Dutch police collecting demonstrators' personal data on a large scale
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
I think what I am saying is wrong with regards to:
'People the world over have determined they're fine '
If anything, I am actually seeing regular people paying attention to sanctions, BSA, BIS and similar. Naturally, it is possible that is because it started to affect more regular people, but yeah.. I am not certain you are right.
That's exactly what he's saying. It wasn't divided between people who believe in the rights of protestors and people who didn't; it was divided between pro and anti-vaxxers, which is largely to say between the political Left and Right. I don't know if there ever was a political core that cared more about their principles of governance (good or bad) than their "side" but it's gone now. The people who dismissed the threat of BLM protests/riots being COVID super-spreader events in 2020 wanted truckers lynched for clogging up a city and honking their horns. On the other side, the same people cheering on an entire city in gridlock and effectively tortured by constant horn noise wanted police to gun down entire crowds for looting a Walmart. Both of them cloaked their defenses with cries of "free speech!" and both called for repression in the name of order and safety. Those of us who apply the same principles to people we love and hate, speech we cheer and find nauseating, are an endangered species.
The truckers also had bouncy houses, food tents and trucks, DJs and dancing in the street. Seems like a good time compared to CHOP and other autonomous zones where people were murdered.
I think it may make more sense to try to make a judgement as to the reason for the protests. My best understanding of the truckers protest they were protesting Canada requiring truckers who crossed the US-Canada border to be vaccinated, while the BLM protesters were protesting US police negligence, uses of force, and perceived lack of oversight.
Maybe the split is more about those who judge the reasons for protesting vs the methods of protesting rather than left vs right. In any case I don't think counting bouncy houses is productive.
What about murders or shootings? Would that conversation be productive?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/fam...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protes...
Also it seems like you didn't make it to the next sentence, where I characterized the trucker protest as an entire city in gridlock and effectively tortured by constant horn noise.
1/3 of the country, the anti-Trudeau bit, could see no wrong in the trucker protests. The rest of the country saw a bunch of entitled jerks being jerks. They weren't even real truckers, more like business owners who owned trucks. Rank-and-file truckers don't have the time nor resources to go on multi-week vacations across the country. The large number of immigrants who drive trucks in Canada were also not represented. The icing on the cake was the hot tub. American protesters at January 6th brought a gallows. The Ottawa "truckers" brought a hot tub.
Every weekend in my area a few huge pickups get together to drive around with their "F*ck Trudeau" flags, the remnants of the trucker protest movement. Everyone else just looks at them wondering where they get enough money to waste gas driving huge trucks around in circles on a Saturday.
There are famous videos of Sikh truck drivers on other drivers shoulders, as the crowd dances to Indian music - near the bouncy castle.
But would it be illegitimate if it appealed to one demographic more than another?
> Rank-and-file truckers don't have the time nor resources to go on multi-week vacations across the country.
They were out of a job so they had time.
> The icing on the cake was the hot tub. American protesters at January 6th brought a gallows. The Ottawa "truckers" brought a hot tub.
How is this good or bad? Lots of people enjoy hot-tubbing in cold weather.
> 1/3 of the country, the anti-Trudeau bit, could see no wrong in the trucker protests.
No chance any of their supporters are there because they agree with the issues? You feel that everyone who supported them was doing so because they disliked the PM?
Do you also feel that everyone who spoke out against them was a supporter of the PM? What opinions are legitimate opinions and which ones do people only have to support their party?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-charge...
Any and all?
You just gave a hypothetical where 999 times out of 1000 that is the case.
I remember a plot to blow up a bunch of buildings and behead the Canadian PM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ontario_terrorism_plot
How carefully in your view should the muslim community in Canada be monitored?
Edit: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
https://pressprogress.ca/it-was-violent-peoples-commission-r...
The reports switch between describing attempted murder - trucks accelerating at pedestrians, etc - and crazy harassment like asking an asian man to do "a dragon dance" and then beating him with "blunt objects" when he refused, which didn't do any damage such that the police refused his report.
> "The pastor recalled convoy supporters, some of whom routinely urinated on his church, even taking issue with a sign indicating the church was broadcasting its masses online due to provincial public health restrictions: “One of them pointed a fist towards me shouting ‘you should obey God instead of F-ing Trudeau’.”"
Pointed a fist(?) and yelled a rude message about a politician. Oh, the harm! No photos of the urinators though - which supposedly kept happening.
The only likely crime (likely a crime and likely happened) I spotted in their report was someone pushing a photographer's camera away. Annoying, and criminal, but totally unpunished at all rallies and protests. The police literally don't react to anything less than theft of a camera or punching the photographer.
That won't happen, though, it will be governments and corporations surveilling everyone else while remaining completely opaque themselves.
something something essential liberty for immediate security...
Something something quote taken out of context and repeated mindlessly
Could you define and point to evidence of exactly how many of "these guys" there were doing this? Can the government with its penchant for mendacity? There were many thousands and thousands of protestors. It's not hard to find a few casually discussing illegal activity and using that as a justification for painting the rest black.
>Even if the cops were violating people's rights, this is not the best situation to be arguing for civil liberties.
No, this is exactly the best situation for arguing in favor of not blatantly violating civil liberties, because it should especially be argued for groups that aren't part of the social mainstream. That's the real test of how seriously a country takes such rules about civil liberties. Any asshole can argue for civil liberties in favor of widely popular, media-favored protests against logging and pipelines.
Nothing in the article states that they were protesters or did what they did because of the protest except being at the border during the protests.
And that is the criteria you would use to silence all of them?
That is a very low bar for censorship and doing away with privacy.
The same standard is not being applied to the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” that we saw just a year prior.
Whether it's the left doing it or the right, it seems that many protests have nothing to do with the "movement" at all and are just thinly veiled excuses to act like an ape and smear shit on the wall.
The reason is protests are often very effective; they are a threat to their power. Look at Israel now, for example. Look at the US Constitution, which went out of its way to protect protests.
Online anonymity is also like being-part-of-a-crowd anonymity.
Frame either in whatever rational interpretation you like. But they both amount to howls of embrace/reject.
There is a strong white-washing attempt by certain unsavory elements to recast it as a benign protest movement.
If the police is violating the law then there's no discussion and they need to be corrected. Otherwise, aren't we supposed to follow the law? If we disagree with the law and want it changed, now that is a different process. But there's no need to be disobedient for disobedience's sake, or just for the sake of not appearing "docile".
We Dutch are also good complainers so I don't think we can be described as "docile", even if "just be normal and you're already crazy enough" is a local saying.
Also, all license plates scanned by speed cameras (very prevalent on the highways here) are stored for months.
Though it is still the internet, so you can't be entirely sure.
On the other hand, on a venn diagram of what creates violence and (anti government) terrorism, they're causing more and more overlap of ever larger circles.
This feels like a very select group of people to be honest. Extrapolating these numbers to “demonstrators” in general seems like a bit of a stretch, regardless of whether this is right or wrong.
Many people seem to have a very simplistic idea about how the law, law enforcement, and courts work.
Laws are always selectively enforced. Police, prosecutors, and courts are not going to simply round up petty criminals such as serial package thieves just because victims suddenly have HD video footage of the (countless) perpetrators. They have other priorities.
Political crime is back with a vengeance, even in the 'liberal' west, and pursuing threats to the existing socio-political and economic order will always take priority. The main issue with pervasive surveillance systems isn't that they are used to detect and prosecute ordinary street crime or nuisance infractions (though the latter can become burdensome). The problem is that these systems will be used to pursue 'special' categories of crime such as political activism. (Expect those categories to creep and expand just as flimsy justifications such as 'conspiracy' and 'incitement' proliferate.)
Expect the full force of the surveillance and control systems being constructed now to be used extensively to maintain public order and pursue threats to public order.
Remember, the primary role of the police is to maintain order. Everything else they might do is secondary to that.
I hate to bring up Julian Assange as he is such a polarizing and widely reviled character - but it is clear now that several governments saw him as a sufficiently dire threat to that they felt justified pouring gargantuan resources into neutralizing him. This never happens with ordinary criminals except in sensational cases where the public is out for blood. I do not know if Assange himself was ever considered such a big threat, but I suspect the systemic risk threatening the whole system was great enough to justify making an example of him to deter others (at least from the perspective of the US and UK governments).
In a slightly unrelated aside, I might also remind some of you of this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kennedy_(police_officer)
And back to the networked cameras. Your own surveillance system is ultimately spying on you and creating records of your activities that probably should not exist - and should you store your data locally, and some of it happens to conveniently go missing, it could incriminate you, whereas this would not be an issue if it never existed in the first place. It brings up the old 'if you have nothing to hide' argument. Yet here we see evidence that largely benign political activities are deemed sufficiently threatening to justify closer scrutiny.
Pardon the sloppiness of this comment. I posted it piecemeal with many edits.
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/06/julian-assange-trial-ext...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-off...
Does GDPR make exceptions for police? (If I was a criminal and being investigated, I imagine it would defeat the purpose if they had to tell me everything they knew about me.)
"the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law"
So no the govt can't "just" spy on you. But if they have, say, a court order, or let's say the law allows it if they have sufficient evidence, then yes. Otherwise, government bodies are expected to behave like everyone else.
My experience is that government bodies tend to be more concerned with legal compliance than private entities.