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harkyns_ruinson MI5 'secretly collected phone data' for decade

Thanks, whipped down thoroughly, I must have had my wires crossed with other policies I liked. If this gets through anyway, I seem to have been rate limited.

harkyns_ruinson MI5 'secretly collected phone data' for decade

The tyranny of the majority. If you can control what they watch on tele, you can basically control what they think.

harkyns_ruinson MI5 'secretly collected phone data' for decade

I can't speak for the OP, but the Nordic countries seem to be pretty progressive in this aspect. I'd gladly relocate to a country that doesn't have this invasiveness (hint hint, 20 odd years in software and devops, hook me up).

The chilling effect is bad enough, but having agencies that sit outside of the light of public/democratic scrutiny is a foul thing.

How much you can trust the alternatives? That's a trickier question.

harkyns_ruinson MI5 'secretly collected phone data' for decade

Well the current laws passed in Australia mean a large array of government departments can see our metadata.

That aside, we know the intelligence gathered has been used for parallel construction... perhaps just selectively I guess.

harkyns_ruinson MI5 'secretly collected phone data' for decade

Seems to be a pretty common theme going on now, at least among the five eyes and any beholden countries.

The one thing that makes me (grimace) laugh is that with this level of surveillance, they seem to be either a) incredibly incompetent because of all the corruption, paedophilia and so on that seems to go unpunished/uncaught, or b) a tool used by people higher up the chain for other purposes.

harkyns_ruinson Behind Rising Inequality: More Unequal Companies

I don't think it's worth worrying about inequality at this stage, we've gone past the tipping point. The people that can make a change have no desire to do so, and they hold the reins tightly now. The rest are either frustrated and powerless, or dizzy on propaganda.

So I think we'll see more environmental destruction and species dying, more debt-slavery, and yet more war coming out of the US because the petrodollar is worth destroying our planet over, and a banking/finance system that is corrupted and uncontrollable. Unless there's some light at the end of the tunnel that I'm unaware of (aside from a train packed with a few people that think they earned their billions because of such hard work).