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Dear Prime Minister Cameron

aftenposten.no

205 pointsoyvind20 comments

This will hopefully signal a trend of newspapers other than The Guardian standing up against privacy issues (I've no doubt it's already happening outside the UK, but there's a language barrier for me in reading them). In the UK we're pretty much stuffed: most of our papers are owned by powerful people (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) who pretty much control who stays in power, and they're likely avoiding talking about it so as to gain favours later on. As far as I've seen all the other papers are either ignoring the NSA/GCHQ story or actively attacking The Guardian. I've no doubt that the government will completely ignore this message, but I'm really grateful to see the issue being raised outside the UK.

I'm starting to wonder if our only way out of this mess is via EU intervention. The tories and their supporters will cry foul, but the EU is supposed to stand for a lot of freedoms and it'd be nice to see it being enforced. Whether the EU as an entity would stand up to the USA though, remains to be seen.

Most EU governments have lots of egg on their face. I don't think the EU as a whole will do anything. Maybe a couple of individual states but the EU as a whole? It would surprise me. They should, after all there is the EU DPD which is violated in just about every way imaginable here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

But I don't think it'll happen.

The germans are the economic titans of the EU, and from the coverage I've seen the population (both young and old) have seemed pretty outraged by the NSA stuff. I don't think this'll translate into EU policy, or even German policy very quickly, but I do think it'll turn into a lot more support for more liberal parties, and more anti-American parties, which could swing Germany, and possibly the EU.

Don't forget that it's election season over here in Germany. Privacy is a talking point that resonates well with the population given Germany's not-so-distant past. It's good to see it on the table, but I'm very skeptical anything will come of it post-election ...

I hope this isn't HN karma suicide, but as pleased as I am (as a Swede) that one of our better newspapers is participating in this, I wish they'd spent the time to rid it of spelling errors and grammatical errors. I think I can be excused for mine in a HN comment, but they can't for theirs in a public letter to the British PM. Other than that, good job.

Those boarders will have a hard time :)

It's a great letter though. I'm pretty sure it won't move the needle but it definitely is good to see this. Now lets see who follows suit.

Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, NRC let's hear it.

Regarding the spelling errors, I was also quite shocked at the low quality of the text until I realised that Chrome had decided to tray to translate the English text from Norwegian to English.

After disabling the stupid translation, it was much more readable.

You Scandinavians have it rough—your English is so often so close to perfect that the tiny imperfections that remain stand out. [1]

When I studied Russian there was an older student whose mastery of the language was so brilliant that native speakers assumed he was Russian. Unfortunately, his 99.9% mastery left room for 0.1% errors, and these were the kind of errors a native speaker would never make, so they sounded odd to Russians. Instead of recognizing him as a brilliant student, a lot of people took him for an illiterate (literally "grammarless") Russian and wrote him off as an idiot. A foreign accent has its advantages!

[1] In case it's not obvious, this being the internet and all, I'm complimenting you and I'm envious.

Thanks. My guess would be that not dubbing TV and movies to our native languages contributes somewhat. Personally, I just played too much video games as a kid.

That's an interesting anecdote about near-perfect mastery having downsides! I can provide a different one but on the same theme. I saw a documentary a while back in which an immigrant sadly explained that if she made her absolute best effort to adapt and speak Swedish, she would get really crappy service in stores and such because of her accent and grammatical errors. If, instead, she spoke English (which she commanded better) she would get excellent service from everyone who were more or less racing towards her in order to be polite and service minded (although that's presumably for mistaking her for a tourist instead of an immigrant, letting their politics shine through...).

I've wanted to learn a second language for years, and Scandinavian languages are really interesting to me; the benefit being that Danish/Norse/Swedish all have a lot of similarities, so it'd help when learning multiple languages. I also have a lot of interest in the Norse countries as a whole in terms of history and craft. Unfortunately I find it damn near impossible unless I'm actually in the country whose language I'm trying to learn. My only hope now, I suspect, is to find some subtitled English shows (or Scandinavian shows subtitled in English) on the Swedish TV streaming sites :D

I really do wish other countries would export more of their own language media to the world. English/American TV shouldn't be so dominant. The only time I get a chance to watch foreign language TV is usually in hotels, where you can guarantee there will be German channels!

I think you'll find a bunch of stuff on the pirate bay. Off the top of my head I can think of these Scandinavian shows and movies that are all at least decent if not great:

Trollhunter // The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (trilogy) // Let the Right One In // Cold Prey [Fritt Vilt] (trilogy) // The Bridge [Bron/Broen] 2 seasons // The Killing [Forbrydelsen] 3 seasons // Kon-Tiki // Dead Snow // Headhunters // Easy Money [Snabba Cash] // Norwegian Ninja

Thanks for the suggestions! The only problem I have with Scandinavian TV is that it's -so dark-. Most of those are semi-horror or crime shows, and that's far from a bad thing but it's hard to watch a lot of it in one sitting :D

And Norwegian Ninja sounds amazing.

The Scandinavian languages and English have a lot in common. I believe they even share a common language stem. You can take any word in a sentence, and switch it out with an english word or vice versa. So some of the basics are already there.

To expand a little on this: The region of Denmark from where I grew up has a lot of different dialects, all from within a very small area. A lot of Danish words resemble their English counterparts, and especially so when pronounced with a bit of dialect: hus/house, båd/boat, æg/egg, hest/horse and so on.

We did all live in the same kingdom a thousand years ago (during Canute The Great's reign). So I guess it makes some sense: http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/wiseman/Nordic/Nordic-1028AD....

I was about to coin the term "Uncanny Valley of Accents," but in Googling around I found that several others already had :(

Well, their (and your!) English is much better than my Swedish, but your point is salient. Improper spelling and grammar in communications has much the same effect as broken windows in houses or uncollected garbage on city streets ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory ) -- it lowers the quality of overall discourse.

The version on Politiken: http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/ECE2057284/documentation-r...

for people like me who have no idea what this is about, can't really understand it from TFA, I presume this would be the "events of the last week", please correct me if I'm wrong

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-usa-security-sn...

That's part of it but mainly this - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald...

Nice way to earn some free publicity I suppose.

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