111–120 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?
Having a law which stops it probably won't make a difference, but have a law which allows it definitely will.
"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... These are the (large) cracks in rule of law that no one has ever managed to close entirely. It's dangerous to criminalise political tier decisions and actions, just like it's dangerous to prosecute former politicians. It harms the ability to preserve peaceful transitions. Criminals or not. First, it opens a door to political purging. Also incentives to use power in order to remain free is just too big.
And if somehow a political leader has managed to corrupt/threaten 3 court levels, then you've got bigger things to worry about, and chances are such a person would take other measures to get rid of his political opponents that are much faster.
Also, it's not like you can't ever arrest a politician. There are laws and countries that do put politicians in prison, especially in cases on corruption.
"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…
> Yet again a UK court has ruled the government’s extreme mass surveillance regime unlawful Except that's not what happened. Not legally anyway. What happened is that the Court of Appeal ruled that a Parliamentary Act did not contain sufficient safeguards to be compliant with the Human Rights Act. So there's, at least, 2 problems you've got. One is that it's not, technically, government legislation. It's the Crown's…
This was such a massive power grab by the authoritarians like Theresa May and David Cameron and they were so transparent about it. Of course such powers should never be allowed in any democrat. But they thought they'd get away with it anyway, because "people don't care about privacy". But this is going to end up badly for UK citizens if they're allowed to operate mass surveillance at a policeman's or taxman's level.
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?
"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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...
I took one look at that article and the fact that the U.S. is literally painted the same color as China as having an equal amount of internet censorship would be hilarious if it weren’t so egregiously misleading. There’s internet censorship and there’s China. Nobody else is in the same league. The only explanation I can think of is if censorship and surveillance are just being casually lumped together, but people und…
The chart is literally titled "Internet censorship and surveillance by country (2014)" with categories that don't differentiate between censorship and surveillance, so I'm relatively certain that the two have been lumped together.
I am sure this will not be popular here, but reality and the truth far more often are so than not. The "elite", power brokers, wealthy ... however you want to refer to those who actuate the levers of power ... have been working diligently to shatter and fracture democracy by importing and imposing foreigners upon their populations that are inherently incompatible and introduce conflict and disassembly of unified identity and common interest.
The idea was to substitute community and common interest that have presented a clear opposition to the elite through the middle class that it produced, and substituting state, i.e., elite ruled instruments of power and state control, as the common glue in a shift away from self-motivated cohesion towards state imposed cohesion. The whole plan is and was heavily reliant on a massive surveillance state, the very same kind you have heard of in all the past and current authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, e.g., Mugabe, Saddam, Gaddafi, China, Indonesia, Sauds, etc.
When you have shattered the self-motivated and self-interested bond that keeps a people organized and cohesive, you then introduce a poison pill that will and is inherently shattering democracy as intended, which will then require heavy handed control by an elite that will invariably become ever more authoritarian and eventually totalitarian.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Corbyn to position himself more as the reasonable candidate whose manifesto actually offered tangible promises. 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 t…
Not convinced that HN is really the venue for detailed tangential discussion of UK politics, but no intellectually honest assessment of Labour's internal debate starts from the assumption that what the "Blairite wing", headed up by the individual that actually deposed Tony Blair(!), really objected to was Corbyn 2017 manifesto innovations like universal free school meals and tuition fee abolution and er.. matching To…
Ah yes. Intellectually dishonest.
Yes, it's true that not every policy Corbyn's 2017 manifesto had was unpopular with the PLP and it is possible to cherry pick many which they had no problem with. Their fundamental problem with it was not admitted to by the PLP but Blair did state "I wouldn't want Labour to win on his platform even if it was popular", maybe because he hates free school dinners. Or not. You tell me why he said it.
The rest of the stuff is more of an excuse to dig in to him. I don't think it's realistic to believe that members of the PLP who, on the one hand praise the success of the Chinese dictatorship at bringing people out of poverty, and simultaneously condemn Corbyn for saying the same of a Latin American democracy actually care about Venezuelans. They're grandstanding on a particular issue to try in order to try and open ideological rifts in the party. Ditto all that rubbish about Marxists and rabbles of trots.
>the party's poor performance in polls
The poor polling coincided with the PLP's constant attempts to undermine him and Labour's unpopularity peaked during the coup when they did everything they could to destroy him. The polling was entirely a self fulfilling prophecy on the part of the PLP.
They created the poor polling of the Labour party with the coup and he dragged them out of it with an unexpected strong performance in the election. It's amazing how well he can perform when knives are removed from his back isn't it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... These are the (large) cracks in rule of law that no one has ever managed to close entirely. It's dangerous to criminalise political tier decisions and actions, just like it's dangerous to prosecute former politicians. It harms the ability to preserve peaceful transitions. Criminals or not. First, it opens a door to political purging. Also incentives to use power in order to remain free is just too big.
But we're talking about courts deciding to put politicians in prison here. And if somehow a political leader has managed to corrupt/threaten 3 court levels, then you've got bigger things to worry about, and chances are such a person would take other measures to get rid of his political opponents that are much faster. Also, it's not like you can't ever arrest a politician. There are laws and countries that do put poli…
In failed rule of law states, it has often happened that former politicians were/are criminalized. This can make losing power, in practice, directly lead to losing life & freedom. This then becomes a mandate to maintain power by whatever means necessary.
It also opens the door to political purges of oponenets.
I'll take an example from the Middle East (my home). When Saddam lost power, he was hanged. Gadaffi was lynched. Mubarak was imprisoned, then released when his faction came back into power. This creative an imperative for Assad to maintain power in Syria. Losing power is a death warrant for him, and he is willing to kill even more brutally to preserve himself.
In Israel, Netanyahu is under criminal investigation. He has immunity from prosecution while in power, but not from investigation. This is very dangerous and many analysts (including US generals and spooks) are worried he will start a war in order to consolidate power. tricky stuff.
These are not rule of law states, and they do not have independant judiciaries. But the principle stand. This is why I found (for example) Trump's threats to Clinton so disturbing. If he had followed up, the entire american system would be in danger.
Realistically, the process in place is there for a reason. Small crimes (eg Clinton's emails or Trump's contact with Russia, if it doesn't turn out to be worse than reported thus far) are swept under a rug. Large crimes (Clinton's BJ?) should be investigated through some non-criminal (courts are OK, the US system is suboptimal here) system where life and freedom are not at stake, just power.
Courts cannot be subsidiaries of executive-legislative power (even in the states where it is explicitely forbidden executive & legislative are not really seperate) but the opposite also cannot be.
It is ugly the way it is. We should be doing better. But, there really are fundamental issues here with the stability of democracies at stake.