Slashdot Mirror
For The UK's 'Snoopers' Charter', Politicians Voted Themselves An Exemption (independent.co.uk)
The "Snoopers' Charter" passed in the U.K. greatly expands the government's surveillance power. But before they'd enact the new Investigatory Powers Act, Britain's elected officials first voted to make themselves exempt from it. Sort of. An anonymous reader writes:
While their internet browsing history will still be swept up, just like everyone else's, no one will ever be able to access it without specific approval from the Prime Minister. And according to The Independent, "That rule applies not only to members of the Westminster parliament but also politicians in the devolved assembly and members of the European Parliament."
The article adds that the exemption was the very first amendment they approved for the legislation. And for a very long time, the only amendment.
The article adds that the exemption was the very first amendment they approved for the legislation. And for a very long time, the only amendment.
The UK masquerades as a democracy, and has for a long time. In reality it's the most hilariously over the top nanny state, The politicians there seem to make up laws for the sake of making up laws. I often wonder if this is just to give the illusion that a politician is doing something because fixing real problems is too hard.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Guy Fawkes masks are going off the shelves in record paces.
So how will the request filter know who is and is not an MP? It won't, so their details will still be leaked all over the place from the food standards agency to the ambulance service, those hotbeds of fighting serious crime and terrorism.
The UK masquerades as a democracy, and has for a long time. In reality it's the most hilariously over the top nanny state, The politicians there seem to make up laws for the sake of making up laws. I often wonder if this is just to give the illusion that a politician is doing something because fixing real problems is too hard.
Stop wondering ... it is.
Remember, on the Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Now you just need to know what method is used to identify those exempt from the surveilance and copy that. What is it? A cookie or something?
No, an election.
Spying on MPs is bad, unless of course you want politicians to be blackmailed by spy agencies and entrenched political powers.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about." -Us, parroting their own logic right back in their face.
The Prime Minister can still allow access to the browsing history of his political opponents, should there be a need for it.
"Election"
I can see the reason. After all, there are a number of very good reasons why you don't want to hand out possibly blackmail-enabling information about your politicians.
The shortsightedness regarding this amendment is that the previously mentioned reason can be extended to EVERY FUCKING PERSON ON THE PLANET.
Guy Fawkes day (a la V for Vendetta, not the catholic stuff) is fast approaching in Britain.
Brexit the fucking UK off the inetrnet, they are becoming a security threat. Let them boil in their own nanny state shitbowl.
Brits, why did you let them do this? You're letting them take your freedom and letting them grant themselves powers that will keep you out of the loop and perpetuate their own power, preventing you from being able to do anything about it in the future. And what can you do to stop this from snowballing? Absolutely nothing now.
Basically everyone in here is like "well we're fine we can circumvent this with encryption" yeah for now, but why bother implementing laws you have to circumvent? Just get off your asses and get rid of the root of the problem. Oh wait you can't do anything about it.
You know a country that isn't?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You think you could get rid of the useless sponges if you had guns? If you do, take a look at the US and ponder again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because all the US gunowners have stepped up to fight the State in their never ending desire to track you more?
Where were the Gun owners after the the Patriot Act? Or the NSA leaks? Or any time a local sheriff forgets about the 4th amendment?
You know a country that isn't?
Probably Switzerland.
It's often just laziness. Sexting children is a hard problem to solve, requiring more than 2 minutes of thought... So screw it, pass the problem on to the social media companies. Just say they can fix it, people will assume you know what you are talking about and no one can accuse you of not doing anything.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The UK masquerades as a democracy, and has for a long time. In reality it's the most hilariously over the top nanny state
Democracies and nanny states are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are strongly correlated. Lots of voters want the government to be their mommy.
The problem with the UK is that they lack the checks-and-balances that many other democracies have. The lower house has nearly all the power, and the PM has a majority coalition that can ram through stupid laws very quickly.
You've managed to one-up the U.S. so far as destroying the civil rights (and perhaps the human rights) of your citizenry. I feel sorrow and pity for people who have to live in the increasingly Orwelliean nightmare that the UK is becoming. What's next for you, UK? Are you going to ally yourself philosophically with the communist Chinese government? You may as well try pulling that one off too, you're not that far from it already. No, wait, next they'll try to 're-unify' the British Isles again -- by force, for the 'safety and security of the people' I'm sure. Think of the children!
What a gods-be-damned dark world this is becoming. Fucking humans and their fucking bullshit.
I don't think this achieves what the people proposing the amendment intend. They're being stupid.
Wikileaks will leak their browsing history once it will be captured as mandated by law.
I'm looking forward to perusing it.
Wouldn't it be in the best interest of spies to get UK MPs to spy and now no one will be watching them.
Teens sexting each other is not a problem to be solved. Adults sexting minors is about as solved as it's going to get, going down the legal system road. If you want to lessen the problem, we're going to have to explore other avenues besides making it illegaler.
We never had a choice in the matter, thank you political outrage. The inquiry of said incident has been sealed under a 100 year secrecy ruling thank you very much. Again the government acting in their own interest and not the peoples.
unless of course you want politicians to be blackmailed by spy agencies and entrenched political powers.
You are assuming that nation states spy agencies cannot uncover embarrassing information by any other means. And if your MPs (or our senators) are getting up to anything that they don't want in the next days news, they just shouldn't be holding that office.
What we need are leaders like President Sukarno, who couldn't be blackmailed by the KGB. MI5 should be actively investigating all government officials with the goal of identifying any that are members of any organizations promoting high moral standards and then failing to live up to them. They should be publicly identified and immediately removed from office.
Have gnu, will travel.
What the actual fuck is wrong with you "Republic" clowns ?
The US is supposed to be a democracy.
A republic is one form of government. A democratic vote is how its selected.
Fuck.
Well, at least it still is a representative democracy in theory. Look at the US, the "demos" (i.e. the population or at least its majority) doesn't get to pick the leader, so it is not a "democracy" under most reasonable definitions.
In Great Britain, the Prime Minister is not directly elected either.
Given their history of child sex ring abuse scandals one could argue that they needed to pass the exemption. That they can't see how this paints them speaks to the quality of our representation.
truly shameful.
To quote the ministerial adviser from a well-known British poltical satire:
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done."
I think people have just stopped learning about governance, civics, history, and social sciences in school.
One could make a very strong argument that gun owners played a big part in getting Trump elected.
The Democrats continue to yammer on about gun control despite a HUGE portion of the population being against gun control (yep, I said it - the polls the liberals like to say showing the opposite are BS, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a majority are actually NOT on their side). Most people think guns cost the Democrats control of Congress after the AWB was passed and most gun owners very likely went for Trump, and not because they legitimately thought he was a good candidate, I bet many in fact did not think that, but because they knew how bad Clinton would be for gun rights, and that matters a great deal to them. Gun owners are a highly mobilized voting block, possibly larger and more reliable than any other block, and a bigger one than the left seems to think, and so it could very well be that guns played a large part in this result.
I'd say that's a meaningful change at least, though whether it's for the better is debatable.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
It perfectly achieves the goal of those who want the spying. Telling the ministers they are "exempt" from the spying is cheaper than bribing them to pass this law.
"The Democrats continue to yammer on about gun control despite a HUGE portion of the population being against gun control (yep, I said it - the polls the liberals like to say showing the opposite are BS, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a majority are actually NOT on their side)"
You say you don't like polls, but anyway here's some trends contradicting you. Gallup
Why not give us some evidence for your assertion?
Trump got elected because the voters wanted change at any cost. Gun owners don't make up a large enough fraction of the voters to swing an election. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
What the actual fuck is wrong with you "Republic" clowns ?
The US is supposed to be a democracy.
A republic is one form of government. A democratic vote is how its selected.
Fuck.
No, the USA is a plutocracy.
US, Canada, India, UK... I guess this golden era of democracy is over. Here comes another round of dictatorships, population control and whatnot. Quite the dark heritage we're leaving for future generations.
Gun owners, despite popular belief, aren't bloodthirsty murderers. The Patriot Act or the NSA spying on people is not sufficient to warrant an uprising where millions will likely die.
Guns aren't magical I-Win buttons for most political or social issues. That you expect gun owners to use them as such for every, relative to history, trivial thing shows more about what you and the people that modded you up think guns are than the people that actually own them.
Wow, 86% of people favor universal background checks with a centralized database. Much higher than I expected. When can you get 86% of people to agree on anything? That seems so overwhelmingly high, how has it already not been passed? Makes you wonder how accurate these polls are. I mean, NRA is powerful and all, but 90% of people want a centralized database?
It's interesting (in a scary way) to compare the plight of the US and UK.
The UK has no constitution to speak of. It has a Human Rights Act, which acts as a mere slap on the wrist -- and the current Pry Minister wants to scrap it. However, we don't think she's a tyrant, just an authoritarian with bad taste in advisors.
The US has a constitution, including embedded rights. Whether he is or not, Trump sounded like a tyrant when campaigning. The US constitution is dependent on both citizens willing to challenge the govt and the Supreme Court's willingness to uphold it. Whilst constitutional protection for privacy is soft, protection for things like due process is strong.
I've said for about 8 years that while the US is quite likely to become a bit fascist towards eg immigrants, it's less likely in the UK. However, the UK is at much more risk of becoming a full blown police state.
And maybe Antarctica...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mission creep will kill any organization. The NRA does what it can, but expecting a panacea is just unrealistic. They can't go after every pet cause of the Left.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What are you talking about? The leader of UK is even less democratically selected than the leader of the US! The Parliament chooses a Prime Minister. It would be as if the President were just chosen by Congress...
No it's not. The US is _supposed_ to be a REPUBLIC. It was specifically designed NOT to be a democracy. Does the Electoral College and the Senate not make this crystal clear?
The framers worried about the "Tyranny of the Majority" as much as they worried about dictators and tyrants.
In a democracy you wouldn't have requirements of "3/4 of the states to pass amendments" or other such high levels. You'd only need 50.1%. I'd also like to point out that in the beginning, you didn't get to vote unless you owned land. In fact it wasn't until 1856 that white men without land could vote in every state.
Your attempt to reclassify this country as a democracy shows you have very little actual knowledge of how it works.
In the past domestic court use of spy logs had to be hidden from courts so interesting people would feel free to talk on a phone, use a fax, open a bank account, talk to their lawyers, offer a bribe, sell information... the GCHQ would get it all as the wider public never saw the legal results in open court..
Now years of domestic spy logs are legal in local courts. Encryption is junk and the UK gov can legally hack any computer or network it feels like with very few limitations.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
MI5/6 and the GCHQ just have to hint at an MP been "Russian" and its full signals intelligence time.
Think back to a Profumo affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They meet in secure vaults and now know remove all their Apple products.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Coalition governments are quite rare in the UK, thanks to our first-past-the-post electoral system. We had one from 2010 to 2015, but the one before that was during the Second World War.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
yes. obviously. that such an exemption only increases the excuses for data collection "we need to know who people are in order not to spy on them!" It's just unbelievable that they are that stupid. It's a useless thing to ask... If they are going to ask for something it should be something about greater transparency, more oversight of the collection, watching the watchers is the only thing that might be helpful, if you are going to have watchers.
Running neck and neck with the US - they are always talking about their special partnership, right? What the UK needs now is a buffoon as PM, to match Trump. They have the perfect candidate in Boris Johnson.
Data is stil collected. This means at some time, an insider or a hacker will leak it.
And since it is tagged "for use after prime minister approval only", it will be easy to leak only that data
Words change their meaning over time. The meaning of democracy has expanded into people voting, usually for representatives but possibly for electors and such and even referendums. Whether some things take a super-majority to pass doesn't take away that the people voted, even if it is indirectly voting for their local government who then votes to amend the Constitution. Limiting who can vote doesn't mean it is not a democracy either, very few democracies allow 16 yr olds to vote.
It is true that your framers set things up so a minority of people can tyrannize the majority (50.1% of voters in the least populous States vote in State governments who want to amend the Constitution taking away the rights of people in the most populous States where 99% voted for State governments against the amendment, or worse if the vote was split in the small States between more parties) but it's still a form of democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
This is quite clever of the established ruling elite. Their data is exempt and will not be collected or retained. But people new to politics running against them are not covered by this until they win.
So anyone feeling challenged by a new player will now have an additional valuable tool in keeping their job.
That's about the only country that first trains its citizens, then sends them home with the whole gear, rifle included. They also have direct democracy and a high standard of living so maybe there's something to be learned: do not abuse your citizens, treat them as responsible adults so they won't jihad you. And arm them well so they can jihad effectively.
Yup. An ex PM is implicated. It goes right to the top.
sag
Exactly. Is there extra funding for ISPs to add extra security for politician's data? If not, then it might not be easy to get with a search warrant, but you can bet that some of it will be leaked. Do MPs have some special sign-on for all Internet access? If not, then you can bet that some hotspot or mobile provider won't know that they're MPs and so will hand over the data when someone goes fishing for data on a particular IP address. Do MPs have their own Internet accounts that they don't share with their family? If not, then you can bet that someone will request the data on their husbands or wives and get the results indirectly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They don't teach you that in Brawndo appreciation class.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Considering what they generally produce, that would be preferable.
I have a modest proposal. Every time a politician submits a bill for consideration, he/she/it should have extracted precisely one cubic inch of flesh from his/her/whatever's own body. Or, in UK, 2.54 cm-cubed, as you prefer. That might make them more deliberative.
And Shylock, don't hold back on account of blood.
Just wait until someone cracks the data store and some interesting surveillance information is made public. Repeal the law now old chaps?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
More important question. Does the kangaroo care?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
We have always been at war with East Asia.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Indeed. In fact at one point there was a possibility that despite being democratically chosen, that Donald Trump could have been replaced by the power brokers at the Republican National Convention in favor of someone that they felt more comfortable with.
Because it, too is a republican construct. Not because it's the "Republican" party, but because in the USA, when you vote republic-style, you're not really voting for the candidate, you're voting for the representative. And hoping that the representative, once elected, then votes for your candidate.
too bad no one on the other side of the argument is rational. They wouldn't read or understand your comment.
I am a gun owner. I have never killed anyone in my 57 years (and as a soldier as well), and none of my firearms have been involved in a homicide. Oh, and I am also a concealed carry licensee. (but I never feel threatened enough to carry concealed, I just have the license because it makes going to the shooting range so much easier.)