MPs win surveillance powers legal challenge
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.
While I'm inclined to agree with the rhetoric, it's important to understand that "not absolute" !== "not protected", and are constantly using tropes like fire in a theater as an excuse for banning insensitive speech and such.
A lot of it is willful, but if we keep believing the idea that our rights are fungible, then our rights will indeed become fungible. Every generation's erosion of civil liberties compounds to the new normal, which makes the next generation's erosion of civil liberties more possible, and in too many cases, even welcomed.
I think the problem with the current politics of fear is that it does seek to promote one absolute right -- the right to be safe from attack by bad people -- as more important than all the others. Of course, it is impossible to truly achieve that goal no matter what you sacrifice. But in the quest to do so, more balanced "greater good" philosophies developed over centuries of human civilisation, like preferring to die on your feet than live on your knees, or preferring to risk letting a guilty man go free rather than risk imprisoning an innocent one, or refusing to negotiate in the face of threats, can be cast aside all too easily. That's what is happening today.
And people wonder why Americans love guns so much...
Now, what do you disagree with specifically?
The electorate wished to be ruled by these people, and they pretty accurately represent the majority view on data collection in the face of risk. MPs are a symptom, not a cause.
Patently false. The people chose these sad sacks as being the least pathetically awful option out of a torrent of etonian nonsense mongers.
Lesser of two evils etc
MPs are totally fine with being in the public eye because, guess what, they've chosen to lose privacy to become MPs. When it comes to privacy MPs are atypical and cannot reflect the general populace.
In that case, would you say the general public are emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress?
When you come to work at a government agency, you learn the tasks and procedures. For the most part, those tasks and procedures carry on regardless of who's in the legislature. Sometimes things do change because of legislation, but mostly policies and practices that were developed inside the bureaucrat's building continue on. Employees come and go, but the manual lives on.
In the case of spy agencies it's even worse, because the legislators have almost no idea what the tasks, policies and procedures are, other than the top veneer that spies choose to share with their overseers. They were truly developed in a vacuum of oversite.
That's a really interesting perspective. Like an algorythm with a relative threat detection system as opposed to a fixed threat level. So when a major threat disappears, the next largest threat is in its sights. What happens when the next relative threat is a guy buying some drugs from a dealer? The manual is SkyNet for wetware.
Having worked with such people, I can confirm they still exist in the UK public sector and have only increased their power. They have an amazing ability to see a cloud in every silver lining. They detest any simple solution to anything.
Generally the system is referred to as the "permanent state". The oral and written tradition of various parts of the civil services has a very large influence on what policy can actually get made. Certain ideas keep popping up in a way that suggests the same briefing paper is simply being presented as a new idea to each new minister.
The secret part of the permanent state is even more persistent, as it keeps all information relating to its operations secret. This can include even quite large chunks of the budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_affair
Pullquote from the end of that page: "We saw the spectacle of police being sent to raid the BBC headquarters in Glasgow in the middle of the night.... We saw the Zircon tapes seized as an elaborate blind." Darling said that the cabinet episode concerned "... the election campaign of 1983, and the fact that the Government sought to undermine and spy on the citizens of this country."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XBdCwWeYzo
Edit: I suspect the answer is "all of them, and some..."
We know what a state of emergency in the UK looks like, it looks like Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
I don't think they are, really, it's just that they haven't thought about it and don't really understand that mass surveillance means everybody, not just the bad guys.
(Consider my favourite bit of narrowly-drafted legislation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act : rather than address privacy in any general way, go after the particular leak that embarrased a particular candidate)
- H.L. Mencken
You make a good point which I think applies to most of them, though I'd say the politicians in higher places are more self-aware and accept that surveillance offers more benefits than downsides, career-wise.
Alternatively, they've already been invited to look into the abyss, or they know colleagues who have.
Our new BS data collection starts in October.
Unfortunately, it has bipartisan support, because both major parties are thoroughly corrupt and terrible.
The usual reasons were given: ISIS, pedophilia, Syria, general terrorism.
If you've nothing to fear you've nothing to hide. Why would you not want the government to be able to check what you do in the bedroom? Are you doing illegal things in there?
Not really. Laws are the nation's monitoring server's source code. Further more, the monitoring server is running on a notoriously buggy, laggy and leaky interpreter, and most of the systems interfacing with the monitoring server uses arcane, often proprietary, and always poorly documented protocols.
Amazingly, most of the time it pretty much just works, although the interesting (and severe!) bugs are all surfaced through user reports, never from a monitoring alert.
But yeah, not the sort of thing you'd want to emergency patch a lot. Unfortunately, no staging environment exists.
I think a lot of civil liberties advocates would argue that mass surveillance has been implemented before, and we do know what kind of society can develop as a result, and that is one of the reasons why those people campaign for civil liberties today.
They're https://twitter.com/daviddavismp and https://twitter.com/tom_watson on Twitter and well worth following.
Typical Tory with a few strong opinions in some areas.
I've been impressed how both of these MPs have defied their own parties to make a stand.
We absolutely need to be more worried and indignant over legislation in the very initial stages, regardless of the risk of 'crying wolf'.
1: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/11/surveillance-...
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/david-davis-and-other...
Here is the summary of why the courts decided against the government:
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a) [s1 of DRIPA] does not lay down clear and precise rules providing for access to and use of communications data retained pursuant to a retention notice to be strictly restricted to the purpose of preventing and detecting precisely defined serious offences or of conducting criminal prosecutions relating to such offences; and
b) access to the data is not made dependent on a prior review by a court or an independent administrative body whose decision limits access to and use of the data to what is strictly necessary for the purpose of attaining the objective pursued.
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My personal interpretation of the reasoning in the ruling is that while a more broad data _retention_ framework is OK for practicality reasons (i.e. it is not practical to know in advance that a person is suspected of a serious crime, nor is it practical to restrict retention to only such persons as it may be necessary to look at data of other people as part of an investigation targeted at a person suspected of committing the serious crime), it must be accompanied by protections at the _access_ level (i.e. such access must be tightly restricted and judged to be necessary by a qualified independent body based on the facts of the specific case).
This ruling specifically says that it's illegal because the investigations aren't vetted by judges or independent third party bodies, among other reasons.