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Comment by ha292 | Hacker News Reader

Let us pause for a second an think what could possibly happen with anti-terrorism laws like this in not-so-advanced democracies where there is little protection of the average citizen from the abuse of state power.

Let us also think about how the leading democracies export the "democratic software" (laws) and they get copied/cited in not-so-advanced democracies in making their own laws. It is very easy for a barely-democratic state to cite a western democracy's law as a precedence.

Let us then think about how many people live under democratic laws (and under strong rule of law) and compare that to the number of people without that.

Depressing.

I fear that these badly written anti-terrorism laws are like software flaws that will flow from system to system and harm many more people than we can see right now.

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> anti-terrorism laws like this in not-so-advanced democracies where there is little protection of the average citizen from the abuse of state power.

Ummm... This is about Northern Ireland, which had an undeclared low simmering civil war for much of the late 20th century, with abuses by state powers (imprisonment without trail, soliders shooting protesters on the streets), active paramilitary groups killing civilians and state actors, and undemocratic processes (gerrymandering of votes).

I think we know what happens when the UK/NI state wants to abuse one part of the population.

We went for a weekend to Belfast (which is a great place to visit) but I must admit I was rather surprised to find that there are still automatic barriers in place that close the roads between the Falls and Shankhill Roads.

They call them "Peace Walls"/"Peace Lines" Spooky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines

One thing is for sure - UK needs a proper Constitution. It seems the government is treating the population lately as if it has no rights.

While in US at least the government tries to pretend that it only spies on "foreign" (with its own interpretation of foreign) communications, because it knows otherwise it would be unconstitutional, in UK Cameron has just said that "nothing should be hidden from the government". And the sad part is there's nothing stopping the UK government/Parliament from passing such a law, nullifying what should be an absolute basic right to privacy everyone on Earth should have.

When there's no privacy there's no freedom. And governments now try to get rid of that freedom under the false pretense that it will offer more security instead (it won't, or at very least the trade-off between terrorist violence and government violence won't be worth it in the long term).

This is kind of an odd case though, where they are charging for a broadcasted signal. Does this happen in other countries?

A lot of European countries have license fees to cover public broadcasting.

Yes, public service television & radio funded by a tax on all TV owning households is common.

Yes. Germany, for instance, has a similar system where you pay per TV.

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