Lisbon has shared dissident info with repressive regimes for years
politico.eu
politico.eu
- This was found out by sheer luck. The city hall did not warn that it was sharing personal/private information with any entity.
- At the moment, there is no thinkable reason for this procedure. It seems the foreign embassies did not ask for any kind of information.
- This procedure (apparently) started in 2011 and Lisbon’s mayor at that time is now the current Prime Minister, leader of the ruling party.
Journalists have had this information since January and decided doing nothing anything about it. Also relevant that candidates for local elections are lining up at the moment.
Nevertheless the procedure should have been known by the Mayor and reviewed ages ago.
This is the reason why mass data collection by the likes of Google and Facebook is so dangerous; not because of whether we can trust people now to do the right thing with it but because it depends upon trusting future holders of that information.
This whole situation is rather shocking to me. I feel naive. Which, as a deeply cynical and suspicious person, is not a good feeling.
By law, if you’re planning a rally/event/etc you have to make a request to your local mayorship, who then approves it (or not) while informing the police about it, so that security details can be planned.
Since the rallies in question involved displays related to certain countries or were held in front of embassies (like the one supporting Navalny, which brought this case to the limelight), the embassies were also informed about who the organisers were.
As some one on the comments already mentioned, it seems to be a case of Hanlon’s Razor albeit a very unfortunate (and disturbing) one
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_diplomatic_...
Fine. But Correia's "protest was held on the Largo de Camões, which is nowhere near the Chinese embassy," so that doesn't apply.
> related to certain countries
Sorry, this doesn't follow. If I show up for a Tiananmen massacre vigil in New York, Gracie Mansion doesn't and doesn't need to notify the Chinese embassy.
I did add an OR in the sentence you quote; exactly because of the example you shared and another on in support of the Palestinian cause held in front of a concert hall just before a Brazilian singer concert, that would go on tour to Israel after.
As for your second point, I totally agree with your point. My previous comment isn’t supposed to show any agreement with the episodes, but just a factual showing of what happened, and how this has been general malpractice rather than some shady intelligence underground operation.
Freedom in general or in reference to a particular type never means you can do whatever you want. The entire premise of civil society is that there are conditions on behavior. It is a fundamental principal that one person's freedom ends where another person's begins. Or as I've heard it said, "The freedom of your fist ends at the tip of my nose".
Because by implication, you're saying there should be no laws, since every law is a condition on freedom in some way. Is that your position on things?
As for dictators and the like: they adopt the words of civil society and spin it into propaganda. All you've pointed out it that bad people do bad things and lie about them, claiming they were good. You haven't addressed the problem of making sure my freedom isn't taken away when someone else acts on what they believe is their freedom.
So, do you think there should be any laws at all? If not, I'm not sure we can have a reasonable conversation here. If so, I'm happy to discuss further, as long as it's not in sound bites and cliches.
I think you are doing philosophy here.
As for public gatherings? Sure: they can interfere with my freedom to go about my life. They might prevent me from leaving my home. They might cause dangerous situations. A reasonable level of oversight helps to minimize that sort of thing. Lisbon went well beyond that, I think we would agree.
So: laws or no laws?
Edit: From my interpretation of your tone, I doubt we're actually very far apart on the issue. Permits for this sort of planned thing should be easy to get and extremely hard to turn down. Spontaneous demonstrations should be given very wide latitude to allow them even without prior approval, with local authority only intervening to make sure things stay safe. Demonstrators themselves should be held to a high level of accountability for their actions if things turn bad, but local authorities should be held to an extremely high standard of accountability if they interfere inappropriately.
But there are the difficult questions: keeping things safe, inappropriate interference... these are places where lines have to be drawn. They are gray areas. They take human judgement because one-size-fits-all policies don't actually fit all. This is a fundamental problem for civil society because people differ in their beliefs on where to draw the line. And people are fallible, they can make mistakes in judgement. People are also corruptible, or come with their own biases. It makes things difficult and messy, but that is the hard work that it takes to give people as much freedom as possible without sacrificing one person's freedom for someone else's. Even then there must be compromises: I think it's a very reasonable restriction on my freedom of movement to have to wait in traffic for a while because other people are exercising their freedom to assemble and protest etc.
My observation is that uou can tell the countries that embrace freedom from those that are tyrannies by whether or not they struggle with these questions vs. having one imposed on them without any recourse save revolution.
But it's still a matter of degree. England is much more free than China, but compared to the US its freedom of expression is much more limited by libel laws. While in the US, privacy-related freedom is much more limited compared to the EU with GDPR (even as flawed as that still is).
We are different because things are very clear to me. Crystal clear. There are nothing "grey lines" there.
Keeping freedom of assembly behind so hoops to jump on a pretext "It's not me who is prohibiting this! Rules do! I'm doing it for your safety!" is very convenient for every bad government around. Otherwise it's entirely pointless.
1. Lots of angry people don't need any freedom of assembly to whack anybody good.
2. Everybody else will not do that anyway.
3. Whacking somebody good, is an act of assault, you either have a riot, civil war, or already a revolution.
What if I want to hold a gathering in the same place at the same time? Which gathering gets the space? Why should my freedom to assemble be limited because of your freedom to assemble? That's an issue that getting a permit resolves: simple scheduling of resources.
Maybe the protest is against a business I work for: What about my freedom to go to work without people shouting at me about how awful I am for working there?
Maybe the protest causes extra traffic at a busy time of day. I have a heart attack and die because the extra traffic meant the ambulance couldn't get there on time. My right to life was taken away because of the gathering, but it's an easy issue to resolve by with a permit process to ensure minimal disruptions.
What if the gathering is in the middle of the street because they're protesting building the road further through natural lands? My freedom of free movement is taken away.
I can go on and on about how something as seemingly simple as freedom of assembly has the potential to impact other people's freedom, because freedom is not as simple as you want it to be.
You insist things are black and white but when I point out a complexity, you ignore it except to repeat yourself in different ways. You have not provided any actual justification. You say that a freedom is not a freedom if there are preconditions but never answer the issue of how all laws are preconditions on freedom.
The questions I raise are not philosophical: you cannot rationally make any claims about freedom if you have not thought through these very basic issues. If you have not examined these questions then your opinions are built on air and emotion, not clear thinking and reason.
I'm done here though. Feel free to respond, but I won't reply only to have you repeat yourself and ignore anything that contradicts your wish for things to be black and white.
When you become comfortable operating this way, you'l do anything to maintain your relationship. And I kid you not, A large chunk of Portugals economy is powered by Angola.
What do you mean by "large"?
perhaps the circles that YOU frequent are powered by them.
GDP is $257.391 billion, again what "large" part of the Portuguese economy is powered by Angola? Again, what do you mean by "large"?
Now, if a country has their hands in some of another country's largest companies, and many of them in key sectors such as banks, telecoms and energy, and in many cases becoming the biggest shareholder in such holdings, to the point where a countries own parliament has to hold sessions to protect their own bank's exposure to Angola, well, call it what you want, I'd call that large.
I worked for one of Portugal's great energy companies, both in Portugal and in Angola. I was working for them in Angola, when they were struggling financially because they could not compete with other European and and Chinese companies, both in Europe, South America and Africa, and I was there when the Angolan president's daughter bought the company and I was there when the company employees were relieved that deals would now become easier because the new majority shareholder also had the power to make the Angolan utility company sign new deals. In fact, the president's daughter forced the national utility to also become a shareholder. Even more, the forced the utility to also pay for her part of the shares. And the proud Portuguese company clapped through it all.
I understand if Portugal made itself economically dependent on imports from a China for example, and China asked „if Lisbon happed to know any trouble-makers“?
But sending it out to anyone who asked, China, Israel, Russia, probably Arab states…
Why?
Like drunk drivers. They were just stupid and did not mean anything bad. Right? Sorry but if part of the government stuff that creates the rules is that "smart" they should be in janitorial positions. Problem is government nearly always gets away with anything they do.
Low quality, but high level bureaucrats.
I don't think it was a case of pandering to economically important regimes, it was more like disgusting and malicious incompetence, like most things that come out of the public sector in Lisbon with this government
If attributed to stupidity, someone got lazy about looking up where protests and their relevant embassies were and so started sending out every protest's every detail to every relevant embassy.
If attributed to malice, to hide the fact that they're providing this to Angola and China by providing it to everyone.
It is a major political scandal in Portugal, and does look like the town hall president will not survive without resigning.
It is a clear case of "Hanlon's Razor" although a very unfortunate one.
As someone who's lived here all his life: doubtful.
Sadly I have to agree, the prime minister already escaped some scandals and Medina will not be any different
For me this is the tip of the iceberg, privacy violations in city councils can be used for personal gains and organized crime.
Governments (and cities are local governments, for the matter) have huge powers in what they can do and what they can do to the citizens. For example in Romania, my country, government entities are practically exempted from GDPR; they also exempt banks and other regulated entities from GDPR rules on collecting data in weird ways, for example there is a national bank rule that the banks need to collect personal data about account holders, no matter the age or amount, that does not apply to the account holder but allows the bank to freeze all your accounts if you don't comply. They really don't need to know your mother's name, but they get it this way and GDPR protection agency never takes action on these situations.
Lisbon city giving such data to embassies is not a mistake or stupidity, it is abuse of power. They have a power that is just transferred at elections to different masters, but they act like they own, in a feudal way, the people. As someone recently said (about taxes): "where are they going to go? We put a minimum everywhere, so there is no escape"
(Article in Portuguese: https://sicnoticias.pt/pais/2021-06-11-Camara-de-Lisboa-pode...)
Public records can however only be accessed by request, and only by a Swedish citizen, so this situation probably wouldn’t fall under that exception had this happened in Sweden. IANAL but I think this would have been a violation of the GDPR had it happened in Sweden, and a quite serious one at that. Formally I think it could also fall under various espionage laws since there are foreign powers involved (but probably not in practice).