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Judges Say the UK's Digital Surveillance Program Snooper's Charter Is Illegal (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Judges have ruled that the UK government's digital surveillance program -- known variously as the Snooper's Charter and the Investigatory Powers Act -- is illegal.
In the case brought by human rights group Liberty, appeal judges found that the preceding Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) -- which ultimately became the Snooper's Charter -- failed to offer adequate protection to people's data. Of particular concern was the fact that private data could be shared between different agencies without sufficient oversight. Further reading: The Intercept.
In the case brought by human rights group Liberty, appeal judges found that the preceding Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) -- which ultimately became the Snooper's Charter -- failed to offer adequate protection to people's data. Of particular concern was the fact that private data could be shared between different agencies without sufficient oversight. Further reading: The Intercept.
Our judges actually care about civil liberties. You buffoons elected Trump. LOL
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Your judges might, but your politicians do not give a shit about you -- just like everywhere else.
The "Deep state" is such a crock on conspiracy shit; it's borderline hilarious. If there is was a "deep state", then you can guarantee people who have been in government for years are a part of it. McConnel, Gingrich, etc. Even pundits like Limbaugh would be tits deep.
Our judges actually care about civil liberties. You buffoons elected Trump. LOL
Personally, I want judges that care about the law as written, not buffoons who legislate from the bench. I also prefer laws that don't impact civil liberties so Judges who care about the law can protect them. So you need two things here. Just laws that protect civil liberties and Judges that enforce the law.
Trump is appointing Judges who care about the law and won't invent rulings on laws that don't exist. I don't see how that's a bad or dangerous thing for anybody, unless you think the law is wrong. If you think the law is wrong, that's something you take up with congress who writes the law, or the president if he signed it. He may be a buffoon to you, but he's doing the right thing with the judges he's appointing.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
LOL. Trump is nominating unqualified partisan idealogues. Just look at the case of Brett Talley.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Exactly. They make batshit crazy surveillance laws in the UK only to protect those that govern from their own civilians.
With FISA, such data about US citizens is never abused in the US by a government trying to stay in power.
Geez, we'd never see a US political party collude with a foreign government to fabricate falsehoods against a candidate from another party, feed that disinformation to party loyalists embedded into law enforcement and intelligence agencies, then use that false data as a pretext for wiretapping that candidate as an "insurance policy" should that candidate win.
FISA protects the US people!
Sorry, but if democratically elected MPs can't pass laws which pass legal muster, that's their goddamned fucking problem.
Being democratically elected is only part of the story. Writing laws which are legal is the other part.
For the same reason that any healthy democracy should have underpinnings which say "no, you don't get to decide these people are slaves", the judiciary is there to prevent people from passing laws which say exactly that.
If you live in a country where judges can't strike down laws as illegal, then you are in a seriously fucked country where lawmakers have absolute power and can pass any stupid ass law they want ... all MPs get to fuck your daughter and your wife whenever they wish, for instance.
So, hey, if you are stupid enough to think you want to live in a country where judges can't void laws ... then please, fuck off and go live in one. I guarantee you, it won't be a nice place.
Know who wants to live in a country where the judiciary can't strike down laws? Tyrants, fascists, and mewling idiots who are too stupid to understand the function of a judicial system in society.
If you want to live in such a country, move to one, and then shut the fuck up.
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About pushing right wing Agendas. This includes the "Deep State" conspiracies being pushed right now. The issue is not so much Trump, its the US Congress, which is full of Neo-Fascists. This has been an on-going thing since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. Basically, the way I see it, the US was on the path to being a purely secular, liberal democracy, and the right wing US Parties have used the idea of De-funding US Public institutions in an effort to try and restore the traditions, and racist ideas of the past.
Only thats not what is actually happening. What's actually happening, is the US is crumbling from within because the actual democratic mechanics of the US are disintegrating. If there is not a "Blue Wave" in 2018, that removes alot of these Senators and House Members from office, and impeaches Donald Trump, we are very likely to see the US Become an outright oligarchical dictatorship, Donald Trump isn't even the real threat here, its the Republican Politicians who won't check him, who are letting him pack right wing ideologues to the courts.
If GW Bush were as bad a Trump is, he'd have been impeached. So Trump is a symptom of the problem, the real problem is people like Paul Ryan, and his ilk. Along with people who aren't even in congress like Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer.
To quote (allegedly) Andrew Jackson: Andrew Jackson, "Mr Marshall has made his decision; Now let him enforce it!"
It doesn't matter what a court rules if the executive charged with enforcing the ruling doesn't feel obliged to do so. And in this case, does anyone believe for a second that GCHQ and friends will be deterred for a minute by a court finding "Hey, this doesn't adequately protect individual rights"? They've known this will ignore individual rights from the get go. It's the whole point of the act in the first place.
EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!
Yes, sleazy publishers have always screamed their headlines to sell newspapers. For some reason, remnants of this marketing practice continue in the internet age. It's a delicate balance; trying to appeal to the unwashed masses who have some reading ability without offending the educated reader with crass commercialism. In which group are Slashdot readers?
"Judges Say the UK's Digital Surveillance Program Snooper's Charter Is Illegal"
After reading that headline 4 times and failing to make sense of it, I tried to read TFS. Eventually I understood a bit more. Why Does Every Word Begin With A Capital? Let's try this again:
"Judges say the UK's digital surveillance program Snooper's Charter is illegal"
Now we see that 'Snooper's Charter' is a thing, and the rest are ordinary words. Notice that in this century, many forward thinking publishers no longer scream their headlines. Here are some: ...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.miamiherald.com/new...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
https://www.cnbc.com/
...omphaloskepsis often...
As long as there is no accountability the judge can say that gravity is illigal, as long as nothing changes and/or heads roll, it is meaningless. Most likely this just means "We change the law till ot is legal." And that is the best outcome I expect. Most likely nothing will happen.
If you do nothing after your kid stole a cookie, besides telling it not to, he will do it again. Still no consequences? Why worry ? Take some more.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You have difficulty with facts, don't you?
Yes, he was nominated. The fact that, after an outcry, his nomination was withdrawn does not mean that he "wasn't even nominated to be a judge?" Of course he was nominated to be judge.
Trump has a long list of successful nominations (where "successful" means that his nomination was appointed). Yes, I don't deny that. What I do claim is that they are largely idealogues, where loyalty to Trump is the most important criteria.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Laws say what they say. Judges that come up with, "well, I think it says something else" are the worst kind of human trash. Slavery is slavery. Ignorance is ignorance. Strength is strength. Anyone who tells you otherwise needs to be hanged.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Judges in the UK can't strike down statutes. The legal system here is not like the US, where the law can evolve directly through the courts as well as through legislation. Our courts are strictly there to interpret existing laws and to deal with conflicts.
In this case, the point is that two laws were incompatible. On the one hand, we have the surveillance law, introduced by our national government. On the other hand, we have the EU human rights laws. The court here took the view that the former were in conflict with the latter, and the latter won.
The same could potentially have happened in a post-Brexit world where those EU laws are no longer supreme, if the equivalent safeguards are transferred into our national law as part of the Brexit process. This is something that various MPs and campaign groups are promoting heavily right now, because they are sceptical about the government's preferred plan where ministers get to transfer laws but also make some adjustments to them, ostensibly for practical reasons, but without necessarily passing primary legislation in Parliament. The loss of EU-derived safeguards for human rights, employee protections and the like is the main reason for concern here.
Of course, assuming we do leave the EU and our national law is then all we have to work with, that does mean that the elected legislature can amend those laws however they want and judges then have to rule based on the new laws. This is by design, and is part of what's called parliamentary sovereignty -- the principle that Parliament is supreme among all parts of the government and can't be overruled by the government alone, activist judges or (more historically now) other potential influences such as royalty or aristocrats.
The potential downside of this is that, yes, they can make bad laws too. The upside is that if MPs do that, there will no longer be anywhere for them to hide. If they want to pass a law that says they can do something bad to ordinary people, they're going to have to do it in public through the mechanisms of Parliament and they're going to be accountable for it at the next general election.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
However, because Britain is leaving the EU, it's unclear as to whether the British government will simply ignore the court ruling since EU laws will no longer have sway over Britain's national security policies.
This is why civil rights groups like Liberty and various MPs are concerned that ministers should not be able to substantially amend current EU laws in the process of transferring them to national law. That way, if the government wants to reduce protections for human rights or increase the state's power over its citizens, it will have to do it in the light of day, and accept the consequences if it turns out that some of those citizens don't agree and vote for someone else next time.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ok, Ok.. Yep, I was mistaken..
However, this guy is certainly NOT representative of Trump's nominees and the senate didn't just rubber stamp him, but returned the nomination to the Whitehouse where it was withdrawn. Not that his motivation was one of a political ideologue....
So you pick the one nomination that was rejected and paint all of Trump's nominations with the same brush? This is an error of logic and lame. What about the rest of his nominations confirmed by the Senate? Care to discuss those or are you claiming they are all political hacks?
Which of them isn't an example of the kind of judge that will uphold the law, not make their own? Because that's what I'm claiming...Unless you figure that being a constructionist makes you a political ideologue.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Most Brexit voters are senile, too scared to leave their homes due to rampant paranoia generated by The Daily Mail, and corporal punishment never did them any harm except mentally, physically and emotionally.
In other countries, judges must have a law background and are usually experience, well respected lawyers who have practiced for many years. This is to give the judge a healthy respect for how the courts work both in theory and practice.
The purpose of the courts is not to blindly apply law; it is to provide justice. There is a difference.
If you just want someone to read from a book and apply its teachings, you want a preacher or a priest, not a judge. Justice is all about interpretation and discretion.
As Cicero wrote:
In other countries, judges must have a law background and are usually experience, well respected lawyers who have practiced for many years.
All true here in the USA at the federal level. It's why the Senate has the "advise and consent" roll that they take seriously and don't just rubber stamp all nominees.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Although this is true, the case we're talking about today didn't involve the ECtHR, but rather the CJEU, and wasn't based on the ECHR, but rather the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
If Brexit involves a complete separation from the EU, neither the CJEU nor the Charter will continue to apply in the UK. The ECHR would be all that was left.
With the UK no longer a member of the EU, the one unassailable barrier to modifying the HRA and thus removing the protections of the ECHR would also be lost. It might still require national legislation to actually nerf the HRA in that way, and no doubt that would be controversial, but in any case the protections would already be weaker than they are today if the equivalent to the Charter had not been transferred into national law when Brexit happened.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's a bunch of hogwash where you conflate the differences in standard hyperbole chosen by politicians in the two places for actual differences. And your hyperbole is just from one political "side," too, so it is crap in multiple dimensions.
Our judges actually care about civil liberties.
The judgement is based on the law, not on whether the judges care about civil liberties. In this case it's the EU law that's protecting civil liberties; without that law and the outcome would have been very different, however pro-civil-liberties any judges were. In other words, the EU cares more about civil liberties than does the UK.
You buffoons elected Trump. LOL
You buffoons voted for Brexit. The consequences of that are going to be much more nasty for you, immediate, and definitely attributable to your vote than the Trump presidency will be for Americans. One of the consequences will be that the UK will be able to legislate away the civil liberties mandated by the EU.
I see some pedantry, but where is the distinction or the difference? Courts here rule that XYZ state statute is overruled by ABC federal law, or that federal law conflicts with the Constitution all the time.
The following are related but distinct: two statute laws are in conflict and a court must decide how to balance them, a statute law conflicts with a higher law (such as a written constitution) and automatically loses, and the effect of a statute law is changed over time by case law.
It's a question of how much a precedent is worth. In some legal systems, as I understand it, case law can eventually become strong enough to override the statutes from which it originated, thus allowing the law as a whole to evolve in the courts. In other legal systems, the original statutes are immutable and always have priority, and no matter how much case law accumulates, it is only ever a guide to interpreting the original legislation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. If you're interested in a sensible discussion and not just trolling and/or reading your personal political views into someone else's post when they aren't there, feel free to clarify.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"patriotic american"
Hahaha, you can say that with a straight face while Donnie won't pull his tongue out of Dear Leader Putin's ass? Quite the 'patriot' you have there.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
That's a very weird construct, "trolling, or having an unauthorized opinion."
Are you ever gonna stop beating your wife?