So hypocrisy justifies spraying random Frenchmen with machine guns? Think harder.
3,405 karma · joined February 19, 2014
Nonsense.
Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.
This is a laughable statement but typically upvoted on HN. Politicians have to appear to have done everything possible to prevent these attacks. They are not dictators, if the public feels they were soft on terror they are gone, no pentaverate necessary.
"Will be interesting to see whether customers will agree to pay a premium for a risk that they do not understand much less can quantify.
The elephant in the room is that all European companies engaged in international commerce are breaching European data protection laws in some way on any given day. The vagueness and subjectivity of many obligations under the legislation leave businesses in an almost impossible position. And most citizens have no idea what benefits the legislation bestows on them because it is so complicated and philosophical. The regime has been in place since 1995 and since that time the average Jo, Jean, Juan and Johannes have all had their 'privacy' massively eroded, however you define that term. The one benefit it was meant to have was harmonisation to make the single market work, but that hasn't really worked either. Frankly, it is a complete sham and failure.
Whilst the single market is powerful force for good, it is continually under attack from this sort of well-intentioned but barmy 'social' protection initiative. All it seems to benefit is the army of regulators at a national and European level who engage in endless navel gazing, looking out for the next hapless target to keep them gainfully employed."
One point consistently glossed over is the fact that if you believe nothing can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word. It would be more like mutual observation. Are there any sci-fi works that acknowledge this depressing reality and somehow manage to make a workable story?
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/07/26/3684525/french-pat...
"You usually do a good job covering this topic but this article is not up to your usual standard. You portray the court's opinion as tautological - "And now the courts essentially maintain that the original surveillance is legal because Congress says it's legal" - but this is a misleading and unfair caricature. The background of this case is that this 2nd Circuit panel said that bulk collection of metadata was illegal because Congress never authorized such a tactic under the Patriot Act. Note that the court said it was illegal because it was not statutorily authorized. It did not conclude the program violated a constitutional clause, right or principle. You conflate these two very different things when you write in your article:
Quote:
So how could something so seemingly unconstitutional continue? Congress said it could, that's how.
Statutorily unauthorized is not the same thing as unconstitutional - the panel never said in their original ruling that the bulk metadata collection was unconstitutional, only that it was unauthorized by the law the government cited for its legality.
Now, in this latest ruling, the 2nd Circuit panel is saying with the recent passage of the Freedom Act, Congress has provided the authorization that was missing under the Patriot Act for the bulk metadata collection. So yes, in a sense, the previously illegal bulk collection program is now legal because Congress says it's legal but that's not twisted logic - that's how laws work. Acts are legal or illegal because the legislative body says so. Previously, the court said the metadata program wasn't authorized by the law - now, the new revised law provides that authorization. There's nothing twisted about that legal reasoning.
To be clear, I oppose the metadata collection or the indiscriminate NSA surveillance. But I do not think this article fairly summarize the reasoning in the court's opinion."