81–90 of 191 posts
What we have learned thanks to Snowden is this: You can never trust your government. Mass surveillance was conducted illegally before and continues to this day. Does anyone really think some "law" will change this?
What it changes is whether you can be criminally prosecuted based on circumstantial / irrelevant / trumped up evidence.
What we have learned thanks to Snowden is this: You can never trust your government. Mass surveillance was conducted illegally before and continues to this day. Does anyone really think some "law" will change this?
Good point, but if we can't rely on the law to help us what will be left? I wonder if one can make a request for information (Freedom of Information Act) about data personally held from the government?
The only options remaining, when you can't trust the laws or the systems that create the laws, are attrition (pervasive encryption and decentralizing of networks to deny governments access to information coupled with aggressive leaking and whistleblowing to limit their effectiveness), violence (which serves the interests of authoritarians and extremists) or acceptance of the status quo.
"Yet again a UK court has ruled the government’s extreme mass surveillance regime unlawful. This judgement tells ministers in crystal clear terms that they are breaching the public’s human rights." So the question then remains...where are the handcuffs?! I ask this question constantly when it comes to government wrongdoing and there is almost never anyone charged with anything. If the government has been acting in a…
The people writing poor laws are supposed to be held accountable by the population in a process called an election. If that process is not working, it seems unlikely any legislation to punish lawmakers will fix it - they make the laws, after all.
Also, the UK's first-past-the-post system has given us a two-party system (Labour and Conservative), which makes elections mostly useless for any issues those two parties agree on, such as surveillance (AFAICT the trajectory of the current surveillance state was set in motion under Blair, and later Brown).
When the Liberal Democrats entered a much-maligned coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, they at least managed to prevent the "Snoopers Charter" getting passed. At the next election, the Conservatives got a majority and passed it as the "Investigatory Powers Act 2016".
I know of very few British MPs, being a Canadian who watches occasionally British panel shows, but I do hear about Tom Watson fairly frequently and almost always for things I am in favor of. Now here he is championing the fight against mass surveillance as well. British folks: is this guy eventually going to replace Corbyn? He seems likeable enough to. And he has a sense of humor- the first time I heard of him was wh…
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There are more Labour members supporting Corbyn than there were Labour members total before Corbyn became leader. Labour will never be unified as long as there is first past the post in the UK, and currently at least the left of the party dominates the membership. Any challenger to Corbyn at this point would depend on the support of the left of the party even more than during the last challenge.
Polarization of the main parties is creating big democratic deficits in UK governance. The Tory party membership is heavily skewed towards Brexit despite it having a razor thin majority in the country; while Labour is heavily skewed towards Marxists, despite Britain being roughly centre-right throughout its modern history, by European standards. As a result, neither parties have natural constituencies in the electora…
No one is calling Merkel a Marxist yet Germany has free higher education and nationalised rail, and Germany is just one example.
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Yet Corbyn's somewhat populist rhetoric seems to have made Labour competitive again, or were their good election results just a coincidence and had nothing to do with Corbyn? Just curious, since I'm not British and probably only have a very superficial understanding of the politics.
The election result was likely considerably more influenced by the government unwisely deciding to base their entire election campaign around empty slogans about a Brexit nearly half the population had voted against including most of the typical swing voters, allowing Corbyn to position himself more as the reasonable candidate whose manifesto actually offered tangible promises. The populist rhetoric came before the m…
This position is largely what the Blairite wing of the party were rebelling against. They wanted to run on a strongly anti-Brexit platform with slightly watered down tory policies. The Lib Dems conveniently demonstrated how deeply unpopular that platform was outside of the London remainer bubble.
Getting the largest increase in voting share since the 40s while the whole media savages you (even the independent and guardian were attacking him 6 weeks before the election) and your own MPs try to undermine you at every turn is an impressive achievement. The next election wont have either of those things and will likely feature a landslide.
"Yet again a UK court has ruled the government’s extreme mass surveillance regime unlawful. This judgement tells ministers in crystal clear terms that they are breaching the public’s human rights." So the question then remains...where are the handcuffs?! I ask this question constantly when it comes to government wrongdoing and there is almost never anyone charged with anything. If the government has been acting in a…
well... whom you would like to send to jail? actual clerk, his/her boss, department head? queen? whole government? (i would love this one :)) Government is unique entity - it is a entity 'too big to fail'. And we all know how entities that can not die act.
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So if you disagree with them they can deal with you one way or another? I've always thought that was the real reason: to dissuade dissidence.
I've always thought this as well. They can more effectively control the population and also get "dirt" on anyone they want. There's pretty much no one on this planet who hasn't said or done something they aren't proud of, don't want public, don't want their spouse to know, is mildly illegal (but which could then be vigorously prosecuted once they are a target), etc. etc. I think it's for the Donald Trump scenario - i…
Assuming the conspiracy theory that the US IC "effectively control the population" is true, the only rational explanation is that they wanted Trump as president, not the opposite.
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Tom Watson has agreeable views in a number of areas, but he's unlikely to be a candidate for the leadership any time soon. Quite aside from anything, Corbyn is unfortunately unassailable at the moment.
> Corbyn is unfortunately unassailable at the moment But... Why? I don't have a horse in this race at all, but Corbyn just doesn't seem to be able to win. He seems so uncharismatic. The last election wasn't so much him gaining seats as it was May losing them. With a minority government, May's days are numbered. It feels to me like the time to replace Corbyn is now, before the next election.
Yeah right, you come only to bury caesar. I'll admit my bias, I'm a fan. And I don't think you can write off Corbyn's coming from well behind, daily attacks from all the centre and rightwing press as if he were the antichrist or some antisemitic Stalinist, as well as attacks from the Blairite dead in his own party, to beat all the critics and deprive "strong and stable" May of her majority, leaving her weakly needing to bribe the Northern Irish in order to stay in government. That's no small achievement given the hatchetjobs he's had to overcome.
Labour under Corbyn look much more like a government than the Tories, frankly.
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I can believe that it happens in some cases but I doubt it would make a lot of sense to do it for the mass surveillance of the population, if only because it would also make it extremely easy to do large scale industrial espionage. I'm pretty sure Germany wouldn't want the USA to have access to all of its trade and industrial secrets for instance. At least I would require a better source than "if I remember correctly…
What about https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-... On your second point, industrial espionage is, I suspect, a large factor in determining which countries should be spied on. Does anyone really think that Boeing doesn't get competitor info from US agencies?
>The German, French and Spanish governments have reacted angrily to reports based on National Security Agency (NSA) files leaked by Snowden since June, revealing the interception of communications by tens of millions of their citizens each month.
The parent was saying that European countries are complicit and actually want the USA to spy on their citizens so that they can recover the intelligence indirectly.
>Does anyone really think that Boeing doesn't get competitor info from US agencies?
Not me at least, which is exactly why I don't expect that the french and german governments for instance to be perfectly fine with the USA spying on Airbus's employees for instance.