>> Citizens of liberal democracies do not expect to be frisked without good cause, or have their homes searched without a warrant.
Lol. What world does this author live in? I expect to be frisked every time I go to an airport or football game. I expect to have to turn my pockets out every time I cross the US-canada boarder. I'm not a minority, but I assume some who are will want to add to this train of thought re being frisked by cops.
And a warrant to search my home? Warrants are pieces of paper. Cops drive tanks and carry machine guns. Whether they bothered to phone a magistrate for permission before hand is the least of my concerns as they break down my door. Warrants only matter if they are going to charge me with something and want evidence admitted in court. Even then, there are so many exceptions. The evidence gets in. My concern isn't about paperwork, it's that I'll be swatted one night and they will shoot my dog.
Also, the "warrant requirement" is an American construct. It isn't a thing in places like Canada, which most would consider a very liberal democracy. Canadian cops can use evidence even if seized illegally. Nor do they have to stop questioning you if you demand a lawyer. Nor do you get a jury trial. Don't assume that all western democracies use the American legal system.
I'm curious as to why you've been down-voted with no dissenting remarks. You're basically correct in my experience too (I've not been SWATed, but I've several former neighbors that have).
your comment touches on something i often wonder about: the differences between US civil rights and the civil rights in our liberal democratic allies (e.g. Canada, the UK, France, et al).
i had no idea that in Canada of all places "cops can use evidence even if seized illegally."
i do know, however, that government censorship of the media is permissible in the UK.
there's no single definition of "democracy" across the world.
it's interesting that some in the US seem to think that, if an individual right is ever modified or restricted in the US, it means we're at "the end of democracy." while, at the same time, these very same rights are routinely restricted in other countries but we still consider those countries to be "democracies."
>i had no idea that in Canada of all places "cops can use evidence even if seized illegally."
according to [1], it's not a blanket yes or no. it's a balance of whichever choice would make the justice system look worse. ie. turning someone's home up-side down to find 1g of weed vs a serial murderer getting away with murder because the judge didn't fill out the paperwork properly.
That's quite a cynical way of explaining this. Is it possible to interpret this as it being allowed to use evidence seized illegally if, on balance, justice would be better served?
The rule in Canada is that the evidence is admitted unless its admission will "bring the administration of justice into disrepute". So where the cops act like total jerks and break into someone's house for no good reason, the court can throw out the evidence. But the court isn't going to let a drug dealer go free because the cops didn't get a warrant before searching the trunk of his car.
The perception of rights goes both ways. Canadians sometimes laugh at the US legal system. Canadians see crimes like felony-murder or misdemeanor-manslaughter as ridiculous. So too with the American tradition of supernatural punishment (ie "life plus twenty"). And the duel-sovereign thing, the risk of being tried in state and then again federal court, is very strange outside the US.
The biggest cultural difference has to be the levels of incarceration. As the US increased punishment in recent years, Canada did the opposite. Have a look at their military prison. It is more often than not empty.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4097208/military-prison-edmonton-...
> So too with the American tradition of supernatural punishment (ie "life plus twenty").
This isn't "supernatural punishment". It's sentencing for more than one crime. Life, probably for murder, plus 20 for (say) armed robbery. It's not meaningless to tack on those 20 years. If the murder conviction is overturned, so is the life sentence, but not those 20 years, unless those convictions are also overturned.
Super = above. Natural = life. US criminals are regularly sentenced to things beyond any concept of their natural lives. There is no legitimate purpose behind these. If a charge is later dropped or overturned, in a normal country, the person is re-sentenced accordingly. Stacking life upon life, decade upon decade, is just scoring points. In countries like Canada or the UK these would be deemed indeterminate sentences meant to put people away for life for crimes that would not normally warrant such treatment.
Some of these (10,000+ years) read like something from a harry potter novel, not a realworld justice system.
You're conflating so many things it is difficult to know how to respond.
Life + 20 is a completely different class of sentencing than the ones in the Wikipedia list. I don't see a large distinction between re-sentencing or not. The end result should still be 20 years, no? "Life without parole + $X years" is functionally equivalent to a "whole life order" in the UK.
The extremes in the list are of two classes:
1. Mass murderers, serial murders, or others who have gone on large crime sprees. These generally carry life sentences without parole. So, they cannot be indeterminate no matter how many years are tacked on, unless they have a successful appeal of all convictions that result in life sentences.
2. The indeterminate sentences you're talking about. Generally speaking, these are pretty egregious, violent crimes with many victims or the same victim over a long period of time. In many cases, the convicted could have received a life sentence, or one would have been mandated depending on the crime and the state.
But this isn't common by any stretch, except on TV crime dramas. A problem is the giving of life sentences to nonviolent offenders (e.g. California's three strikes law). Also problematic is the stacking of charges to compel plea bargain, which is exacerbated by cumulative sentencing. But "Life + 20" is just, effectively, a life sentence with a different label.
The contours of the state's relationship with the citizen vary, not just on which country you're in but who you are.
The US takes an extremely textualist approach to rights. Other countries take more outcome-based approaches rooted in a human rights context, which pretty much post-dates WW2 and the need to avert its atrocities. The UK is kind of stuck in the middle; we don't have a foundational text to focus argument on like the US Constitution, but nor have we faced up to the worst incidents of our past. This makes discussions about what freedom means in the UK frequently degenerate into incoherency as people talk past each other.
Theoretically the UK is a lot less free in some ways; practically you're a lot less likely to be shot by the police, and the justice system maintains a strong focus on fairness. I'm a big fan of Amartya Sen's calling it "capability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach - how relevant is a freedom to do something that you're not practically able to achieve in your circumstances?
> Also, the "warrant requirement" is an American construct. It isn't a thing in places like Canada, which most would consider a very liberal democracy. Canadian cops can use evidence even if seized illegally. Nor do they have to stop questioning you if you demand a lawyer. Nor do you get a jury trial. Don't assume that all western democracies use the American legal system.
While Canada's justice system is noticeably different than the US's, it isn't generally worse at protecting the rights of the public. Yes, there are search warrants, and in fact Canada is more protective of an individual's home than the US is. Yes, you have the right to a jury trial for serious crimes. Yes, you have the right to remain silent (though it is somewhat different). Both the US and Canada can often use evidence seized illegally - the judges in both places have the ability, but not the obligation, to throw out such evidence.
But try taking to an american about the concepts of summary, indictable and hybrid offensives. The idea that crown prosecutors can decide how to try a case is very alien to their clear-cut system of felonies and misdemeanors.
>> Both the US and Canada can often use evidence seized illegally - the judges in both places have the ability, but not the obligation, to throw out such evidence.
Look that one up. The US is very big on the exclusionary rule. If evidence was seized improperly, unconstitutionally, it is out. The most famous US criminal cases (think Miranda) involve excluding evidence for such reasons, even if that means an admitted criminal is to be set free. The concept so permeates US legal culture that courts take is as a necessary implication whenever discussing evidence.
US cop-TV shows often treat it as a given, but US courts allow in bad evidence more often than not. US supreme court decisions are generally against the exclusionary rule, and it's likely to mostly disappear in the US in the near future, except for very rich defendants. Here's the most recent one:
where everyone involved says the evidence was seized improperly, unconstitutionally, but the evidence is very much in and the defendants are in prison today.
In a European country with restricted access to guns most likely, where the police doesn't need tanks and machine guns to keep a situation under control. Also most people travel by train or car so they only get searched when they go on vacation.
They all learn from each other. In addition we have companies that are building the necessary infrastructure which then probably can be used by a surveillance state. Unless surveillance gets checked by law it will soon be world wide.
The most ironic part is that employees are convinced — totally convinced — that they aren’t building that infrastructure.
It would be different if people had the self awareness to admit it and that they were ok with it. But it’s either cowardly (afraid of peers’ reactions) or somewhat delusional.
I wince to express this, but I’m at least happy to be living in America. For all its flaws, it feels like the founders really did see this type of situation coming and did the best they could to give us some tools to defend against it. Other places have fewer.
A few weeks ago at work we looked at the categories Facebook puts each of us into for advertisers. The Nazis or the east German Stasi would have been super happy with that level of data. It would have made their lives much easier. You probably can always buy the data you need for a surveillance state if you can afford it.
I struggle with the idea that for every programmer that finds it unethical to build weapons or surveillance software, there are others that believe it is their patriotic duty to do so (or at least enough to get those projects done).
I've been involved in projects which were teetering on the edge of my ethical boundaries, knowing full-well they would/could easily be abused... but I knew if I didn't do it, I would lose/quit my job and then somebody else would just do the project. Even if say, 90% of programmers turned the job down, there are enough hungry people in the world who would gladly do the job in order to feed their family/buy a lambo/etc., regardless of ethical implications.
Patriots at least care. They may realize that the tools they're building aren't serving the best interest of their country.
The worst are pure mercenaries, who care only about the paycheck.
(But that's still simplifying the problem. Taking a moral stand is also a function of your life circumstances. It's easy to complain about ethical problems when you aren't the sole provider for two households and also facing a huge medical bill. Also, evil people don't write job advertisements for complete turn-key doomsday products. There's a spectrum there - isolated parts may not seem that evil.)
Eh. It would be better not to make people feel afraid for expressing those views. I held them once, before NSA’s bad behavior came to light. In many ways I still do.
The argument goes like this: any student of war will tell you that the most important factor in warfare is intelligence. Strength is of course a requirement, but it’s secondary. It was why Japan was defeated at Midway, for example — that situation arose only because we knew for a fact what their plans were, thanks to breaking their comms.
In that light, since humans seem no different from a hundred years ago till now, it seems rather better to be top dog than to be someone else’s dog. And that makes it my duty to keep my country firmly in that place.
... at least, that’s how I felt growing up. Those feelings have translated more into “we have to be in this for each other, not for governments.” It feels like the Internet is one of the last bastions of true freedom — free from employers, free from identity. You can even make a fortune if you’re sufficiently lucky and talented.
It feels hollow, though. Part of the reason for the feelings I expressed above was that it fulfills a deep primal desire to be a part of something greater than yourself, to be aligned to a common goal, something more than just chasing a paycheck.
I wrote this mainly to give some context about how someone might be ok with the idea of building surveillance software, but feelings are always a complex and multifaceted thing. And we’re all still learning what it means to be human and to contextualize our place in the world. Is this really the best way to spend our time? And yet we’re forced to, if someone else has a club they want to club you with.
One closing point: the best way to change an organization is from the inside. If someone was truly worried about the NSA, joining them seems like one of the most effective things you could do. Because you truly believe it could be a tool of good, rather than a dystopaian weapon. There’s a reason idealists like Snowden were attracted to the job.
I hope this wasn’t too philosophical. Mostly it’s just hard to determine what you should even do with your life. It feels like no matter what you do, there will be people who hate it. So why bother defending your own point of view? Yet that feels like a cheap way out.
Don’t discount desperation. I can very easily imagine a struggling programmer who has the choice of putting food on the table or going without. The felon programmer who posted to HN several months ago falls into this category.
It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.
Eroding and not being applied properly. What was that stuff snowden revealed about the NSA and their capabilities again? Now consider how much time has passed since then and how much they could have refined their tools and methods over time. And remember how nobody gave a fuck who wasn't exactly involved with tech or human rights. Sure, it's "just" the secret service(s) able to access that data, but is our solution really always just pointing at some other country and saying "well look this is even worse so I guess we're doing fine". Also, every time some shit the govt or some agency was pulling gets uncovered, large scale end-of-history syndrome sets in and people assume that now that this has been revealed, everything is fine for good.
I'd like to argue that this even leads to us caring less about it than we should. In the west we are so convinced that our political systems are far superior, so that our governments can't do any evil, and if theyd try, someone would take care of stopping them. Only that I have my doubts about that really happening. The favorite way Americans like to do this is playing the "freedom of speech" card, but I guess other countries have equivalents.
>Unless surveillance gets checked by law it will soon be world wide.
This already seems nearly impossible. As the surveillance state gains strength it becomes more difficult to oppose it and win an election. In legal means, they can fund your opposition well and they can attack you for crimes that could have been prevented. And beyond that, their surveillance is a very strong tool in an election.
For an in-depth look on surveillance in the States, I recommend @War[0]. It delves into the rise of the NSA and the role of digital surveillance in modern warfare, along with the NSA's relationship with large corporations to achieve these goals.
Interesting that this shows up on HN today because I was just reading a thread[1] on reddit where a user was forced to install spyware on their android phone when crossing into this region of China
Also I had no idea what was happening in that region. This[2] is from one of the commenters in that thread:
> As someone from Xinjiang and migrated with my family to somewhere else, This is only a small part of the whole oppression and violation of human rights going on in North Western China. Now a days, Uyghurs students are not allowed to speak their mother tongue in schools, fasting during Ramadan is considered "politically incorrect"(let alone praying etc), and you will end up in "re-educational camp"(aka prisons). Uyghur females are forced to marry Chinese mans, as part of CCP's assimilation process, almost one million Uyghurs has been locked up in prisons, EVERY SINGLE successful Uyghur businessmans has been locked up, influencial figures like artists, scholar,, singers has gone into "political re-educational camps" too, many getting their organs harvested, and CCP sell them in the black market. Many healthy teenagers dies after being released from those camps, due to being some essential part of their body organs being harvested. The international community knows very little about everything happening in Xinjiang because Uyghurs don't have an vocal enough exiled leader like Dali Lama, and also because NO media is allowed inside Xinjiang, especially foreign media, if you have friends and family that have interests in Chinese culture or China as a country, I hope you guys can spread the message and things happening in Xinjiang, China, towards Uyghur people. Its comparable to the Holocaust, just done very low profile, I really mean it. It has past the point of making me angry, I just feel extremely depressed when I read things happening back home, and talking about them. Im just glad myself and all my family members are in a safe and free country now. If you wanna learn more, you can visit Radio Free Asia's website, and they have section reporting on Uyghurs.
> Edit: I'm sorry if this is getting political, I by no means saying that this has anything to do with average Chinese citizens and Chinese people, most of Chinese people I've seen and work with are all very humble really nice people, I'm only speaking out towards Chinese Communist Party, and please don't get too political under the comments,and I just want to give some background information of why CCP installating malware on people's phone is a common phenomenon in China (especially places like Xinjiang). Please be nice to each other, regardless of ethnicity or any differences.
>Please be nice to each other, regardless of ethnicity
without talking about ethnicities that dislike other ethnicities, I can't explain why this photo means that the media won't talk about the Uyger genocide until it's at least well and done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs#/media/File:Uyghur_gir...
It started off sounding authentic and believable, then went to the crazy side with claims of organ harvesting and forcing Xinjiang girls to marry Chinese men.
echoes? the only element we're missing is making widespread arrests using the data that's harvested.
to be clear, we're still making many arrests and incarcerating far more of our people than anywhere else in the world -- just using criminally exploitative drug policy as our "gotcha" more than technology, for the moment.
the economist sees "echoes" of the police state in the west. i see the same song played in a different key and a less manic tempo.
Be worried. If NSA's work was to any extend genuinely relates to foreign intelligence gathering, they would not be prowling through web diaries American teenage girls. How you think they were supposed to look for Ben Ladens on American facebook.com and myspace.
Moreover, Snowden's powerpoints confirmed eager cooperation from all major US dotcoms, with facebook's early ex-CTO nearing to publicly admitting that NSLs they received were about "get raw DB access" which I assume they still have, and use up to this day.
The USG is able to lawfully conduct domestic surveillance of citizens with security clearance. It is trivial to turn that panopticon on to the rest of the populace.
Of all the dogs the ATF has shot and all the doors the FBI has wrongfully kicked down how many of them belonged to people who are part of a three letter agency?
Enforcement organizations treating their own like they treat normal people is the rare exception to the rule.
There are many lines drawn. The thin blue one just happens to have the most brand recognition among the people on the wrong side of all the lines.
The other article[0] linked in this one is well worth a read. I had never heard about Uyghurs or China's treatment of them before I read the reddit thread yesterday about phone spyware. It's pretty appalling and what more how the western tech community idolizes China and their tech scene while looking right past atrocities like this.
I actually agree with it a lot by the way. I don't want to be hypocritical about the whole thing. But it seems that the fact that a lot of Uighurs make credible threats of violence, (indeed, are actively involved in ACTUAL mass violence), is often used as an excuse by the Chinese for everything they do. Similarly in the UK, some people make credible threats of violence, and the surveillance state kicks into high gear on everyone. And I'm not just picking on the UK and China, many nations use this excuse.
Look, I'm a "tough on terrorism" kind of guy too. Uighurs blowing things up, fine, crush them. With prejudice. You can't negotiate with terrorists. Period. I get that.
Why a dragnet on your entire population though? The issue is scope creep. It starts out with the UK wanting to find people making terroristic threats, and in 20 years the family court accessible text messages between you and your lover are being entered as evidence in your divorce hearing.
I've seen a bunch of people talking about restrictions on freedom of speech in the UK, but when you look at the case we almost always see someone who hasn't just voiced an opinion, but has made a clear threat of violence.
If someone is planning on killing you, wouldn't you like to be informed beforehand, so as to defend? It would seem silencing such voices is like putting your head in the sand.
You still haven't given any examples of what you're actualy talking about, which is making it impossible to rebut your overly vague comments.
But the perpetrators of Rotherham went to prison; there have been several rigorous investigations into the child protection and police lack of action in the case; people resigned.
Most importantly: no-one has been arrested for trying to investigate Rotherham.
Please give an actual name of someone who faced police action for investigating rotherham.
He interfered with an ongoing criminal trial (putting that trial at risk of collapse) by threatening witnesses and calling the accused, before they had been convicted "muslim paedophiles". He was filming inside the courtroom and intimidating witnesses. He was asked to stop. He didn't stop, and he told police he was going to go to the homes of witnesses.
He was arrested and sentenced for that contempt of court. He was given a suspended sentence and clear instruction not to do it again.
You seem to think that Yaxley-Lennon would be free to speak in the US, but he's been forbidden to travel to the US by the US -- that's why in 2013 he tried to used a false passport to travel. https://news.sky.com/story/edl-leader-lennon-jailed-for-pass...
Would you stand up, please. I take, as I hope
has been made very clear by the comments that I have
made, a very dim view indeed of your conduct which was
in the face of repeated warnings that you should not
do that which you did do. I accept what Mr.
Kovalevsky tells me about the dangers that you might
face were you to be sent into immediate custody. I
have to say it is on a knife edge so far as I am
concerned because a very large part of me thinks so
what? you could be put into protective custody. But,
my concern is to make sure that this trial keeps on
track, and my concern is also to make sure that other
courts with other trials in similar situations are
kept on track without any danger of repetition of the
kind of conduct that we have had visited upon us here.
The sentence, therefore, that I pass upon you, taking
into account all of those matters that have been
placed before me and your admissions entered via Mr.
Kovalevsky, is one of three months' imprisonment which
will be suspended for a period of 18 months. That
will be suspended. There will be no conditions that
need to be attached to that suspended sentence, but
you should be under no illusions that if you commit
any further offence of any kind, and that would
include, I would have thought a further contempt of
court by similar actions, then that sentence of three
months would be activated, and that would be on top of
anything else that you were given by any other court.
In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court,
refer to people as "Muslim paedophiles, Muslim
rapists" and so on and so forth while trials are
ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury
that that is what they are, and you will find yourself
inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much.
This is a baffling comment. WHy do you think voices are silenced about Rotherham? There is absolutely no freedom of speech restriction about rotherham.
For tech from Shenzen for example. You could order as much or as little you want at anytime and day of the week and pay the rock bottom price. Rarely is it asked, "How is this possible?" Factory labor? Prison labor? Environmental concerns? Those things are glossed over. We order a single prototype board, pay $10 including shipping, and are pleasantly surprised when it arrives in the mail. Ignoring the human and environmental impact of the material and chemicals that went into it.
Really most of us ignore that for all tech, at any price. It has nothing to do with Shenzen or the chips they produce. For that matter, there are similar moral issues with most clothing you will buy and the effects of a lot of the food you are eating. The cosmetic products you use are almost certainly funding (or have funded) a company that perpetrates animal cruelty.
The world is built with sadistic bricks. I don't think it is active malice that most people ignore them, I think they just cannot exist properly if they think about each and every one. So most people think about a few, if any. Maybe sometimes they eat a biological egg from a chicken that has twice the floor space of a regular chicken. Or they drink some fair trade coffee that was ostensibly not produced with modern slave labour.
On Chinese tour bus hired by our U.S. MBA class, our Chinese guide made several disparaging/dehumanizing off-hand comments about people from Tibet to the entire group. I still wonder if the Chinese government privately tells this guide to say this so that Westerners lose sympathy and interest in supporting a free Tibet.
The problem isn't the surveillance. Surveillance is just modern technology being applies as a means to an end. History shows that you can't stand in the way of technological progress for very long unless you're willing to be an authoritarian police state to do it).
The problem I see it is one of a divided society. The people who create and operate the laws and the surveillance dragnets do not worry about being subject to them in their fullest.
Politicians will argue for gun control, enact laws that erode our freedoms, half-ass healthcare and approve funding for surveillance dragnets that will be used to make an end run around civil liberties. In the back of their minds they know that they have armed security, that no enforcement agency will risk using those laws to abuse politicians, they don't have to worry about healthcare and they can afford a good lawyer to convince the court that their civil liberties have been violated.
The people and organizations that actually implement these bad things don't rock the boat because when you're on the inside whatever bad thing it is doesn't apply to you. Cops are exempt from gun laws. The three letter agencies don't use secret courts to handle issues with their own personnel and don't send information requests and gag orders to each other. People in the healthcare industry know how all the tricks to play and strings to pull to get themselves good enough coverage at a fair price. The agencies operating the stingrays, using ALPRs to catch people with weed on their way out of states where it's legal, kicking down doors and shooting people's dogs don't have to worry about being subject to it themselves because of the thin blue line. And all these people's salary depend on them not rocking the boat over the fact that they enjoy some perk that is not available to the peasantry at large.
If all the bad authoritarian crap society does was done to everyone with at least a token attempt at being impartial we'd do a hell of a lot less of it.
The timing of it on HN smacks of the discussion from last month based on the NYT article that the Chinese government employs people to patrol internet discussion forums and write "America is just as bad!" posts to distract people every time an article comes out that paints China in a negative light.
It's probably more advisable just to flag this discussion if you believe it is Chinese, American, European, Russian, liberal, conservative, (whatever else) political propaganda.
Of course, most of HN is political propaganda lately, but that's a separate issue.
> In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism (see Technology Quarterly). The results are effective, yet deeply worrying.
These claims seem completely unfounded. It always surprises me when well-known outlets like The Economist just make assertions like this, without having any data to back it up.
Of course the governments implementing the surveillance regimes will claim that it's effective, but it's the media's job to actually verify the veracity of these claims. Instead they are just parroting this tired old narrative.
> police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism
> Cops surveil, that's their job
These statements are not equivalent. No one is disputing that cops surveil people. The question is, are they using the same tools that China is? That's what the person you're respnding to thinks the Economist needs to back up.
I think even that is not entirely accurate. The comment by rkrzr rather was about the tools being effective:
> Of course the governments implementing the surveillance regimes will claim that it's effective, but it's the media's job to actually verify the veracity of these claims.
The West invented this stuff, though our implementation is less centralized and relies much more heavily on the private sector. The Chinese are just copying it.
This is just different policing tradition. China and to some extent, Russia, have external cages for free individuals inside the cage. The Western tradition grows the cage inside the individual, so it cannot escape "rules", since these are built in. The Western kind of censorship is self-censorship. And it goes deeper than DPI. I am writing this after I started reading A. Gramsci's letters from prison, and got very clear idea how the ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – establishes and maintains its control. Its still there, inside you.
Well, carrying knife is a criminal offence in Britain, isn't it? Then why the Economist does not analyse a grave situation with personal freedoms in the UK first?
80 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadwhen independence was our declaration conveyance
it formed a republic with a twist of democracy
power to the people's voice was it's purveyance
today the people blindly march toward oligarchy
as we for free products provide our own surveillance
and I long for the future Just and Loving theocracy
When those in Christ know God fully in unveiled valence.
The surveillance will demand it.
Lol. What world does this author live in? I expect to be frisked every time I go to an airport or football game. I expect to have to turn my pockets out every time I cross the US-canada boarder. I'm not a minority, but I assume some who are will want to add to this train of thought re being frisked by cops.
And a warrant to search my home? Warrants are pieces of paper. Cops drive tanks and carry machine guns. Whether they bothered to phone a magistrate for permission before hand is the least of my concerns as they break down my door. Warrants only matter if they are going to charge me with something and want evidence admitted in court. Even then, there are so many exceptions. The evidence gets in. My concern isn't about paperwork, it's that I'll be swatted one night and they will shoot my dog.
Also, the "warrant requirement" is an American construct. It isn't a thing in places like Canada, which most would consider a very liberal democracy. Canadian cops can use evidence even if seized illegally. Nor do they have to stop questioning you if you demand a lawyer. Nor do you get a jury trial. Don't assume that all western democracies use the American legal system.
I've haven't had any neighbours swatted, but I have had friends online targeted. It is something that can haunt you for years.
i had no idea that in Canada of all places "cops can use evidence even if seized illegally."
i do know, however, that government censorship of the media is permissible in the UK.
there's no single definition of "democracy" across the world.
it's interesting that some in the US seem to think that, if an individual right is ever modified or restricted in the US, it means we're at "the end of democracy." while, at the same time, these very same rights are routinely restricted in other countries but we still consider those countries to be "democracies."
according to [1], it's not a blanket yes or no. it's a balance of whichever choice would make the justice system look worse. ie. turning someone's home up-side down to find 1g of weed vs a serial murderer getting away with murder because the judge didn't fill out the paperwork properly.
[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Canadian_Criminal_Procedure_an...
The perception of rights goes both ways. Canadians sometimes laugh at the US legal system. Canadians see crimes like felony-murder or misdemeanor-manslaughter as ridiculous. So too with the American tradition of supernatural punishment (ie "life plus twenty"). And the duel-sovereign thing, the risk of being tried in state and then again federal court, is very strange outside the US.
The biggest cultural difference has to be the levels of incarceration. As the US increased punishment in recent years, Canada did the opposite. Have a look at their military prison. It is more often than not empty. https://globalnews.ca/news/4097208/military-prison-edmonton-...
This isn't "supernatural punishment". It's sentencing for more than one crime. Life, probably for murder, plus 20 for (say) armed robbery. It's not meaningless to tack on those 20 years. If the murder conviction is overturned, so is the life sentence, but not those 20 years, unless those convictions are also overturned.
Some of these (10,000+ years) read like something from a harry potter novel, not a realworld justice system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentenc...
Life + 20 is a completely different class of sentencing than the ones in the Wikipedia list. I don't see a large distinction between re-sentencing or not. The end result should still be 20 years, no? "Life without parole + $X years" is functionally equivalent to a "whole life order" in the UK.
The extremes in the list are of two classes:
1. Mass murderers, serial murders, or others who have gone on large crime sprees. These generally carry life sentences without parole. So, they cannot be indeterminate no matter how many years are tacked on, unless they have a successful appeal of all convictions that result in life sentences.
2. The indeterminate sentences you're talking about. Generally speaking, these are pretty egregious, violent crimes with many victims or the same victim over a long period of time. In many cases, the convicted could have received a life sentence, or one would have been mandated depending on the crime and the state.
But this isn't common by any stretch, except on TV crime dramas. A problem is the giving of life sentences to nonviolent offenders (e.g. California's three strikes law). Also problematic is the stacking of charges to compel plea bargain, which is exacerbated by cumulative sentencing. But "Life + 20" is just, effectively, a life sentence with a different label.
The US takes an extremely textualist approach to rights. Other countries take more outcome-based approaches rooted in a human rights context, which pretty much post-dates WW2 and the need to avert its atrocities. The UK is kind of stuck in the middle; we don't have a foundational text to focus argument on like the US Constitution, but nor have we faced up to the worst incidents of our past. This makes discussions about what freedom means in the UK frequently degenerate into incoherency as people talk past each other.
Theoretically the UK is a lot less free in some ways; practically you're a lot less likely to be shot by the police, and the justice system maintains a strong focus on fairness. I'm a big fan of Amartya Sen's calling it "capability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach - how relevant is a freedom to do something that you're not practically able to achieve in your circumstances?
While Canada's justice system is noticeably different than the US's, it isn't generally worse at protecting the rights of the public. Yes, there are search warrants, and in fact Canada is more protective of an individual's home than the US is. Yes, you have the right to a jury trial for serious crimes. Yes, you have the right to remain silent (though it is somewhat different). Both the US and Canada can often use evidence seized illegally - the judges in both places have the ability, but not the obligation, to throw out such evidence.
>> Both the US and Canada can often use evidence seized illegally - the judges in both places have the ability, but not the obligation, to throw out such evidence.
Look that one up. The US is very big on the exclusionary rule. If evidence was seized improperly, unconstitutionally, it is out. The most famous US criminal cases (think Miranda) involve excluding evidence for such reasons, even if that means an admitted criminal is to be set free. The concept so permeates US legal culture that courts take is as a necessary implication whenever discussing evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._Michigan
where everyone involved says the evidence was seized improperly, unconstitutionally, but the evidence is very much in and the defendants are in prison today.
It would be different if people had the self awareness to admit it and that they were ok with it. But it’s either cowardly (afraid of peers’ reactions) or somewhat delusional.
I wince to express this, but I’m at least happy to be living in America. For all its flaws, it feels like the founders really did see this type of situation coming and did the best they could to give us some tools to defend against it. Other places have fewer.
Still, those tools seem to be eroding with time.
The worst are pure mercenaries, who care only about the paycheck.
(But that's still simplifying the problem. Taking a moral stand is also a function of your life circumstances. It's easy to complain about ethical problems when you aren't the sole provider for two households and also facing a huge medical bill. Also, evil people don't write job advertisements for complete turn-key doomsday products. There's a spectrum there - isolated parts may not seem that evil.)
The argument goes like this: any student of war will tell you that the most important factor in warfare is intelligence. Strength is of course a requirement, but it’s secondary. It was why Japan was defeated at Midway, for example — that situation arose only because we knew for a fact what their plans were, thanks to breaking their comms.
In that light, since humans seem no different from a hundred years ago till now, it seems rather better to be top dog than to be someone else’s dog. And that makes it my duty to keep my country firmly in that place.
... at least, that’s how I felt growing up. Those feelings have translated more into “we have to be in this for each other, not for governments.” It feels like the Internet is one of the last bastions of true freedom — free from employers, free from identity. You can even make a fortune if you’re sufficiently lucky and talented.
It feels hollow, though. Part of the reason for the feelings I expressed above was that it fulfills a deep primal desire to be a part of something greater than yourself, to be aligned to a common goal, something more than just chasing a paycheck.
I wrote this mainly to give some context about how someone might be ok with the idea of building surveillance software, but feelings are always a complex and multifaceted thing. And we’re all still learning what it means to be human and to contextualize our place in the world. Is this really the best way to spend our time? And yet we’re forced to, if someone else has a club they want to club you with.
One closing point: the best way to change an organization is from the inside. If someone was truly worried about the NSA, joining them seems like one of the most effective things you could do. Because you truly believe it could be a tool of good, rather than a dystopaian weapon. There’s a reason idealists like Snowden were attracted to the job.
I hope this wasn’t too philosophical. Mostly it’s just hard to determine what you should even do with your life. It feels like no matter what you do, there will be people who hate it. So why bother defending your own point of view? Yet that feels like a cheap way out.
It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.
I'd like to argue that this even leads to us caring less about it than we should. In the west we are so convinced that our political systems are far superior, so that our governments can't do any evil, and if theyd try, someone would take care of stopping them. Only that I have my doubts about that really happening. The favorite way Americans like to do this is playing the "freedom of speech" card, but I guess other countries have equivalents.
This already seems nearly impossible. As the surveillance state gains strength it becomes more difficult to oppose it and win an election. In legal means, they can fund your opposition well and they can attack you for crimes that could have been prevented. And beyond that, their surveillance is a very strong tool in an election.
"Probably can"? Definitely can and is being used.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/War-Rise-Military-Internet-Complex/dp...
Also I had no idea what was happening in that region. This[2] is from one of the commenters in that thread:
> As someone from Xinjiang and migrated with my family to somewhere else, This is only a small part of the whole oppression and violation of human rights going on in North Western China. Now a days, Uyghurs students are not allowed to speak their mother tongue in schools, fasting during Ramadan is considered "politically incorrect"(let alone praying etc), and you will end up in "re-educational camp"(aka prisons). Uyghur females are forced to marry Chinese mans, as part of CCP's assimilation process, almost one million Uyghurs has been locked up in prisons, EVERY SINGLE successful Uyghur businessmans has been locked up, influencial figures like artists, scholar,, singers has gone into "political re-educational camps" too, many getting their organs harvested, and CCP sell them in the black market. Many healthy teenagers dies after being released from those camps, due to being some essential part of their body organs being harvested. The international community knows very little about everything happening in Xinjiang because Uyghurs don't have an vocal enough exiled leader like Dali Lama, and also because NO media is allowed inside Xinjiang, especially foreign media, if you have friends and family that have interests in Chinese culture or China as a country, I hope you guys can spread the message and things happening in Xinjiang, China, towards Uyghur people. Its comparable to the Holocaust, just done very low profile, I really mean it. It has past the point of making me angry, I just feel extremely depressed when I read things happening back home, and talking about them. Im just glad myself and all my family members are in a safe and free country now. If you wanna learn more, you can visit Radio Free Asia's website, and they have section reporting on Uyghurs.
> Edit: I'm sorry if this is getting political, I by no means saying that this has anything to do with average Chinese citizens and Chinese people, most of Chinese people I've seen and work with are all very humble really nice people, I'm only speaking out towards Chinese Communist Party, and please don't get too political under the comments,and I just want to give some background information of why CCP installating malware on people's phone is a common phenomenon in China (especially places like Xinjiang). Please be nice to each other, regardless of ethnicity or any differences.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_bo...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_bo...
without talking about ethnicities that dislike other ethnicities, I can't explain why this photo means that the media won't talk about the Uyger genocide until it's at least well and done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs#/media/File:Uyghur_gir...
to be clear, we're still making many arrests and incarcerating far more of our people than anywhere else in the world -- just using criminally exploitative drug policy as our "gotcha" more than technology, for the moment.
the economist sees "echoes" of the police state in the west. i see the same song played in a different key and a less manic tempo.
Moreover, Snowden's powerpoints confirmed eager cooperation from all major US dotcoms, with facebook's early ex-CTO nearing to publicly admitting that NSLs they received were about "get raw DB access" which I assume they still have, and use up to this day.
Enforcement organizations treating their own like they treat normal people is the rare exception to the rule.
There are many lines drawn. The thin blue one just happens to have the most brand recognition among the people on the wrong side of all the lines.
http://www.telerama.fr/monde/amesys-egyptian-trials-and-trib...
0: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
Which particular example are you thinking of?
I actually agree with it a lot by the way. I don't want to be hypocritical about the whole thing. But it seems that the fact that a lot of Uighurs make credible threats of violence, (indeed, are actively involved in ACTUAL mass violence), is often used as an excuse by the Chinese for everything they do. Similarly in the UK, some people make credible threats of violence, and the surveillance state kicks into high gear on everyone. And I'm not just picking on the UK and China, many nations use this excuse.
Look, I'm a "tough on terrorism" kind of guy too. Uighurs blowing things up, fine, crush them. With prejudice. You can't negotiate with terrorists. Period. I get that.
Why a dragnet on your entire population though? The issue is scope creep. It starts out with the UK wanting to find people making terroristic threats, and in 20 years the family court accessible text messages between you and your lover are being entered as evidence in your divorce hearing.
But the perpetrators of Rotherham went to prison; there have been several rigorous investigations into the child protection and police lack of action in the case; people resigned.
Most importantly: no-one has been arrested for trying to investigate Rotherham.
Please give an actual name of someone who faced police action for investigating rotherham.
He interfered with an ongoing criminal trial (putting that trial at risk of collapse) by threatening witnesses and calling the accused, before they had been convicted "muslim paedophiles". He was filming inside the courtroom and intimidating witnesses. He was asked to stop. He didn't stop, and he told police he was going to go to the homes of witnesses.
He was arrested and sentenced for that contempt of court. He was given a suspended sentence and clear instruction not to do it again.
He did it again.
Notice that Yaxley-Lennon has said nothing at all about his EDL colleague who was convicted of sexual offences against children. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/edl-english-defe...
You seem to think that Yaxley-Lennon would be free to speak in the US, but he's been forbidden to travel to the US by the US -- that's why in 2013 he tried to used a false passport to travel. https://news.sky.com/story/edl-leader-lennon-jailed-for-pass...
Here's a barrister's views: https://thesecretbarrister.com/2018/05/25/what-has-happened-...
Here's the sentencing remarks for the first convction (please read all of it. It's short and clear):
https://www.judiciary.uk/publications/committal-for-contempt...
Here's the warning the judge gave to him:
---begin
Would you stand up, please. I take, as I hope has been made very clear by the comments that I have made, a very dim view indeed of your conduct which was in the face of repeated warnings that you should not do that which you did do. I accept what Mr. Kovalevsky tells me about the dangers that you might face were you to be sent into immediate custody. I have to say it is on a knife edge so far as I am concerned because a very large part of me thinks so what? you could be put into protective custody. But, my concern is to make sure that this trial keeps on track, and my concern is also to make sure that other courts with other trials in similar situations are kept on track without any danger of repetition of the kind of conduct that we have had visited upon us here. The sentence, therefore, that I pass upon you, taking into account all of those matters that have been placed before me and your admissions entered via Mr. Kovalevsky, is one of three months' imprisonment which will be suspended for a period of 18 months. That will be suspended. There will be no conditions that need to be attached to that suspended sentence, but you should be under no illusions that if you commit any further offence of any kind, and that would include, I would have thought a further contempt of court by similar actions, then that sentence of three months would be activated, and that would be on top of anything else that you were given by any other court. In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as "Muslim paedophiles, Muslim rapists" and so on and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much.
Could you elaborate? Most of the people I know in tech are actually on the paranoid side.
The world is built with sadistic bricks. I don't think it is active malice that most people ignore them, I think they just cannot exist properly if they think about each and every one. So most people think about a few, if any. Maybe sometimes they eat a biological egg from a chicken that has twice the floor space of a regular chicken. Or they drink some fair trade coffee that was ostensibly not produced with modern slave labour.
The problem I see it is one of a divided society. The people who create and operate the laws and the surveillance dragnets do not worry about being subject to them in their fullest.
Politicians will argue for gun control, enact laws that erode our freedoms, half-ass healthcare and approve funding for surveillance dragnets that will be used to make an end run around civil liberties. In the back of their minds they know that they have armed security, that no enforcement agency will risk using those laws to abuse politicians, they don't have to worry about healthcare and they can afford a good lawyer to convince the court that their civil liberties have been violated.
The people and organizations that actually implement these bad things don't rock the boat because when you're on the inside whatever bad thing it is doesn't apply to you. Cops are exempt from gun laws. The three letter agencies don't use secret courts to handle issues with their own personnel and don't send information requests and gag orders to each other. People in the healthcare industry know how all the tricks to play and strings to pull to get themselves good enough coverage at a fair price. The agencies operating the stingrays, using ALPRs to catch people with weed on their way out of states where it's legal, kicking down doors and shooting people's dogs don't have to worry about being subject to it themselves because of the thin blue line. And all these people's salary depend on them not rocking the boat over the fact that they enjoy some perk that is not available to the peasantry at large.
If all the bad authoritarian crap society does was done to everyone with at least a token attempt at being impartial we'd do a hell of a lot less of it.
The timing of it on HN smacks of the discussion from last month based on the NYT article that the Chinese government employs people to patrol internet discussion forums and write "America is just as bad!" posts to distract people every time an article comes out that paints China in a negative light.
Of course, most of HN is political propaganda lately, but that's a separate issue.
These claims seem completely unfounded. It always surprises me when well-known outlets like The Economist just make assertions like this, without having any data to back it up. Of course the governments implementing the surveillance regimes will claim that it's effective, but it's the media's job to actually verify the veracity of these claims. Instead they are just parroting this tired old narrative.
> Cops surveil, that's their job
These statements are not equivalent. No one is disputing that cops surveil people. The question is, are they using the same tools that China is? That's what the person you're respnding to thinks the Economist needs to back up.
> Of course the governments implementing the surveillance regimes will claim that it's effective, but it's the media's job to actually verify the veracity of these claims.