is nothing more than another step on Putin's march to returning to the past where neighbor spied on neighbor, where freedom of speech is only so much as he says is freedom of speech, where opposition newspapers, television and radio stations are routinely silenced to prevent the people from hearing anything other than state sponsored "news", where he and his oligarch buddies steal the country blind and live in lavish homes while the common man can barely afford a decent meal.
Is it any wonder the world doesn't take Russia seriously and why Russia, to this day, has still not advanced to a first world status.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower