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Waiting for the Knock
Andrew G. Feinberg writes "in this LinuxToday story, Richard Stallman talks about some upcoming laws that could be disasterous for British citizens." Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.
This is for all those Brits who mock the US for it's lack of freedoms. They look down their noses at our government and say they have just as luch liberty as us.
Well if it's even possible that any of this stuff could be legal, I would say they don't. That is, even if these don't become law, if they could without being struck down(ours would be in the Supreme Court, I'm assuming there's something at least vaguely similar in the UK), then you do not have more freedoms than we do.
Don't worry, I'm plenty pissed with the guys in Congress, too, but I know if that bill with the Ten Commandments in every classroom passed the Supreme Court would throw it out so fast it would make your head spin. Thank God we have the Bill of Rights, without it, our country would've gone down the tubes long ago.
Although the tories were blamed for introducing this reprehensible legislation, the current Home Secretary Jack Straw looks like he's trying to out-bastard the tories. And he seems to be succeeding.
The Brits seem to be facing the same problems as the Americans in that there's no way a Tory (or Republican) government could get away with this sort of shit, but under Labour (or the Democrats), it becomes acceptable.
I was happy to see Blair get in -- and there's no doubt that he's done wonders in Northern Ireland -- but the laws just keep getting worse and worse. Given the closeness of Britain and Ireland, and the (slight) tendency to follow the lead of neighbours, I fear for the laws of Ireland.
Unfortunately, RMS repeats a few myths about the PTA in this otherwise excellent essay.
1. IIRC, the PTA was passed by a Labour government, not a Conservative one.
2. In fact, the PTA would not necessarily linger on after peace in Northern Ireland. It was only passed for the current year, and must be debated, voted on and passed by the Houses of Parliament, or it lapses. Unlikely, I know, but the potential is there.
3. The attack on the right to silence comes from the Criminal Justice Act, which was passed by the last Conservative Government. In effect, it says that if you choose to rely in court on information which you refused (as in, were asked, but refused) to speak to the police about, they can mention this fact. Any infringement of liberty is bad, but this one is quite mild.
4. However, the CJA does not have any sunset provision like the PTA. WOrryingly, nor will the Electronic Communications Act.
jsm
My understanding of law in the UK is unfortunately limited. The problem is that the United States has baised their legal system on this also - and most other modern democracies have as well. Is it at all possible that the governments could be conspiring to rob the citizen of our rights, probably - will the people allow it, hell no. Yet another law to fuel the fire and piss the people off.
I find it so funny that all the democracies, or otherwise similar government types were all interlocked into this 30 - 40 or more year 'cold war' because the 'enemy' was supressing the individual rights and choices in that country. As scary as it may be we have entered the flipside of that argument... look at the signs, guns are more moderated then ever thought possible - your first ammendment rights can be waved by the NSA or FBI, not to mention your right to a fair trial is out the door. Instead the government spends the enormous amount of money it collects on taxes on special interest programs and bullshit that nobody cares about one bit.
Isn't it wonderful living in a Socialist country? Wanna change it? Start by electing more people like Jesse Ventura - someone who is not afriad to tell the little groups off, someone who doesn't believe that government is big brother - and shouldn't take a ton of taxes from you. He's a social liberal, so he has no hesitation doing what he believes good for the people.
I will now get off of my soapbox.
After a lot of complaints from pro-liberty and pro-cryptography groups (CyberLiberties, for example) it was finally removed from that bill and slotted into the RoIP bill - unchanged. The official slant was that the RoIP bill was a "better vehicle" for this.
The basic problems with it are these:
- You do not need to be even SUSPECTED of a crime - you just need a police officer to be OF THE OPINION that a given file is encrypted.
- If you can't hand over a key (because you don't have it, or the file isn't encrypted) then you are liable to a jail sentence
- If you tell anyone about having been served the warrant, you are liable to a larger jail sentence
- if you tell your solicitor about the warrant for purposes of your defence (and the only defence is to PROVE you don't have the key - an impossible task) HE is also bound by the clause not to tell anyone
- There is only one appeal to the warrant - not to a criminal court, but to a closed panel, not accountable to any judicial body and not required to give an explaination of their decision.
- You are not entitled to compensation unless the warrant was signed personally by the head of the Home Office (a government department). A warrant signed by a police inspector is just as legal, but doesn't carry any compensation.
If anyone has looked at my homepage in the last few months, now they know what my profile means--
-=DaveHowe=-
Well... maybe it will, us english people are scarily apathetic, perhaps we care, perhaps we don't, and even if we did there aren't many people that would actually make a stand.
Having said this is was 7 years ago when the single data card idea was proposed in UK government, the card with an electronic chip which would hold all our info (we wouldn't get to know what info it held) and would supposedly have had a chip that could be tracked so the police would always know where we were.
It didn't happen, I don't think these proposals will either.
We *DO* still live in a democracy of sorts, although maybe not for much longer.
Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.
Congress ain't asleep at the wheel. Brilliant law coming out that lets the government claim that an encrypted message says anything they want it to, and they have no requirement to disclose how they decoded that message. Their decoding becomes presumptive fact.
Steganography isn't the cure for this; quite the opposite! Under this legal system, you could provide all the keys you've ever touched in your life, you'd be unable to prove that the government didn't actually find incriminating evidence hidden under an alternate passphrase channel.
The general idea being bandied around both legal systems is to insert as much nervousness as possible, taking advantage of people's natural laziness and trustfulness to make them avoid encryption technologies. Then, anyone who isn't lazy and trustful can be selected and monitored--go check out the NSA drowning with info story. Imagine cracking a SSH session only to find some teen chat!
The big stick on both sides is as follows: "You try to hide your messages from us, and we'll manipulate the legal system to give us unlimited power to ruin your life and the lives of those you love."
But I must be fair. Power abhors a vacuum. Data Mining is quickly building comprehensive profiles of many more people much more efficiently than any CoIntelPro could have hoped, but the knowledge is not going into any organization with a mandate to the people.
I have to wonder. Which to prefer? A constitution? Or a stock certificate?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Someone else already posted the link to http://www.stand.org.uk, but I thought it deserved some emphasis. Their latest bit of campaigning was to send Jack Straw a letter which, if the legislation were to pass as proposed, would leave him liable for a two year jail sentence.
"Dear Mr Straw,
Please find at the end of the letter a confession to a crime, which has been affirmed by Statutory Declaration. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has been informed that you are in possession of this information.
You will not be able to understand the confession, because the words have been scrambled using a strong cryptographic key. This key was created in your name and has been registered on international public key servers..."
STAND is the main campaigning organisation in the UK tackling the issues raised by this bill, and it's a very well done website by some very clueful people. Visit it, everyone!
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Xenu loves you!
Senators, representatives and members of parliment are afraid that in 10 or 20 years, terrorism and criminal organizations will be communicating freely over the Internet and will remain beyond prosecution. To combat this they pass legislation (the only way they know how to deal with problems), but in order to get the bad guys(TM), they must stomp on the rights of regular citizens. They don't see another way to deal with it, and trampling the rights of common citizens seems a small price to pay for safety.
As with all reactionary movements throughout time, this will go too far. Some legislation will get passed, some person's rights will be trampled a little too far, and then the protests and media blitz will follow that will end this reactionary era. The government will get over its hangups about encryption and realize that in the long run there is nothing it can do about it and it does not inhibit there standing ability to enforce law and order.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This sort of bad legislation doesn't infringe on our rights because we don't, in principle, have any. We are not merely subjects of a monarch, but are in fact her property - as are all our posessions. The monarch does not currently excercise her power, but instead lets it vest in a bloated civil service and an unprepresentative parliament. Any connection between what is decided at Westminster and the "will of the people" is purely tangential.
There is no assumption in Britain that government is "by the consent of the governed". Instead there is a political class which regards the common people as peasants, there to be taxed to death (approx 48% of GNP goes to tax), but not really good for much else. There is no mechanism in the British constitution for balancing power between different parts of government. There is no mechanism for ensuring that basic rights are upheld. There is no meangful local government. There is basically no way for the average, reasonable person to make a difference to the world of government - unless of course they're prepared to become a part of the machine themselves.
And yet, we are smug. We are intolerably smug. We look with disdain across the Atlantic to the USA, and we sneer at your drive-through churches and yourlow-brow TV. We deride what must be the most free society on Earth, and all the while we don't have the right to go pee except by the consent of the Queen.
Americans reading this - you know you have problems in your government and society. And you rightly complain about them, and work to change things. But you know what? Your politicians have to listen, eventually. And you have a strong judiciary who aren't afraid to say "This law is against the constitution - so I'm striking it out".
Sure, laws are made which go against the constitution every year. But at least you have a written statement of rights and principles - so you know when it is being infringed. And eventually, it is put right.
We have no rights. But hey, who needs rights when you've got that nice Mr Blair and a shedload of apathy?
Secondly, all these measures were originally mooted by the last (conservative) government. New Labour is not so much attempting to turn England into a police state as it is continuing policies established by Thatcher and her successors.
Why they're doing this is a strange question. It seems to me that the whole of English culture is in the grip of a wave of security-related hysteria that has nothing to do with terrorism (we put up with the IRA for thirty years, after all) and everything to do with accelerating social change. People feel insecure and worried, and respond by looking for some group to blame. New age travellers, gun owners, paedophiles -- they're all identifiable targets who stand out from the herd and give the herd reason to dislike (or hate) them. So it's no surprise that they come in for attack.
What's new and frightening is the introduction of "zero tolerance" measures in law, in a country that doesn't have a strong constitutional foundation. (There's a bill of rights, and there is an unwritten constitution, but it's hard to attack bad laws on the grounds that they violate constitutional rights.) Add half a million CCTV cameras in public places and a willingness to install another sixty thousand cameras a month and you can see why the UK is now the nation to visit if you want to buy neural-network based face-recognition software. Big Brother is alive and well and living in London.
Digging a bit deeper, we may also be seeing a once-in-a-century re-alignment of British politics. Traditionally, the Westminster parliament has been a two-and-a-half party system. Until 1923, it was Conservative/Liberal with a minor Labour presence. Labour replaced the Liberals, ushering in a period of Conservative dominance -- the Tories ran the UK for 40 out of the 60 years leading up to 1996 and Tony Blair's historic landslide victory. But they blew it, the same way the Liberals blew it in the 1920's; corruption scandals cost them the election and are still haunting them, while the Liberal presence in parliament is the highest it's been since the 1920's. Meanwhile, New Labour has lurched so far in the direction of the authoritarian right that they're staking out a claim to be the true right-wing party in British politics!
There's a general consensus in UK politics about the need for broadly free-market economics, but the traditional proponents of the market in the UK are strongly associated with the authoritarian right. The Liberal Democrats are beginning to reassert liberal values -- civil libertarianism mixed with moderate economics -- and may be staking out a claim to be the new party of the left in the UK, but for now neither of the main parties has any truck with civil liberties.Worse, the current right-wing authoritarian party of government is dominated by ex-Trotskyites. If there's one thing more zealously conservative than a hard-core Tory, it's an ex-Trot who has repented, seen the light, and bought an Armani suit and a BMW. (They're born control-freaks with no sense of humour, and you can't trust 'em either -- they know they've gone over to the Dark Side, and they just don't are about anything other than Power any more.)
Me, I'm just glad that after the last Conservative election victory I resolved to move to another country! (I made good on that promise -- and came to Scotland.)
..but isn't the scrapping of the right to jury trial being done to bring us in line with the rest of the EU?
It seems to me that if I was British I would be quite upset about this just from a historical basis. After all, wasn't that part of the Magna Carta?
This was scrapped last week. See:
www.theregister.co.uk/991122-000008 .html
"The controversial Part III, which dealt with police seizure powers for encryption keys, has been shifted into a separate Home Office bill"
ie. they're reviewing it after www.stand.org.uk pointed out Part III was bollocks.
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Labour have always had a tradition of making *really* bad laws like this (not just with the PTA). It's usually something like this that ends up getting an otherwise useful government voted out of office.
The sad thing is that the government will keep trying until this gets passed. This is the second attempt at this. It will probably get thrown out, but it will surface again under a different name in 6 months or so. They may end up passing it very quietly, and not telling anyone about it.
This law is the prevention of terrorism act revised. They seem to have fixed all the things that the courts found flaws with, eg letting solictors have publicity (those nasty terrorists would have never been found innocent if Gareth Pierce had been gagged), giving people appeals, and the right to a trial.
The law even allows the minister responsible to alter the legislation later if something isn't working.
When they passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a South African minister was said to have retorted "I wish we had laws like that". This law is something from the text book of a dictator, "give us what we want or else we lock you away and there is nothing you can do." I'm sure there are a few people in Chinese government looking at this saying "Oooh... Thats nice. Think we can get away with do that to our people?"
I think I'll start renaming the various ministers as characters from "Animal Farm".
The PM, as I understand it, has very limited powers when it comes to executive decisions. For a start, the PM must persuade his own party that his plan is a good idea (the proposed reform of disability benefits was much weakened by opposition from within the Labour party). If a bill can be passed by majority vote in the House of Commons, the bill is passed to the House of Lords for acceptance or revision. The Lords have a history of sending back for revision bills that take things a little too far, and the upper chamber is (IMHO) a pretty reasonable one, since the members are not elected, and therefore tend to vote with their heads, not with the party line. The term "checks and balances", BTW, was coined by Walter Bagehot in 1867 to describe the British parliamentary system. The status of the reforms discussed here is that they were read in the Queen's Speech. The QS is a list of bills that the government intends to put before Parliament in the coming year. They have the same weight and likelihood of seeing the light as a manifesto pledge ;-) Cambrensis.
That'll be why we looked down our noses at our government and politely told them to fuck off whereupon they promptly did.
The UK government scrapped the whole mad keys idea last week. This story is very old, very out of date, and very not valid anymore.
Isn't it about time Slashdot got a European correspondent to stop this kind of confusion?
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I would think that juries can be in the best interests of either the crown (or the state, if you're an american) or the defendant, but in either case do not best serve justice as an abstract.
Juries can be corrupted by the crown by exploiting popular prejudice against the defendant. The defendant, on the other hand, can attempt what's known as jury nullification: seeking a mistrial by finding at least one juror sympathetic enough to disregard the letter of the judge's charge. If there are enough sympathetic jurors, you may even get an acquittal.
On the other hand, juries keep the court in touch with the local population. Most of the world, unlike the US, has an appointed, independent, and professional judiciary. This can let a judge drift into the clouds, knowing his job is secure; on the other hand the judge is not necessarily subject to mob appeal.
I would not be overly secure in the competence of trial judges. A recent review by the law society of upper canada revealed that of 100 warrants, 60-odd contained some kind of technical error but only 7 of those were rejected.
The existence of appellate courts, on the other hand, at least allows judicial errors to be put right. A trial judge can set aside a wrongful conviction (or a wrongful civil decision) by jury in some jurisdictions; that, at least, allows errors in the favour of the crown to be put right.
Which, although unpopular, is how it should be.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
One thing that Richard Stallman did not take into account is that the UK is part of the European Union. As such, it is bound to respect the European Convention on Human Rights, which is mandatory to join the EU.
In case this law was passed (which remains to be seen -- we may even have a rare Labour/Tory bipartisan front against this law) and a British citizen lands in prison because of it, I guess there would two major consequences: (a) an outcry all over Europe against the UK and (b) an appeal by said British citizen to the EU Human rights court, whose decision would be binding on both British judicial institutions and (in general) other European courts.
Not to mention Amnesty International, which would probably throw up a ruckus over it. Interesting times to be a Britsih citizen, for sure. First BSE, then this. Hmmmm... Are these related?
=)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
There are express articles that exempt you from this sentence if you can prove or make clear that you, at the time of the question to produce the key, could not do that, as long as you do the moment you can provide it.
Yes, that's a wonderful option. I think a recent open letter to Jack Straw put the best slant on this (I don't have the URL to hand, but I am sure someone here on
- Basically, a group of hackers did the following:
- Created a key in the name of Jack Straw
- Uploaded that key to the keyservers
- had a criminal make a signed confession of a currently unsolved crime
- Scanned and encrypted that with the JackStraw key
- Destroyed all intermediate work - the key, the original (paper document) and the unencrypted disk file)
- posted the encrypted file to a website, along with a description of what they had done
So, here is the situation - any police officer can find a file that blatently contains information useful to clear up a crime. According to the file, the key is held by one Jack Straw, Home Secretary. How is Mr Straw to PROVE he does't have that key, and in fact has never had it? it has his name on it, after all.....BTW, can you point out the clause that allows you merely to "make clear" that you don't have the key, not prove the negative?
And that's what scares me the most: apparently a lot of thought hs gone into this bill, to try and be "fair", but those people doing the "thinking" still overlooked the basic unfairness of it all. I mean, there's even a provision to allow you to invalidate the key (which otherwise would be an offence, as well). They think that far, but think not close up, or something.
Hmm. it has obviously been "tweeked" a little more since the last draft I saw (which does't have that provision, and indeed, now even allows you to chose to decode the document yourself (the previous draft didn't even allow you to see the document claimed to be encrypted by your key)
I must admit though, in a quick scan, I couldn't find a option to revoke; any chance of a section number? I am not doubting you, just trying to locate these loopholes without having to re-read the entire thing again....
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-=DaveHowe=-
I wasn't aware at the time it had been deferred but we came to the conclusion (myself and others preent) that it would not be written into law as that assumption of guilt would set a legal precedent which all judges from then on would be forced to consider.
Reversing the Burden of Proof isn't unknown - for example, you are forced to PROVE you have car insurance / a licence if stopped by a policeman, or are liable for not doing so (the crimes you are guilty until proven innocent for here are driving without a licence, and driving without insurance)
That isn't the problem. what IS the problem is that it is impossible to prove that you don't have a key - or, worse yet, that you HAD the key, but have forgotten the secret password you used to access it. Normally, reversing the Burden of Proof is reserved for cases where producing such proof is easy for the accused (if you HAVE a driving licence and / or insurance, even if you have lost your original documents you can obtain at least a letter proving you had them) and awkward / impossible for the government (imagine if the Police had to contact every insurance company in the uk after a road accident, to ask "is person xxx insured to drive with you, or covered by anyone you DO insure?" - now imagine what hoops the insurance company would have to go through to handle several dozen calls per office per day of this nature, and who would end up paying for it).
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-=DaveHowe=-
Although, I disagree with the proposal, it is incredibly hypocrtical of Americans to attack them, as they have always had this system - the vast majority of offences in the US are not and cannot be tried by juries.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Most countries (EU) do not have the right to jury trial because a jury trial isn't a guarantee
that you get a fair trial...
But this is totally backwards. The defendant has a right to a jury trial, not a requirement for one - in the U.S., the defendant can choose either a jury trial or a trial with only a judge, depending on which he thinks is in his better interests. This gives the defendant the best shot at a fair trial available - if the government is screwing him, he can take the case to the people. If he's afraid he'll lose because the people will dislike him, he can rely on the judge who will presumably adhere strictly to the law.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Sorry - but no. The bill it WAS part of (the eCommerce one) will go ahead without it, but the provisions have been moved to a "more appropriate vehicle" - in this case, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, and as far as I can tell, without even a cursory edit.
Isn't it about time Slashdot got a European correspondent to stop this kind of confusion? /., but then, the majority of web users are still merkins. I think what you are actually asking is for a european story reviewer, which is a different matter :+)
There IS a strong Merkin leaning on
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-=DaveHowe=-
You're wrong. As the Stallman article points out, if you'd bothered to read it, the controversial parts are being removed from the e-commerce bill, to be reintroduced in a "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" bill. Stallman is trying, among other things, to keep people from being deluded that they've eliminated these provisions - they're just moved to clear the way for the e-commerce bill to pass immediately.
I pay fairly close attention to the UK situation and though it's possible that I would post something out of date, in this case at least, I'm more up to date than you are...
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
...The Lords have a history of sending back for revision bills that take things a little too far, and the upper chamber is (IMHO) a pretty reasonable one, since the members are not elected, ...
Maybe this explains why so many hereditary peerages (those that aren't gifts from the government currently in power) seem to be losing their right to vote.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
Steganography is the method of "conceiling" an encrypted file inside another, larger file that has redundancy (for example, a .wav sound file or a .gif). There are utilities that will do this for you, and at least one crypto package (Scramdisk) that allows you to set aside such space in a .wav and use it as a virtual drive letter.
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-=DaveHowe=-
The Jack Straw letter was mentioned in a previous slashdot story and included links to the
letter and the photo essay.
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
I suspect that the party would correct your statement and indicate that the government has the greatest {\it potential} for evil, not that it always is. Why? Because, unlike a business, it can operate primarily by coercion under the banner of legitimacy...
Businesses just want your money; some governments want {\it everything}, including your life.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Abuse of power by big government will stop when people stop supporting big government. The problem is that most people are totally schizophrenic, and want the 'benefits' of big government without the problems. For example, on Slashdot today we have one thread here about government abuse while a neighboring thread is talking about how we should steal more tax money and give it to teachers. Do we support big government or not? Because the only way for big government to continue to exist is to have a massively intrusive global police state.
Otherwise, the creative people are just going to move somewhere with very limited government which does what they tell it rather than try to tell them what to do... at which point you have one area full of creative productive people and the rest of the world a bunch of decaying welfare states full of the unproductive dummies who used to leech off them.
So make a choice: do you support big government or do you oppose it? And when the majority of creative people choose freedom, big government will end.
To a libertarian, "the government" is just another bunch of people
It is my understanding that to the libertarians, "the government" is the most evil bunch of people, as opposed to big corporations, who are always a good bunch of people, no matter of hard they hit your privacy and freedom of speech.
Bravo!!! I have never heard libertarianism defined so well before. After reading all the pro-libertarian propaganda that passes for "political discussion" here on slashdot, it is nice to see that there are a few souls here who have actually thought about politics, rather than mindlessly parroting something that they learned but have never really thought about...
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A man who wants nothing is invincible
As someone famous and important said:
"A lot of misinformation gets said when people put words in the mouth of those that they disagree with".
We libertarians believe that burocracy in a republic tends to be ineffective and inefficient. (Did you know that for every federal tax dollar earmarked for public schools, only 0.35 gets to a school - the other 0.65 is spent in collecting, processing, and distributing the money).
We tend to believe that corporations will be more efficient simply because if they aren't, they'll be driven out of buisnuess by the mechanics of the free market.
Do you really trust the government more than you trust yourself?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Yes, implementation is broken, but the basic idea is sound.
Welfare should have incentives to get people back to work. One incentive would be to pay much less cash, and issue the rent money directly to landlords (in the form of a check) and crack down on landlords who split these checks with the welfare client, who doesn't actually live there.
And incentives to get a job by adding the wages to the welfare for a few months. Switching jobs is a costly process and it's often impractical to buy a bus pass, work clothes, etc, out of what's barely enough money to live on in a normal month.
I'm always disgusted at how in Canada (dunno about the USA) it's easier to apply for welfare (one form, instant check) than UI (unemployment relief) which is multiple forms, a dismissal notice from your work, and three to five weeks...
The system is insane. But, if you reward people for paying out less benefits, you can't be suprised when they complicate the system to make it harder to collect.
A lot of the problems come from rewarding the wrong behaviour.
I see no reason why a government run agency can't be as efficient as a private one, if you're allowed to be as ruthless as a corporation would in cutting out useless jobs and firing people for incompotence.
But, I don't see much happening as long as we live in a representative democracy where we have to pick the least corrupt person to 'represent' us. When electronic voting becomes possible, if used right, it could remove a lot of corruption simply by removing the politicians who hire incompotent relatives, etc.
Jesse isn't the person I'd have picked, if I was in his state (or country for that matter), but he's a lot closer than any of the other politicians.
Even if you only judge him by how corrupt he is, he's had a lot less time to be corrupted by big money advocates. He'll have just as many biases as the next person, but until he's in office for as many years as most politicians, he won't be bought on as many issues.
It's partly because he just got into politics (well, fairly recently) and partly because he's not from a rich family that would already have a lot of these connections.
And, I also think that having been a SEAL, he's less likely to support pointless wars and military operations, knowing what it's like to risk your life for some moron politician who's just vote pandering. Finally, a politician who didn't get a cushy National Guard position, or go straight into officer school and sit behind a desk during the war.
So God writes a document full of encoded criminal plans, without handing over the keys.
;-)
Now, that makes God a criminal right?
Everything makes much more sense now; such strangeness, here in a rather protestant nation with a distaste for catholicism which spawned from the country that created a new religion so its king could get a divorce...
Makes ya proud to be a Jew
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
This is truly nasty, I'll agree, but...
Is it legal? I mean, will this get through the European Court of Human Rights?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
The European Convention on Human Rights is already law in Scotland and will soon be in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (presumably in the course of the current parliament, along with the long promised and water down more than a supermarket prawn freedom of information act).
This legislation will not stand up to judicial scrutiny if the system for handling human rights cases actually works properly. Given the slightly flakey nature of the British legal system outside of Scotland it may not. The Court of Session in Edinburgh has recently upheld two complaints on human rights grounds, one of which has forced the Scottish Government to stop employing temporary sherriffs. There will be more such cases, and probably a lot of ensuing chaos - getting the crypto stuff heard might be hard.
We won that fight. This is their *next* braindead idea, and I think this "stunt" is a highly effective and dramatic demonstration of its unworkability.
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Xenu loves you!
Do you really trust the government more than you trust yourself?
.35 cents would go to the schools, .60 cents would be costs (rent, salaries, office supplies, postage, etc.) and .05 would be profit. You don't really think that business would choose to make a little less profit in order to give a little more to the schools, do you?
No, but I trust the government more than Exxon, Southwestern Bell, Microsoft, etc. And I certainly trust the government more than most of my fellow "citizens" (yourself included)!
(Did you know that for every federal tax dollar earmarked for public schools, only 0.35 gets to a school - the other 0.65 is spent in collecting, processing, and distributing the money).
So corporations do not have any costs when it comes to sending out bills and collecting money? If schools were privatized probably only
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A man who wants nothing is invincible