British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport The Brazilian partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald – Edward Snowden's go-to reporter for the dissemination of sensitive papers about the NSA's dragnet surveillance programmes – has been released from custody. The 28-year-old was held for almost nine hours for questioning by Metropolitan Police officers when he passed …
The legislation used against him was allowed to be passed by the voters. The abuses of that law are also now being ignored by the majority. Half the voters don't even show up in an election. What does that say about the process.
The voter is the boss, not civil servants. If you don't like it, fight against that law and all the other ones invading your privacy on a minute to minute basis. Terror, security, and fear are being exploited by governments who want to keep you in line, rather than you keeping THEM in line. Don't blame the government. Blame your own lackadaisical attitude in letting others decide your fate.
If nothing is done, then don't say a thing when you or someone you care about is held without charge and has their electronics seized on suspicion.
"I think his point might have had something to with the idea that silence = compliance."
And it would be a fair point if outrage = well, anything really. But it doesn't.
Look to the US, where, from opposition, Obama criticised the use of 'national security' as an excuse for essentially throwing entire cases out of court and promised that his government would be far more selective, only blocking certain, classified and sensitive information but never blocking the entire case. And, in Government, what has he done? Use the exact methods he was criticising (and promising not to use) in exactly the same way and for exactly the same purpose. In fact it seems likely now that the use of that provision has exceeded even the worst indiscretions and heavy-handedness of the Bush administration.
So go ahead, vote-in the other, barely distinguishable crew of smug gladhands if that makes you feel better.
There was no vote by the general public. There was no vote on war in Iraq. Bliar brought that in, and embarked on his illegal war in Iraq. Vote by public is not part of the process. Sheeple will vote for anything at a general election
So right about Bliar helping start the Iraq war (with fabricated evidence for which he has still not been brought to book) and so right about the sheeple voting for anything. Let's not forget they voted him in again after he was shown to be a blatant bloody-handed liar.
Anyone else remeber him saying he was given "a mandate by the country" when he got in on less than 40% of the vote? Isn't the UK's consituency system a wonderful example of democracy - NOT! Without a decent proportional repersentation system the UK is doomed to get the government they deserve rather than the one they want.
1984 ain't knocking on the door; it kicked it in and plundered your house for a long time now.
>Let's not forget they voted him in again after he was shown to be a blatant bloody-handed liar.
I was so disgusted by that I left the country. Never returned. I still don't understand how they (the electorate) could do it. For the promise of taking successful peoples money and handing it to them? They liked that spray-on grin so much they couldn't control themselves? Fuckwits.
I don't think PR would make the tiniest improvement though. There'd still be broad cross-party support for every mindless malignant bill to further oppress the plebs. Tinkering with the "representation" model couldn't change that... may even weaken what trace constituency accountability might exist!
"Allowed to be passed by the voters"
This isn't Switzerland (AFAIK the only true democracy in Europe). Do you actually have a clue what a representative democracy is? Every 4 years there's a popularity contest that one team wins (for varying values of 'win', as we've lately seen) then you cross your fingers and hope that the contest winners won't do anything stupid in the next 4 years, which they invariably will do. There's a variety of systems in place to stop the proles from interrupting things in the period between popularity contests, these have both positive effects (political stability) and negative ones (the winners can do virtually anything they want as long as it takes less than 4 years) so we're stuck. Then there's all the stuff that's being driven by the civil service, people that few proles know the existence of and even fewer voted for. When politicos start talking about the voters having any sort of influence it's either 'cos we're in the run up to another popularity contest or they're trying to deflect blame from themselves by making you feel guilty for somet' you had no choice about.
On a side note, did you vote for us to invade Iraq? No, 'cos nobody asked you to. Somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 proles demonstrated their opinion on that and it made not a blind bit of difference. That's the anti-interruption systems kicking in. The IRA had more power in the UK than the voters do now :(
Democracy? No we have the them-and-us-merry-go-round system instead. Anything bad that happens is blamed on 'them' and anything good was obviously a gift from 'us'. Every so often the 'them' and the 'us' swap places so the blame game can be perpetuated. The whole thing is run by career politicians who's sole aim in politics is to further their career. Where is the incentive to serve the people when serving a party makes you so much richer? Where is the incentive to say something meaningful when you can blame the previous incumbents and keep the merry-go-round spinning profitably on. It's only every five years or so that we get a say and even then we can only say some variation of 'us' or 'them' so who cares.
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"The voter is the boss, not civil servants. If you don't like it, fight against that law and all the other ones invading your privacy on a minute to minute basis. Terror, security, and fear are being exploited by governments who want to keep you in line, rather than you keeping THEM in line. Don't blame the government. Blame your own lackadaisical attitude in letting others decide your fate." -- Oh, Hi, You must have been born yesterday !!!
If voting was actually that powerful and able to effect the amount of change that you suggest, there is no way we would be allowed to do it.
I'm not saying that I don't vote. I toddle along and put an X in the box (the mark of the illiterate) from the menu of liars, scumbags and idiots, like everyone else does. But at the end of the day I'm still voting for liars, scumbags and idiots.
"Politicians are not born. They are excreted."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106BC - 43BC
"Politicians are not born. They are excreted."
Not disagreeing with the sentiment, but I doubt Cicero said it. You'll find the quote all over the net - but never with a reference, and seldom in Latin (and with Aristotle and Zeno as alternative sources).
In Cicero's day there was no word for 'politician' - a man of a certain status did politics, but he also did jurisprudence and military command. The 'professional politician' is a product of modern toilets.
I don't know. What's the place coming to? All these Brazilians coming over here with their strange expectations of life and liberty, taking all our lead and trying to use our airports. They don't seem to have any idea how to live in a police state. The Stasi will fix them, that's what I say.
Certainly was lucky. If they'd managed to find the tiniest excuse to arrest him - something encrypted, a whiff of a "result" on some dubious chemical contact test, or whatever, they'd have had a full month to piss him about. I wonder if they swabbed him. Thank God Neo Labour got the 2006 terrorism act through to protect us.
Should have been a quarter of a year mind.
"The legal grounds for his detention are currently being disputed by Labour MP Keith Vaz, among others, who told Radio 4 he was concerned about the apparent use of "terrorism legislation for something that does not appear to relate to terrorism"."
Keith Vaz obviously has a short memory: when his party was in power and bringing in all the draconian anti-teror legislation, there were plenty of people complaining that the laws were too vague and could be abused but the leadership of the Labour government accused them of overreacting. The subsequent rampant abuse of RIPA by councils and others is no secret but while we have such legislation in place, we can expect the authorities to use them.
...Vaz added that he was not aware that personal property could be confiscated under the laws...
They were almost certainly after Key material. They will have intercepted lots of encrypted emails from Snowden and associated journalists and contacts, and now they are going after the keys. I hope none of that crowd keep their keys on their laptops in clear...
> I hope none of that crowd keep their keys on their laptops in clear...
It wouldn't matter if the keys were encrypted - under RIPA2K, it is an offence not to decrypt such materials or hand over the decryption keys when ordered to by someone with the appropriate pwers.
And that covers far more than police and judiciary :-(
Vic.
The odious little shit. They inflict this repugnant legislation on us, then when they get slung out of office, they try to use its existence to score points against the other lot.
...and the tossers then have the gall to feign consternation at the fact "it has become fashionable" to loathe them.
. . . which is exactly the problem that every civil liberties group has with every such legislation across all affected countries.
Each time, the Government of the day makes reassurances about 'safeguards' and 'reviews' and 'independent commissioners' and implies that anyone worried about the law being used indiscriminately is misinformed or paranoid.
Each time, a predictable bunch of people will repeat the fallacy that "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" and completely miss the point.
And, each time the laws will be misused and all the warnings of the civil liberties groups proven to be accurate.
And yet, nothing changes.
You can vote out the mob that put the legislation in but the laws are never repealed due to law enforcement saying that (despite them not having it a few years ago) it would be a major setback and cripple their operations.
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