"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 manner that has been found in a court of law to violate human rights, then multiple people should be going to jail.
Before you drop the "well now we know for sure - we shouldn't be punitive and punish people who thought they were doing their job properly" crap, think about this. Whenever the government applies a law in a new and untested way against a civilian the case is watched very closely and if that civilian is found guilty they never get the benefit of the "well it's been settled and now we know" argument and get let off lightly. So I argue the same should apply here. The government has grossly violated the rights of citizens on a mass scale and everyone at the top of the food chain involved in these programs should be rotting in a jail cell.
> 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 legislation as enacted by Parliament. Secondly, and slightly less importantly, the Court of Appeal isn't the final arbiter here. One can either argue that it's the European Court of Justice or, and this is where it gets fun, Parliament.
Now, you can of course make a case for banging the Queen away. It's not like that hasn't been tried in the past with some of her predecessors. Or you could make a cases for locking up some or all of both Houses of Parliament. Or they could enact an amendment to correct the problem.
Of course, if it turns out that anyone was actually affected by the legislation as it stands then that should be dealt with as a matter of urgency. While the internet happily chunters on.
> Of course, if it turns out that anyone was actually affected by the legislation as it stands then that should be dealt with as a matter of urgency.
How do you decide whether "anyone was actually affected" by ISPs storing as much browsing data as they can? Doesn't that affect either everyone or noone depending on whether you think it matters? And if it matters, does it not affect everyone? What can you possibly do about that retroactively?
If Shirley lost £1,000,000 and a body part as a result of the ISP’s actions, she’s affected more than somebody who’s merely annoyed and feels their human rights have been breached.
The point about surveilance is it doesn't effect anyone, until it does - and then everybody gets arrested in the night. We're just a couple of decades out of the twentieth century - and if the more bloody-handed of the last century's regimes had today's databases, they would have been far worse.
Is this perhaps where the monarchy having no real power falls down - Parliament is Her Majesty's, if her Parliament fails to abide by her laws then she should act, she didn't even need to use the courts, she should really just have the relevant persons held "at Her Majesty's pleasure" ... the only problem there is the complete breakdown of democracy and the rule of law ...
The MPs have failed to dutifully carry out her wishes, assuming she wanted the HR laws to be followed, Parliament makes the laws but it is Her Maj that - in our pseudo-democracy actually decides to implement them.
ECJ already ruled against the UK on this issue and because they did Tom Watson was able to apply to the UK courts (CoA) for a review of the legislation.
The ECJ has ruled less awful laws than this to be invalid under the fundamental charter of rights. I wouldn't be worried about them. It's the UK courts you have to worry about when deciding such cases, especially when the UK doesn't even have a constitution and they kind of play it by ear.
Oh, if you meant the government thingy no, we kinda accept that stuff changes... which I think is more useful than holding any one thing as particularly holy and untouchable. The US has got its knickers in a proper twist with all that "money is speech" "what the framers intended was" stuff. It's fetishised. Your 21st amendment even repeals the 18th amendment, what's the point?
By your own admission, the UK is driven by expediency. The state can do essentially whatever they want, as long as they have a Really Important Reason. Get rid of jury trials for northern Ireland for a few years, because it's cheaper than properly protecting juries? No problem!
The American constitution exists to say that there are some things the government ought not do, even if it makes their job harder, and that if you truly must do those things, you have to convince more than 51% of the country that it's okay. Californian cities can take their own people's guns away, but it is not their place to take them away from rural Kansas, where a cop is an hour away at best. You have to have at least minimal evidence that somebody did something before you can ransack their house.
I readily grant that our current practice is to play silly games to say that these lines aren't being crossed when they are (border phone searches, stop and frisk, you name it).
The other advantage of the UK system is that when the government comes up with some dumb new idea to abrogate human rights for people born on Tuesdays or whatever, the public debate is couched as "is this really a good idea?"
In the US it gets hung up on "is this constitutional?", which sort of misses an important point.
> Get rid of jury trials for northern Ireland for a few years
I believe we still have Diplock courts. They were actually put in place because internment without trial was considered too draconian. The kind of thing that would never occur with a constitution (give me a G...)
> Californian cities can take their own people's guns away
How does that work? Is California accepting that the 2nd amendment put in the bit about a militia for a reason or something else? I mean, the US Constitution isn't meant to be a state by state menu is it?
> You have to have at least minimal evidence that somebody did something before you can ransack their house.
I believe you have to have reasonable cause. You don't actually need any evidence. And, as you point out, you've all had a few years to drum up some excuses when it becomes inconvenient.
I'm sure having a constitution is comforting and all but, in reality, you're in exactly the same boat as the UK and for exactly the same reasons. We have checks and balances too.
And when the state, in its infinite wisdom, chooses to bend them, we sometimes get quite annoyed (the UK version of angry).
Quite annoyed is a bit extreme. I'm miffed but annoyed? Rocking the boat mate.
Not having a written constitution isn't as bad as it seems. The government can't do what they want. The courts do rule against them.
We have quite a deep history of law that sets things out. Thousands of years. Sometimes we get silly things, like until recently pregnant women having the right to piss in a bobby's helmet, but it's very much a case of a complex set of rights wrestled from the ruling classes over those thousand years or so.
The government is in a precarious situation at the moment. They are extremely weak. It wouldn't take a whole lot to get this legislation outright neutered. If Tom Watson is working on it, I imagine Labour are doing just that.
America has plenty rules which aren't written down, too. You just lack a good word for them, having decided to use constitution to mean a particular bit of paper, which is periodically found to contain rights unknown to its authors.
A nice example is the slowly shifting norms around executive orders.
A bigger example: didn't both Liberia and Mexico basically xerox the US constitution? The bit of paper, I mean. For clearly the unwritten "ways we do things" in everyones heads were very different.
The problem the US has is that the constitution has two roles. Firstly it specifies the relationship between the federal government and the states (a kind of treaty). Secondly it specifies the rights of individuals.
While the treaty between the states and the federal government has very little reason for change, the rights of individuals need to change as society changes.
But the US constitution does not lend itself to easy modification, so in practice the Supreme Court is used to "interpret" further individual rights into existence.
Three roles — it gives individuals rights versus the federal government, which on the one hand is a fairly logical extension of a treaty between the states and the federal government but which on the other hand has the problems you describe — and it also gives individuals rights versus the states, which is a totally different and very weird kettle of ball games.
On the plain meaning of the text, an amendment like "Congress shall make no law …" wouldn't even bind the states in the first place, but apparently it does.
Yes and when the rights of states clash with the rights of individuals, there are often nonsensical consequences.
For instance, in 2005 the US was one of the last countries to abolish the death penalty for children, not by passing a law, but on the action of the judiciary interpreting a new individual right into the constitution (i.e. to not be executed for crimes committed under the age of 18). Quite how they managed to get the age 18 out of the words "cruel and unusual punishments" is something to ponder.
Prior to that, the states had an inviolable constitutional right to execute children.
So the US was prevented from ratifying the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child because Congress couldn't make a law violating the right of states to execute children, yet the US states could not individually ratify the UNCRC themselves because that would be violating the right of Congress to make treaties.
The outcome of this battle of rights between governmental bodies, is that children in the US are to this day denied individual rights that they would otherwise have under international law, or even national law, and rely on 12 judges to extract their rights from thin air.
It absolutely doesn't. It's not written down because it doesn't exist.
All that article is doing is listing some Acts that contain portions that Brits tend to take more seriously than, say, the Dangerous Dogs Act.
But here's the important bit. Legally, it's no harder to repeal the Bill of Rights that it is to repeal the mangy mutts act.
For example, Parliamentary sovereignty is considered sacrosanct in our constitution. Except we have fairly regularly given it away in Acts and are, presumably, going to get some back in another one because of Brexit.
And Brexit is going to happen because we, randomly, had a referendum about it. In most countries, fundamentally restructuring almost all our treaty obligations of the last 40 years would have a higher threshold than muzzling Rottweilers. Not so in Blighty.
Now, I happen to think that that's not necessarily a bad thing (OK, I think Brexit was scandalous). But we clearly don't have a constitution in any reasonable sense.
Not sure a constitution necessarily helps. In this case, the Human Rights legislation is acting like a constitution in the sense that it's a benchmark that laws are being held to.
A constitution can sometimes be a fairly negative thing. You regularly see US decisions being made against the Constitution where it blatantly isn't applicable. You rarely (ever?) see SCOTUS saying that the Constitution doesn't apply so it needs to go back to Congress for a more applicable law. In other words a Constitution starts to resemble a religious document that has the answer to every conceivable problem if only a priest can interpret it.
What would it mean for the US Constitution not to apply to a law within the US?
For a federal law, either it's within Congress's specifically enumerated and limited powers (as interpreted by SCOTUS) and therefore valid, or else the law is invalid.
For a state law, the US Supreme Court will only base their ruling on the US Constitution if anything legally binding at the federal level (including but not limited to the Constitution) forbids or allows that state law.
Otherwise, SCOTUS and every other court will defer on state law to the state Constitution as interpreted by state courts, but from a federal constitutional perspective, states can pass whatever laws aren't federally forbidden.
As an obvious example, the 5th Amendment blatantly didn't have anything to do with passwords. The whole idea is a bit silly. The sensible thing to do would be to say that the Constitution has nothing much to say on many issues relating to modern technology and deal with it accordingly.
Same goes with guns. If you want everyone to be armed then fine. That's your prerogative. But the Constitution clearly didn't mean for everyone and their mom to be tooled up with semi-automatic weaponry. I mean, just how legal are militias in the US? Because they're the reason you should be carrying.
It was clearly a document of its time. And one of international importance. But the religious zeal to which it is adhered to is highly questionable.
Now, it's not like we're perfect in the UK or anything. But if someone tried to justify something to do with smartphones or terrorism by referencing Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, we'd probably take a step back and give them a napkin for the mouth frothing.
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.
I agree with you generally, but not in this case. Anyone with a double digit IQ should have been able to know that this was illegal. This wasn't one of those gray areas where federal agents are wondering how far their power goes. A simple comprehension of basic human rights as they have been acknowledged formally in law should lead any decent, reasonable person to conclude these surveillance programs were seriously against the law. That's why I don't apply the same good faith exemption that most law enforcement receives most of the time. This is gross, willful negligence and they are now trying to claim ignorance.
It's not quite obvious. British constitutional theory holds Parliament to be completely sovereign - so the concept of an illegal piece of statute law is a bit alien.
The only real constraints on Parliament's freedom of legislation are the body of EU law, and the European Convention on Human Rights. The former is variously directly and indirectly applicable in UK law, and the latter is enforced both by UK statute (which can be overridden by Parliament) and by oversight from an external court (which has limited enforcement powers).
I agree that the surveillance law is obviously bad policy, but it wasn't obviously in breach of either EU law or the ECHR. The English court of appeal thought that it wasn't, but referred it to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a binding opinion, because they decided the question was finely balanced. CJEU ruled that it was in breach of articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, so the Court of Appeal made a domestic declaration that the statute was in breach of EU law.
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 politicians in prison, especially in cases on corruption.
It's not necessarily about corrupting the courts. It is about maintaining influence or outright control over police, prosecution, legislation or whatever body (very often a political body, as in The States) is responsible for investigating or prosecuting political offenses.
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.
>In failed rule of law states, it has often happened that former politicians were/are criminalized.
If they were "criminalized" and no one had the power to lock them up, there was no rule of law in the first place. There was a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.
Morally, I agree with you. My former prime minister is in jail for graft, theft essentially. He will spend less time in prison (though fortunately he is at least serving some) than a common thief even though the damage he has done is imesurably greater.
The reason I argue the opposite (OP) is for practical rather than moral reasons. Morals are a luxury. Systemic stability is at stake and is a requisite for any rule of law.
That said, prosecuting legislators and/or political executives for ilegal legislation is far too dangerous, essentially merging all branches of government.
The law is the output of politicians so in a certain sense they can collectively always pass legislation that protects themselves anyway so there’s not much point in compelling them into doing so by prosecuting them.
Parliamentary immunity also exists in many countries to ensure that parliamentarians cannot be prosecuted for acts they undertook whilst in office (or other acts, so they that they cannot be compelled into anything).
You’re never going to get a body politic to pass a law that places them all at risk, and if somehow one got through, they’d pretty quickly pass another one to repeal it.
In the UK the Queen passes the laws, so there seems no reason she couldn't issue a writ making particular actions of MPs unlawful.
Presumably she doesn't because she rather likes the money and the palaces more than she wants to settle the question as to how you have a parliamentary democracy and monarchy with "you don't".
I don’t know if that is even possible within the confines of the UK’s latter-day (uncodified) constitutional monarchy, but the Queen resuming the practice of unilaterally imposing laws upon Parliament and the Realm at large would be one of the most terrifying regressions of the past several centuries.
Besides, the scenario you depict further reinforces my argument that there’s a “trusted root” at the apex of our democracies and that this entity (whether the Queen, or Parliament, or Congress, or the President, or whatever-have-you) can pursue its own interests with abandon, and there’s nothing we buggers further down the pyramid can do to prevent it.
If the Queen imposed a requirement for MPs who sponsor laws to go to prison if those laws clearly beach the ECHR (or maybe HRA) who'd complain?
It's far less terrifying to me that the present Queen can do that than that any oligarch with a £100M to spare can probably "lobby" to get the changes they want.
The royal family are in a dicey position, but I trust the current Queen more than MP s in general, but perhaps less than the 2 Houses as a whole. She can probably do anything that goes with either Parliament OR with the demos but couldn't go against both.
It's not illegal to pass a bad law. When the Supreme Court finds the law is incompatible with the Human Rights Act or EU law, they rule that the law needs to be changed. They don't prosecute the MPs that voted for it.
It appears your argument against prosecuting criminal politicians boils down to being afraid of their power and what would happen if you did? Seems like a weak argument from authority.
"Argument from authority" means something entirely different, although your use here is somewhat amusing.
You're also misunderstanding the argument: It's not the powerful politicians that are frightening, it's the powerless. By prosecuting (former) politicians, you're not creating disincentives against abuse of power, you're disincentivising loss of power.
That's the hard-to-accept logic behind the mostly deferential treatment the Nixons and Mugabes of the world today get after they lost power.
This is still a weak excuse for allowing politicians to break the law. It's like saying we shouldn't go after child molesters because they might kill the police so they can keep molesting children.
>By prosecuting (former) politicians, you're not creating disincentives against abuse of power
Do you think prosecuting people who committed crimes creates a disincentive against crime?
>you're disincentivising loss of power.
The same could be said for (former) leaders of drug cartels and mafia bosses, but we still go after them (as well as the current ones), don't we?
Loss of power is already by default highly disincentivized, which is why people want to hold on to it for as long as they can. It's also why we enforce term limits and have checks and balances. However those checks and balances are quite toothless when you elevate politicians above the law.
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." -Aesop
Do you think those who gave prosecution (PM May is I've presumably) have enough power to move the UK out of begin a democracy (of sorts) in order to avoid prosecution.
In the case of the Flint water debacle, there were several indictments. It's been a really positive change at the state and local level. It empowers the career experts to say to the political appointees and elected officials: "no, I'm not going to jail over this."
Which is why the experts can use that now very real threat to refuse to carry out certain political commands. You have to have the possibility of going to jail in order to refuse to go to jail.
For what it's worth, the state government of Bavaria was recently fined 4.000 Euro by a Bavarian court for failing to take action on air quality: [DE] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/oberbayern/inhalt/deutsche-umw... . Apparently, if they don't pay, the minister for the environment may be arrested...
Not all trials are criminal. In fact, the vast majority are civil. To expose elected politicians to criminal liability would completely stymie them: laws are routinely struck down for all sorts of reasons, and it would be almost impossible for a single parliamentarian (who usually has a staff of two or three, max) to foresee all challenges.
I know this "Snooper's Charter" evokes strong feelings, which makes it a bad example.
The courts also have enough power already to make their judgements stick. Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the US, and it didn't take any jail sentences to make that right a reality, even though roughly 40% of the population are vehemently opposed.
To see a particularly crass example that comes close to your fantasy, see Joe Arpaio, one of the very few politicians to actually defy a court long enough to be convicted of criminal charges.
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.
The problem with having a couple of elections per decade is that they lump all decisions (economic, legal, home, foreign, etc.) into one.
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".
The courts didn't technically rule that it violated a particular persons rights, only that the law lacked safeguards to prevent such an abuse. That quote was by a Labour minister not the judge.
But otherwise I agree with holding politicians accountable, as this has no doubt already broken at least a few peoples rights.
I disagree. The judges held that it was "inconsistent with EU law". That means it is illegal because it goes against the (higher) EU law. They held that the reason it was inconsistent was because it lacked "prior review by a court or independent administrative authority" - basically, due process. It seems clear from the language of the judges that rights were violated without due process. That's no minor offense.
> That means it is illegal because it goes against the (higher) EU law.
It actually does not mean that. The courts cannot ignore an Act of Parliament even if it conflicts with the Human Rigths Act but can o ly give an declaration of incombability which they have done.
What you're asking for is nothing like what this process is designed to be.
The Human Rights Act is designed as a way to allow courts to push back on certain kinds of legislation - this ruling is a normal part of the legislative process not any indication of criminal wrong doing by anyone.
I am not a UK citizen so I can't say with any level of certainty what the process was designed to be. However, a few things seem pretty obvious.
1) The judges said this was "inconsistent with EU law". That means it is illegal because it goes against the (higher) EU law. This is equivalent to how Federal law trumps State laws in the US and State law trumps local/municipal law. If it is inconsistent with EU law, then it is a violation of that law, plain and simple.
2) The judges also held the ruling in #1 based on lack of "prior review by a court or independent administrative authority". That's the US equivalent to what we call due process. So rights were being violated without due process. That's pretty serious.
I think you are making the water murkier by trying to imagine what you think the process is/should be. The fact remains that the law has been violated on a mass scale, by government, and this has now been adjudicated in a court of law.
What is happening is that the court has decided law X is not consistent with law Y.
In the UK system, when this happens the courts can order Parliament to review law X to make amendments so the laws are consistent. The Government can choose to appeal this to a higher court or they can choose to amend the law. (Incidentally this differs from the US system in that the court doesn't say what the new law should be - but rather says that a section of the law is invalid in a certain way and must be changed - a job then left to the politicians).
No law has been disobeyed at all here - rather two perfectly valid laws have been created that are in disagreement, and the court is ordering that the disagreement be resolved in favour of one.
Because those who wrote the law have cover from parliament passing the law.
Who would we be cuffing?
Those who drafted the law? Or maybe those who whipped party members into line to vote for the law?
In my opinion, people drafting illegal laws is to be expected. It is the responsibility of parliament and the house of lords to keep illegal laws from being enacted. So if we were to cuff anyone, it seems to me it ought to be parliament.
For parliament we have a different measure than the courts though. That would be elections!
It seems less that wise for the public prosecutor to be able to target members of parliament for how they voted.
The solution should be sought in a better democracy.
An underlying issue here might be that a majority of voter would actually like to see the constitutional basis for this ruling changed.
The Brexit vote could be seen as supporting this.
If indeed the electorate wants to get rid of this, there is very little to be done.
And that is how a democracy is kind of supposed to work.
Sometimes, this makes democracies suck. But like Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms we've tried.
You kinda hint at the answer in your post already - you keep referring to "the government", but who? Is there one or a few people responsible for directing others to perform the unlawful surveillance? Or are they too protected by some mechanic? The legal state being "unclear" probably also means that those people can't face judgment for continuing doing it while the judges were still out.
At minimum, it should be the architects of these programs in the intelligence community. I'm not sure of the UK case, but in the US and many other countries the intelligence agencies just kind of took it upon themselves to do these things "for national security" whether it was lawful or not. Sometimes they retroactively had laws passed to attempt to make it legal. The situation is probably the same in the UK. Now we know for sure that it was not legal in the UK to do this. So those that designed these programs should be held to account. That means the top brass at these agencies. They have a ton of resources that they could have used to know this was probably illegal or at least might have been deemed illegal. They chose to either ignore those warnings or never sought out council in the first place because they never thought 1) they would be caught doing what they are doing or 2) that even if they were caught it wouldn't be found illegal and if it was nothing would ever happen to them because they would be protected.
There are arguments to be made in their defense, sure. Most likely regarding intent and what a reasonable person could/should have known. And that's what a court is for. But they should absolutely at least be charged so a case can be made. If the people of the UK accept that they were acting in good faith, then fine. But to me, all of this stuff looks like an intentional screw job that they tried to make legal after the fact, which has now failed. And the fact remains that we know for sure now that they have been violating the law. If we know this with certainty, cases should be brought.
>You kinda hint at the answer in your post already - you keep referring to "the government", but who? Is there one or a few people responsible for directing others to perform the unlawful surveillance?
Yes. Those that signed related orders. It doesn't even matter if they get them all, just some high enough would be enough to deter others.
The Human Rigths Act specifically does not grant the courts the possibility of not following Acts of Parliament when the too conflict. The courts can only give an declaration of incombability which they have done. This is how an Parliamentary sovereignty works.
Well somebody or some bodies stood for the law and approved it. They needn't all go to jail or it would become a neat implement for beheading a government, but allowing them to create such laws without any repercussions is wrong.
Umm... that is exactly how an parliamentary democracy works. The parliament can enact any law. Yes, many such systems contain laws that overrule all other laws and are often harder to change. These are often called constitutions. But I can't recall any constitution that could not be changed.
Handcuffs for legislators are just as rare as handcuffs for CEOs. At a certain point one is left to conclude that handcuffs are inversely proportional to the amount of capital you control.
In theory, wouldn't it require someone challenging the government in a court of law?
It sounds like this kind of thing is very common, but because there's no challenge to these crimes the government just carry on as normal.
I know no more about the law than the average person, but surely a large-enough group of people, backed by someone with legal/political pull, could challenge the government?
Reminds me of bad actors in large companies. You'd think it is beneficial to remove them as fast as possible, but in any sort of bubbled environment, extrication is not easy. Especially when the bad decisions are a result of the existing system and the said actor in tandem. (That is, that person may be "good" in another system)
I want the people at the top of the agencies that engage in these activities to be charged. I guarantee you when they set up these programs they consulted legal council and they were warned of the possible legal issues that could arise. They chose to ignore those warnings. If by some incredible chance they did not seek council, they were being grossly negligent in carrying out their duties, which resulted in violations of the law and harm to individuals through violation of their human rights. That (gross negligence) is also a crime, at least in the US where I am, so it doesn't matter how you look at it. Those at the top should be held to account for these monumentally bad decisions which have now been deemed illegal.
In the UK the police can knock on your door for an offensive Tweet. If what happens on the internet has such serious implications then so should abusing power on the internet like this.
Biggest problem IMO with this is that they left the data collection and storage to each ISP individually without any support. This results in a large surface area for security failure and the inevitable leak of this data into the public domain.
I wrote my MP with these concerns but they wanted it on the cheap and forced it through.
I don't like that they're storing the data in general as even if they centralised it and secured it properly it'd still probably leak but they've more or less chosen the worst approach on top of recording information that they shouldn't be recording in the first place.
Also its linked to billing account which is a lossy way to deriving who is actually looking at what and begs the question: "do you actually know what websites your children are visiting?". Because now those sites come up as places YOU (the bill payer) are going to.
I'm looking forward to the "scandal" when MPs are "found" to visiting dubious sites when its really someone else in their household.
and everyone going anywhere vaguely dark with half-decent tech knowledge just switches to VPN undermining the whole premise. My MP was _very_ interested in that bit without realising that even if you close that loop hole we just invent another.
I have two heuristics that are related to this topic:
1. If something is physically possible and can be done economically, then it is already happening.
2. If a nation state wants you - or your people - gone, then you're done, period. This is a function of state's coordination power in general, and not of any technology or program they may or may not have.
(Heuristic 1. is, incidentally, why I was not in any way surprised by Snowden's revelations. It was obvious that this is happening. Heuristic 2. is why I don't buy the general argument saying "census is bad because the Nazis used census data to target Jews".)
Heuristic 2. tells me that if the state turns fascist, it's game over, and it has little to do with present surveillance and efforts to oppose it. Heuristic 1. tells me that no matter what the law says, militaries and intelligence agencies will keep snooping on everyone. So given all that, what's the change?
The change will be visible when you forget about doom&gloom scenarios (1) and NSA (2). It's about regular abuses of citizens in a stable state, under the rule of law. If the state sets the rules of the game and then breaks them, you have recourse. There are courts. There are media. Careers of politicians and public servants are on the line. Officials will be reluctant to break the rules out of simple fear for their own reputations and career prospects.
So this is not a perfect win. But there will never be a perfect win, there will be no end of electronic surveillance, as long as we are a technological civilization (see heuristic 1). But it's something to go on, it's a change in the direction of actually achievable balance.
I agree. But that doesn't mean we should make it legal, and, as per the snooper's charter, relax who has access to it. I'm glad we still have people fighting for us.
What it changes is whether you can be criminally prosecuted based on circumstantial / irrelevant / trumped up evidence.
Although that is obviously an improvement, it is of limited benefit if mere suspicion of criminal behaviour (including "terrorism", the current root password to the legal system) is still enough to impose serious extra-judicial restrictions on someone's life, and there are many laws and government mechanisms that provide for that.
> Good point, but if we can't rely on the law to help us what will be left?
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.
There were cases in the States where a defendant tried to subpoena records from the meta-data collection saying it would exonerate him from the accusation. I can't find how the motion was ruled on with some light Googling. Anyone remember?
Government agencies who want to do illegal things must do them with some level of restraint because reducing volume makes abuse and/or public knowledge of their actions less likely.
Illegal action is more costly at every step (you have to hide it and its paper trail).
Less abuse and smaller (illegal) programs means less opportunity for politicians to look good to the public by holding your agency accountable for violating the law.
Making stuff we don't want the gov to do illegal for the gov to do helps very much because it provides negative incentives for them to do those things so they are less likely to do those things in large volume.
Making something illegal for the gov to do is no different than writing a law that fines private companies for doing something bad. Sure they'll still do it when they think the rewards make it worth it but they'll do it a hell of a lot less overall.
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 when he was doing comedy bits with Five Second Films[0].
Watson is one of very few British politicians who seems to care about privacy, surveillance, and internet issues. He was also a big part of the "phone hacking" case against the Murdoch press. It's a shame we don't have more politicans like him. And it's not even a partisan issue - it doesn't surprise me that the Conservatives want to bring in more surveillance and internet laws, but even their biggest opponents on the left rarely oppose it.
>is this guy eventually going to replace Corbyn?
Not likely. He seems more of a background figure who does best focusing on the issues he cares about, and not so much of a leadership type. He's also more in the 'centre ground' of British politics, and has been quite critical of Corbyn over the past few years. It's likely that the next Labour leader would be someone with similar views to Corbyn.
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.
Labour under Corbyn look much more like a government than the Tories, frankly.
But again, how much of that is just because May has been such a disaster?
Corbyn's Labour might look like the government-in-waiting by default, but that's partly because they've got very good at either not committing on controversial subjects or having policies that have a very visible upside that they've promoted while they gloss over serious downsides. None of that will be sustainable if they actually form a government.
It's because Corbyn was attacked excessively at the start. That allowed him to circle the wagons, and Labour is still in the grip of that siege mentality.
Probably not soon anyway as he's associated with the old, non-corbyn faction of the party which seems to be in disfavour ATM.
Though... he does currently have a shadow secretary position. In theory that makes him a ministerial candidate and that (also in theory) puts him in position to create labour's policy on such topics.
Writing the cheques from government is always different to being in opposition or even a disident backbencher. But you're right. He does seems to have an understanding of these issues, and guts.
you say that like undermining Corbyn is an objectively bad thing. He's an extremely divisive element of the current Labour party and the primary reason why I (and I consider myself a liberal first and foremost) cannot support the current Labour leadership. Labour's always been a mix of liberals and socialists but in my opinion Corbyn is too far to the latter to ever unify the party behind his ideas.
He's divisive among a lot of the MPs especially the ones who came in under Blair because of his policies. By historical standards they're soft-left but they're to the left of the overton window so he's "extreme".
The members, most of whom are disgusted with establishment politics and neoliberal dogma are about 90% behind him though. Enough new members were inspired to join by him that they now have the largest membership of any party in Europe.
Anti-establishmentarianisn is only natural given the failure of the status quo to deliver egalitarian growth and freedom. You can have it from mild liberals like him or the far right. Either way the days of the dominant neoliberal era are numbered.
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 electorate to deliver a majority right now. And LibDem are a rounding error.
And of course Corbyn is completely out of whack with his membership, being pro-Brexit while the party is heavily for Remain. Remain effectively doesn't have democratic representation, and nor does the business-focused middle ground.
Sorry, I tune out when anyone mentions Marxism and the current Labour government. Considering their policies are in line with most other center ground European countries it just comes across as repeating Daily Mail taking points.
No one is calling Merkel a Marxist yet Germany has free higher education and nationalised rail, and Germany is just one example.
The Marxists in Labour are few and far between and far to the left of Corbyn. The fantasy that Labour is heavily skewed towards Marxist is just that. Most Labour MPs are more opposed to Marxism than to the Tories, and unlike most social democratic parties in Europe, Labour has never had a tradition of Marxism (though it has been more left wing that today) - there has been a schism between Marxism and more methodist inspired socialism in the UK dating back to before Labour was founded.
> And of course Corbyn is completely out of whack with his membership, being pro-Brexit while the party is heavily for Remain.
He voted Remain, campaigned for Remain, and made it clear he'd vote Remain again (unlike May who "refuses to answer hypothetical questions" for fear of angering people). On what basis do you claim he is pro-Brexit?
Brexit, however is official party policy that he does not have authority to alter on his own and is obliged by party rules to follow, for the simple reason that it'd be political suicide for Labour to oppose is as long as the majority of those Labour seats that are at risk are in Leave heavy areas. Labour has the choice between continuing down that route and try to moderate the Tories and hopefully get more room to maneuver and a shot at government, or start pushing a Remain line and lose rather than gain seats next election - Labours Remain-heavy constituencies are mostly seats that are safe.
> Remain effectively doesn't have democratic representation, and nor does the business-focused middle ground.
We agree on that, but that is the cost we pay for an undemocratic electoral system - if Labour where to go Remain, it would not make a difference - Labour would simply lose a ton of seats.
The man advocated buying houses for the homeless. How economically illiterate can you get beyond that?
(Yes, this is a bit of a trick question. It's a test of whether you understand second order effects or not; whether you support policies to address problems, vs policies that change outcomes.)
> On what basis do you claim he is pro-Brexit?
Primarily because he has not attacked any pro-Brexit policies and he is not opposing the main political goal of the opposition. The country effectively doesn't have an opposition.
> The man advocated buying houses for the homeless. How economically illiterate can you get beyond that?
Homelessness in the UK is not a problem of lack of housing, but of lack of suitable council controlled housing with facilities suitable for caring for homeless people - the vast majority of homeless people are not homeless because they couldn't find a house, but because they have been unable to deal with a life situation that often include mental illness.
But to your concern over changing outcomes: To bring people back out of homelessness on an ongoing basis, then yes, putting a roof over their head is on one hand treating symptoms, on the other hand it is also typically an essential first step:
Getting people back into work and getting people mentally back on track is generally far easier once they have a stable living situation and a fixed address - a lot of homeless people get into a cycle where they become homeless and as a result of becoming homeless find it hard to hold down jobs and near impossible to get new ones, because finding a job without having a fixed address and without having somewhere to clean yourself and clean your clothes and so on is far harder.
So my impression from the way you raised that question is that you don't understand the problem. Having a housing provision to offer is essential.
> Primarily because he has not attacked any pro-Brexit policies and he is not opposing the main political goal of the opposition. The country effectively doesn't have an opposition.
The Labour manifesto makes it clear carrying out Brexit is official policy. If he were to go against the manifesto, he'd be violating his duties. He's not a dictator, and his job is to push for the policies set by the party conference and the national policy forum., not to be a loose cannon pushing his own agenda. It's beyond ironic how many people want Corbyn to act like a dictator, especially after how much effort he spent on arguing for increasing party democracy.
It sucks that it's official policy, but the political reality is that both the Tories and Labour would be guaranteed a loss if pushing Remain at this point given the number of marginals that are Leave heavy.
The idea that Corbyn or his supporters are all Marxists because they want to nationalize a decrepit subsidized rail system used to suck profits out of commuters is on the batshit extreme end of right wing. This stuff is both extemely popular among Brits and common sense.
By historical standards Corbyn is pretty soft left. It's the establishment and London media bubble that have moved into crazy town.
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 manifesto, and - along with widespread opposition to it from within his own party - appeared to have the opposite net effect on voters. Besides which, gaining some seats and weakening the government was far better than expected, but not an especially wonderful achievement for a party that had been in power for more of the previous couple of decades than it had been out of it.
Corbyn has an adoring fanbase and a massively increased party membership but he also still often finishes behind or level with a PM virtually nobody has a good word to say about in "who would make the best Prime Minister" polls.
>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 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.
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 Tory tax cuts for those on £55-70k per annum and dropping Miliband's much-trumpeted "Mansion Tax".
There's a reason why they had a lot of negative stuff to say about Corbyn's long track record of opposing Labour leaders,
his gaffe-prone communication style in the media and lack of communication internally, his "anti-imperialist" foreign policy, him applying considerably more caveats to his "endorsements" of the EU than those of Hamas and Latin American dictatorships, his fondness for surrounding himself with obscure Marxists from outside the party and the party's poor performance in polls and yet even those who'd walked out on the party had few objections to the manifesto.
Tony Blair stepped down under pressure from Gordon Brown with whom he'd already pre-arranged an exit and poor poll performance. Gordon Brown, who is his ideological brother, replaced him. Trying to characterize that as a deposal of Blair and everything he stood for is... oh, what's an appropriate phrase?
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?
Blair stepped down after Tom Watson, the soft-left hardman mentioned upthread, organised an open letter demanding Blair's resignation, and loudly and publicly quit his own position when he didn't get a response. But it's amazing how those unfamiliar with party their history have reinvented him as an ardent Blairite for orchestrating the same sort of attempted coup the next time he thought the party needed a change of leader.
I don't think it's realistic to believe that a man whose only column inches for most of his thirty five year political career have been attacking every aspect of his party's foreign policy (from the justified to the ridiculous), speaking out with none of his usual caveats against the West at solidarity campaigns for the Cuban government and attending memorial ceremonies for terrorists isn't the initiator of all the foreign policy grandstanding. Or that having the odd good word to say about better relations with China (who, even?) is quite the level of blind spot as insisting the real problem with Hamas is that the British government doesn't understand its dedication to "bringing about long-term peace and social justice" at a Meet the Resistance fringe meeting. Or that the likes of Andrew Murray don't exist or have any influence, or spent 40 years in the CPGB because they were natural bedfellows of the soft left.
I'm not really sure that arguing that people might actually object to the stuff they complain about and not the stuff they don't is likely to fall on anything other than deaf ears though...
It was almost entirely to do with Corbyn (and the energy brought to the party by his leadership campaigns, in the form of new members and new organisations).
The government(s)'s excuse is terrorism, but terrorism in Europe doesn't kill a big enough amount of people to justify these drastic measures. I would argue also that no one has proven that it's efficient at preventing terrorist attacks.
There must be a reason, I don't get it. Is it just because governments can, so they do it? It is to create the basis for some initiative that is planned for the future when technology improves..?
There's a simple, political answer. If you're the MP for, say, Manchester after the Ariana Grande bombing, you're (probably) not going to survive politically after trying to make philosophical points about privacy to angry, grieving parents (on live, national TV), explaining why you voted against the surveillance bill.
It's an example of an issue with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.
Yes but what does surveillance have to do with bombings. Have they ever stopped 1 single bombing because they were filming regular people going by their business..?
I think it's probably a vote-winner. From within our tech bubble it's easy to see why this is stupid, but the majority of the UK might look at a newspaper headline such as "May cracks down on terrorism on UK soil" and think Hey, she's actually doing something about all these scary terrorist events I hear about.
I would imagine if newspapers phrased it as "May enacts legislation which will allow the government to spy on what porn you look at" rather than the meek-mannered garbage they actually print, the opinion of the average person in the UK would be quite different.
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 - if an "outsider" tries to enter the political arena to gain power they can crush that person using all the available tools in their arsenal. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, he was able to combat that because he was already rich and famous. No regular human being could rise to power without the approval of the existing political elite. Mass surveillance is just one tool they use to maintain that power.
You basically outline why that's an unsatisfying answer. It didn't prevent Trump from entering the political arena. The "Access Hollywood" tape surfaced a month before the election, why not during the primaries, when he was more vulnerable? Does anyone really believe that someone with purportedly the full power of the US intelligence community couldn't find more on-the-record dirt on him, or his senior staff? What about the stuff in the Russian dossier (the golden shower stuff)? Again, appeared days before the election, too late to do proper damage, and if that's the best the US intelligence community can do, they're mind-bogglingly inept.
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.
> I would argue also that no one has proven that it's efficient at preventing terrorist attacks.
What if arrests in terrorist investigations are kept under wraps though? If the public would hear of thwarted terrorist attacks on a regular basis, either they'd feel more and more unsafe - that is, the terrorists win - or the terrorists find out about other cells and find ways to circumvent detection.
Terrorists would quickly know about other cell failures if no attacks ever succeed, so they would already be changing their game. Constantly thwarting attacks would also increase confidence in the effectiveness of these measures, not decrease them. If there was evidence to speak of, we would have seen it by now. The arguments in favour of surveillance are smoke and mirrors.
Neither. Successful anti-terrorism is about nipping this stuff in the bud before the potential perpetrators get close to having specific plans. You can easily think of tactics that would disrupt recruiting, financing and supply chains quietly, all the way down to simply having a "friendly" chat with someone (and/or their mother).
The extend to which this happens and to what degree surveillance helps with this is difficult to ascertain, of course.
If we were catching terrorists on the regular with programs enabled by these sorts of laws you can bet your ass they'd be trotting out each and every one of them in front of the press while singing praise to the dragnet programs that made it possible.
The surveillance engine in the five eyes primarily, was always really intended primarily as a tool for control, rather than security (see: Bill Binney's testimony). Don't forget the major data storage facilities that were created, they also want to be able to "walk the cat back" so once a dissident rears their head they can retroactively get dirt on them.
Secondarily, it's about major contract kickbacks for the good ol boys.
The most shameful part of it all is how the majority of the populace just subserviently and silently acquiesced, except to criticize those of us trying to warn everyone. (via the classic bullshit arguments we had to put up with, such as if you have nothing to hide, etc).
If it weren't for Snowden people would still be calling many of us "conspiracy theorists".
They would still if we vocalized the other things...
I'm not exactly convinced this will change anything. It's the same for Denmark, and even though it was also ruled unlawful, it just continues. They are even planning on expanding it, and sharing data across public inst. without approval.
The judges invoked EU privacy laws, so I guess this one of those cases of „the yoke of Brüssel imperialism“ that the UK may soon(ish) be liberated from.
Can anyone point to countries which are not going down this same route? In my head Europe is doing better with protecting privacy, but maybe that's just an impression. Canada? Not Australia. Japan?
I call male bovine excrement on the assessment of Sweden though.
Full take collection, installed by and heavily integrated with FVEY, is the gist of it. Describing it as "Little or none" seems like a cynical joke.
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 understand that they’re not synonyms, right? Right?
> The only explanation I can think of is if censorship and surveillance are just being casually lumped together
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.
Sure, but that doesn’t imply that there’s an equivalency between the two, or that the grading scale should be course-grained enough to show no difference between the U.S. and China.
If I made an article called “human rights violations and numbers of reality tv shows by country” and painted Saudi Arabia and Germany the same color, it should rightly raise some eyebrows.
They are closely related though. Mass surveillance, and/or the loss of privacy online, has a chilling effect - effectively censorship.
Either your government blocks / censors your er, controversial statements, or you're afraid to post your controversial statements because the government is watching you. Same effect.
China blocks access to anything on the internet that disagrees with their ruling party. They block any VPN or SSH. Like, not just for avoiding filters, just at all. They degrade any encrypted traffic by just doing compression analysis and dropping packets if your traffic looks encrypted.
This is not the same thing as the NSA’s dragnet surveillance or anything the UK is doing. China is already at the endgame you are hypothesizing, and you’re creating a false equivalency through a slippery slope. A slope where the bottom is where China is today.
If I remember correctly, Europe relies on US to spy on it's people so technically they are not spying on their own people.
Personally, I find it unrealistic to expect that such huge opportunity(almost by the second log of citizens activities and opinions as well as precise control of who sees and hears what) will arise and the people in power will not exploit it.
China is taking a more direct route but in general it looks like the political elite's dreams are about to come true on global scale.
edit: HN really hated that idea :) I could not find the source of the claim but it makes sense to me.
The Five-Eyes nations wholesale spy on each other and share the data they collect. They can't spy on their own populations, so they collect the data of foreign nations and then swap it for data on their own citizens. It's been widely known since... Hell, Echelon was "revealed" in the 90s?
According to the Guardian and other sources, there's something called the 14-Eyes, which is a working agreement between the FVEY and the SIGINT organizations of nine other countries, including multiple European ones, like Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/02/nsa-portrait-t...
It is not so far fetched as it sounds. We had a parlamentary inquiry after the Snowden relevations. The result of 4 Years work is a lenghty document detailing[0] (among other things) How BND and NSA work together on analysis and raw data processing. That does not mean that BND needs the NSA to bend the law (that one they can do very well on their own), but the cooperation between the 2 organisations is such that the bulk of analysis is done in data centers in the US, simply because the german intelligence services do not have the nessessary processing power.
One of the results is that the german intelligence services will get more resources to do analysis on their own in the near future.
The idea is that if a country can't do mass surveillance on it's own people due to political reasons, still can just let an ally do it and get that information from that ally as a part of information sharing agreement.
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" in order to be convinced.
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?
Right, but that's my point. Your article is about the USA spying on European citizens (with the complicity of the UK) and the governments of these countries complained (at least publicly):
>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.
> Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes.
>US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has alleged the National Security Agency engaged in industrial espionage.
>In an interview with Germany's ARD TV channel, the former NSA contractor said the agency would spy on big German companies that competed with US firms.
>Der Spiegel said files obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that the NSA spied on the EU in New York after it moved to new rooms in autumn 2012 and that the NSA runs a bugging programme in more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide called the "Special Collection Service", which has "little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists"
> Gone are the Cold War days when one Soviet agent reportedly tried to stick a gyroscope in his pocket during one trade fair. But a Russian spy official and a former chief of French intelligence said in recent interviews that that their agents were involved in industrial espionage.
Sure they wouldn't want to let USA complete access, so they can spend their time keeping the US espionage on the desired domain and everyone happy and politicians elected.
Do you have anything particular in mind or are you just guessing? This is all very vague and smells faintly of tinfoil-hattery.
Not that I don't believe that the USA are heavily involved in Europe and cooperate pretty tightly with European intelligence services but the original question was about mass surveillance of the citizens. For example how do you explain the GDRP if the point is to let the USA snoop on European citizens?
>"Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY have been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens."
That's fair but the only complicit European country in the Five Eyes is the UK (and, well, not for long anymore I suppose). I don't think I'm willing to jump to the conclusion that "if the UK does it then certainly the other european countries must do the same". The UK<->USA relationship is rather unique.
At this point you need to look on a country-by-country basis, I doubt there's a secret EU-level agreement to let the USA spy on EU citizens. For instance I could believe that the Germans might consider it, if only because they have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to international intelligence and diplomacy. That being said industrial espionage would be an obvious drawback.
On the other hand I really don't expect French intelligence to accept such a scheme. French has its own network for international intelligence and is perfectly capable of spying on its own citizens if it wants to. There's simply too much to lose letting the USA in unchecked.
As for the rest of Europe it's also hard to make a simple guess. Some countries like Poland are historically very USA-friendly and might accept something like that. Others on the other hand align much more with Russia nowadays and might be more willing to collaborate with the FSB than the CIA.
So I still don't buy the "european countries let the USA spy on their citizens". It's too much of a leap considered the evidence we have.
This is nothing new. The US alphabet soup boys will tap right on the other side of the imaginary border. It's the same reason they fly people out of the US to interrogate them.
> The court of appeal ruling on Tuesday said the powers in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, which paved the way for the snooper’s charter legislation, did not restrict the accessing of confidential personal phone and web browsing records to investigations of serious crime, and allowed police and other public bodies to authorise their own access without adequate oversight.
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.
The article makes it sound a little like rights are respected if the controls are to be put in place. However, bulk collection is still going to carry on is it not?
> The three judges said Dripa was “inconsistent with EU law” because of this lack of safeguards, including the absence of “prior review by a court or independent administrative authority”.
I imagine the government knows exactly how to take care of the pesky little problem of EU law giving people rights.
occam's razor: you don't need to introduce migrants to create deep fractures.
look at the US. we're still fighting political battles along (roughly) the lines of the civil war. there's genuine animosity before you introduce any migrants.
It's actually a means to an end, a tool, a method to achieve the desired outcome.
What people are not at all realizing is that the internet has totally change the nature and character and dynamics of basically all things, including to an extreme extent, what migration means and impact it has.
Just as an example, where migration to the USA was for the purpose of populating a territory that was largely unpopulated in order to retain control and the population was forced to conform to and integrate with the mostly English society that had established the civilization in North America. The internet has both created now migrants that would never have made their way to the USA and are even artificially being introduced and imposed upon people, and it has also turned migrants that used to integrate and conform into a common society, into what are essentially colonists that are introducing instability and non-inconsistency and complication and fragmentation that are inherently volatile and detrimental in the long run.
Regardless of what people want to believe in their heart of hearts, all the scientific research shows that what we refer to as "diversity" invariably increases friction and conflict. I have come to realize that it's because it's not really actual diversity at all, but rather imposition and affront and pollution. If you force things upon each other, especially the more dissimilar or even reactive they are, the more likely you will cause a violent reaction. Actual diversity is NOT destroying cultures and muddling and polluting them all, it is shared and mutual respect for each other's differences. Nothing will be gained when cultures have been eradicated and there is no more France or Germany or Italy, etc because it's just a hodgepodge of mixed master race people with no identity and no common value or aim.
What is being created is a rather dystopian future of animalistic masses of humans, ruled by demigod like elite as it has been illustrated in so many scifi films. Think a lot more Elysium and a lot less Star Trek.
99% of the data has leaked multiple times already. It also seems to sport all the classic signs of an amateur project. Post facto design changes, unauthenticated mails, unprofessional mobile apps, leaky access to all of the data irrespective of your need, terrible code (same hard coded passwords for everyone), cludgy design increments making the problems worse while not acknowledging existing issues, logical errors (like beign unable to reset passwords if you have lost mobile device) and the deaths of people unable to access hospitals and food in some areas, Police cases against people reporting on vulnerabilities, ... ...
It's a kafkaesque nightmare and I am surprised no one mentions it on HN much. Probably because it's a slow motion train wreck.
I am not sure how the Indian courts are even going to justify continuing with the system anymore given the absolutely callous handling of the data thus far by their Aadhaar agency.
In the end, India's aadhaar is actually not a government project, it is a private project run by a bunch of companies run by some ex infosys top shots who have time and again proven to only look after their own interests.
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 manner that has been found in a court of law to violate human rights, then multiple people should be going to jail.
Before you drop the "well now we know for sure - we shouldn't be punitive and punish people who thought they were doing their job properly" crap, think about this. Whenever the government applies a law in a new and untested way against a civilian the case is watched very closely and if that civilian is found guilty they never get the benefit of the "well it's been settled and now we know" argument and get let off lightly. So I argue the same should apply here. The government has grossly violated the rights of citizens on a mass scale and everyone at the top of the food chain involved in these programs should be rotting in a jail cell.