Doesn't apply to law enforcement, but it does to government generally. In fact, one of the biggest fines yet in Portugal was paid by a public hospital.
There is also the case of the secret Palantir contract in Greece. The bounds of GDPR need clarifying in respect to non EU governments and also public private partnerships.
Perhaps. But the interaction of the GDPR and freedom of information / public records is quite complicated. For example in Sweden there’s a law that says that access to public records (Tryckfrifrihetsförordningen) takes precedence over the GDPR. On the other hand EU law generally takes precedence over national law and there is no exception in the GDPR itself AFAIK.
Public records can however only be accessed by request, and only by a Swedish citizen, so this situation probably wouldn’t fall under that exception had this happened in Sweden. IANAL but I think this would have been a violation of the GDPR had it happened in Sweden, and a quite serious one at that. Formally I think it could also fall under various espionage laws since there are foreign powers involved (but probably not in practice).
Weird that they would pander to ALL foreign regimes?
I understand if Portugal made itself economically dependent on imports from a China for example, and China asked „if Lisbon happed to know any trouble-makers“?
But sending it out to anyone who asked, China, Israel, Russia, probably Arab states…
joaofs explained what happened. It was Lisbon town hall doing this not the Portuguese government. This of course, does not excuse this new level of bureaucratic stupidity.
Like drunk drivers. They were just stupid and did not mean anything bad. Right? Sorry but if part of the government stuff that creates the rules is that "smart" they should be in janitorial positions. Problem is government nearly always gets away with anything they do.
I would think if I was in this type of position, it would strike me as odd and a very not okay thing to do.
Maybe the immersion in that kind of world creates a kind of indifference or inability to think outside of the context of bureaucratic protocols.
At one time one guy sent it to some embassy on a whim of the moment, then his follower just took over the habit. Bureaucracy doesn't require much thinking.
It wasn't to anyone that asked, the city hall sent it willingly to any embassy "relevant" to the protest in context
I don't think it was a case of pandering to economically important regimes, it was more like disgusting and malicious incompetence, like most things that come out of the public sector in Lisbon with this government
People who are born free and live all their lives in free societies sometimes have certain sensibility atrophied. The concept of authoritarian states to them is as far fetched as non carbon-based life.
I think the problem in Portugal is the opposite; the authoritarian regime was taken down in '74, but entirely too many people still have that mindset, even if they disagree on who should be the authority.
> sending it out to anyone who asked, China, Israel, Russia, probably Arab states… Why?
If attributed to stupidity, someone got lazy about looking up where protests and their relevant embassies were and so started sending out every protest's every detail to every relevant embassy.
If attributed to malice, to hide the fact that they're providing this to Angola and China by providing it to everyone.
The procedure started in 2011 because it was when the Civil Governments (that previously had this responsibility) were extinct by a government led by the current opposition party in order to save costs and create a leaner government.
Journalists have had this information since January and decided doing nothing anything about it.
Also relevant that candidates for local elections are lining up at the moment.
Nevertheless the procedure should have been known by the Mayor and reviewed ages ago.
Certainly there were people other than the mayor involved. Mayors aren't autocrats. And regular worker/bureaucrats had to be doing the day-to-day collection and dissemination of information.
This is the reason why mass data collection by the likes of Google and Facebook is so dangerous; not because of whether we can trust people now to do the right thing with it but because it depends upon trusting future holders of that information.
This whole situation is rather shocking to me. I feel naive. Which, as a deeply cynical and suspicious person, is not a good feeling.
I read two articles on Politico.EU on the subject. Yet, I have a few questions. First, was there a request made to share data? Second, if there was a request made - what is the legal procedure to share data? Third, if there was no request made - why did the Portugal proactively share data?
There was no request (afaik) done by any of the involved parties.
By law, if you’re planning a rally/event/etc you have to make a request to your local mayorship, who then approves it (or not) while informing the police about it, so that security details can be planned.
Since the rallies in question involved displays related to certain countries or were held in front of embassies (like the one supporting Navalny, which brought this case to the limelight), the embassies were also informed about who the organisers were.
As some one on the comments already mentioned, it seems to be a case of Hanlon’s Razor albeit a very unfortunate (and disturbing) one
Sounds entirely reasonable and sane process. You have to allow these foreign embassies to prepare against potential terrorist activities. In some case when known anti-government terrorist forces are identified they have good reason to increase preparedness.
Fine. But Correia's "protest was held on the Largo de Camões, which is nowhere near the Chinese embassy," so that doesn't apply.
> related to certain countries
Sorry, this doesn't follow. If I show up for a Tiananmen massacre vigil in New York, Gracie Mansion doesn't and doesn't need to notify the Chinese embassy.
I did add an OR in the sentence you quote; exactly because of the example you shared and another on in support of the Palestinian cause held in front of a concert hall just before a Brazilian singer concert, that would go on tour to Israel after.
As for your second point, I totally agree with your point. My previous comment isn’t supposed to show any agreement with the episodes, but just a factual showing of what happened, and how this has been general malpractice rather than some shady intelligence underground operation.
All freedom comes with conditions, generally around not abusing them or otherwise interfering with other people's freedom.
Freedom in general or in reference to a particular type never means you can do whatever you want. The entire premise of civil society is that there are conditions on behavior. It is a fundamental principal that one person's freedom ends where another person's begins. Or as I've heard it said, "The freedom of your fist ends at the tip of my nose".
That's a nice sound bite that doesn't actually respond to what I said. It's the sort of thing a politician would say, and as with most such things it avoids difficult topics in favor of easy simplifications.
Because by implication, you're saying there should be no laws, since every law is a condition on freedom in some way. Is that your position on things?
As for dictators and the like: they adopt the words of civil society and spin it into propaganda. All you've pointed out it that bad people do bad things and lie about them, claiming they were good. You haven't addressed the problem of making sure my freedom isn't taken away when someone else acts on what they believe is their freedom.
So, do you think there should be any laws at all? If not, I'm not sure we can have a reasonable conversation here. If so, I'm happy to discuss further, as long as it's not in sound bites and cliches.
I was responding to your blanket statement-- that is what got us here. You're still avoiding the hard question about all laws being conditions on freedom.
As for public gatherings? Sure: they can interfere with my freedom to go about my life. They might prevent me from leaving my home. They might cause dangerous situations. A reasonable level of oversight helps to minimize that sort of thing. Lisbon went well beyond that, I think we would agree.
So: laws or no laws?
Edit: From my interpretation of your tone, I doubt we're actually very far apart on the issue. Permits for this sort of planned thing should be easy to get and extremely hard to turn down. Spontaneous demonstrations should be given very wide latitude to allow them even without prior approval, with local authority only intervening to make sure things stay safe. Demonstrators themselves should be held to a high level of accountability for their actions if things turn bad, but local authorities should be held to an extremely high standard of accountability if they interfere inappropriately.
But there are the difficult questions: keeping things safe, inappropriate interference... these are places where lines have to be drawn. They are gray areas. They take human judgement because one-size-fits-all policies don't actually fit all. This is a fundamental problem for civil society because people differ in their beliefs on where to draw the line. And people are fallible, they can make mistakes in judgement. People are also corruptible, or come with their own biases. It makes things difficult and messy, but that is the hard work that it takes to give people as much freedom as possible without sacrificing one person's freedom for someone else's. Even then there must be compromises: I think it's a very reasonable restriction on my freedom of movement to have to wait in traffic for a while because other people are exercising their freedom to assemble and protest etc.
My observation is that uou can tell the countries that embrace freedom from those that are tyrannies by whether or not they struggle with these questions vs. having one imposed on them without any recourse save revolution.
But it's still a matter of degree. England is much more free than China, but compared to the US its freedom of expression is much more limited by libel laws. While in the US, privacy-related freedom is much more limited compared to the EU with GDPR (even as flawed as that still is).
> But there are the difficult questions: keeping things safe, inappropriate interference... these are places where lines have to be drawn. They are gray areas. They take human judgement because one-size-fits-all policies don't actually fit all. This is a fundamental problem for civil society because people differ in their beliefs on where to draw the line. And people are fallible, they can make mistakes in judgement. People are also corruptible, or come with their own biases. It makes things difficult and messy, but that is the hard work that it takes to give people as much freedom as possible without sacrificing one person's freedom for someone else's. Even then there must be compromises: I think it's a very reasonable restriction on my freedom of movement to have to wait in traffic for a while because other people are exercising their freedom to assemble and protest etc.
We are different because things are very clear to me. Crystal clear. There are nothing "grey lines" there.
Keeping freedom of assembly behind so hoops to jump on a pretext "It's not me who is prohibiting this! Rules do! I'm doing it for your safety!" is very convenient for every bad government around. Otherwise it's entirely pointless.
1. Lots of angry people don't need any freedom of assembly to whack anybody good.
2. Everybody else will not do that anyway.
3. Whacking somebody good, is an act of assault, you either have a riot, civil war, or already a revolution.
You are ignoring my answer about how gatherings or protests can impact my own freedom. Any freedom has that potential. I listed some, but here are more:
What if I want to hold a gathering in the same place at the same time? Which gathering gets the space? Why should my freedom to assemble be limited because of your freedom to assemble? That's an issue that getting a permit resolves: simple scheduling of resources.
Maybe the protest is against a business I work for: What about my freedom to go to work without people shouting at me about how awful I am for working there?
Maybe the protest causes extra traffic at a busy time of day. I have a heart attack and die because the extra traffic meant the ambulance couldn't get there on time. My right to life was taken away because of the gathering, but it's an easy issue to resolve by with a permit process to ensure minimal disruptions.
What if the gathering is in the middle of the street because they're protesting building the road further through natural lands? My freedom of free movement is taken away.
I can go on and on about how something as seemingly simple as freedom of assembly has the potential to impact other people's freedom, because freedom is not as simple as you want it to be.
You insist things are black and white but when I point out a complexity, you ignore it except to repeat yourself in different ways. You have not provided any actual justification. You say that a freedom is not a freedom if there are preconditions but never answer the issue of how all laws are preconditions on freedom.
The questions I raise are not philosophical: you cannot rationally make any claims about freedom if you have not thought through these very basic issues. If you have not examined these questions then your opinions are built on air and emotion, not clear thinking and reason.
I'm done here though. Feel free to respond, but I won't reply only to have you repeat yourself and ignore anything that contradicts your wish for things to be black and white.
> Maybe the protest is against a business I work for: What about my freedom to go to work without people shouting at me about how awful I am for working there?
Then, you bear with it. You are a big boy.
> Maybe the protest causes extra traffic at a busy time of day. I have a heart attack and die because the extra traffic meant the ambulance couldn't get there on time. My right to life was taken away because of the gathering, but it's an easy issue to resolve by with a permit process to ensure minimal disruptions.
> What if I want to hold a gathering in the same place at the same time? Which gathering gets the space? Why should my freedom to assemble be limited because of your freedom to assemble? That's an issue that getting a permit resolves: simple scheduling of resources.
You are nitpicking
> how all laws are preconditions on freedom.
Indeed they are. You will have no parliament, and parliamentarians to complain about in the first place if you lose the state apparatus to an usurper.
You did not defeat that persons argument. I do think that you just repeated your earlier absolutist views and demonstrated nothing further. You did not substantively address the issues raised by merely dismissing them. I’m not the original party here, so I don’t really care that much, but your debate style leaves actual debate to be desired, being th equivalent of “nope because I said so, so there” which doesn’t really address anything, IMO
It's not conditional. The police and city hall can't say no. You're just suppose to inform them of the protest. Have done this a few times in Portugal.
Portugal is not very competitive internationally, so their economy became dependent on government contracts and deals with politically exposed persons. For example, most of Angola's corrupt elite stashed their wealth in Portugal by buying property and businesses. Additionally, corrupt countries are very hard to do business in without kickbacks, but if you're willing to play the game, it becomes very easy, as in your businesses get a lot of government handouts, your interests are protected, etc. There is a law in Angola where foreign businesses can only enter the country if they partner with a local, and usually those "locals" are ministers, generals, the president's family and friends, etc. Local businesses are roadblocked to your benefit.
When you become comfortable operating this way, you'l do anything to maintain your relationship. And I kid you not, A large chunk of Portugals economy is powered by Angola.
Now, if a country has their hands in some of another country's largest companies, and many of them in key sectors such as banks, telecoms and energy, and in many cases becoming the biggest shareholder in such holdings, to the point where a countries own parliament has to hold sessions to protect their own bank's exposure to Angola, well, call it what you want, I'd call that large.
I worked for one of Portugal's great energy companies, both in Portugal and in Angola. I was working for them in Angola, when they were struggling financially because they could not compete with other European and and Chinese companies, both in Europe, South America and Africa, and I was there when the Angolan president's daughter bought the company and I was there when the company employees were relieved that deals would now become easier because the new majority shareholder also had the power to make the Angolan utility company sign new deals. In fact, the president's daughter forced the national utility to also become a shareholder. Even more, the forced the utility to also pay for her part of the shares. And the proud Portuguese company clapped through it all.
This is sadly true, completely due to inability of bureaucrats of using their brains and mostly done by the administrative services of Lisbon town hall.
It is a major political scandal in Portugal, and does look like the town hall president will not survive without resigning.
It is a clear case of "Hanlon's Razor" although a very unfortunate one.
Well, Lisbon is not only one, but pretty much all of progressive liberal West been in bed with enemies at some point for "strategic" reasons (which usually means cash, and other treats.)
France deports Russians with protected refugee status upon KGB requests in exchange for Russia staying away from them in Africa
Poland plays double games with Belorussian opposition, promising assisting in smuggling weapons, and then handing them over to Lukasenka in exchange for jailed Polish citizens
Austria happily trades political refugees for basically everything now
Italy has a record as an only country to secretly, extralegally, abduct, jail, and then hand over completely uninvolved family of a political activist not to some evil empire, but to the complete joke regime of Kazakhstan in exchange for god knows what, but assumedly plain wire transfer of cash to the chief of SISMI, for which he was forced to later resign. https://www.unionedirittiumani.it/litalia-riconosce-lo-statu...
Denmark previously deported Syrian political refugees "by mistake" upon direct requests from Damascus, and now wants to deport them officially
Germany's BND was uncomfortably close with Russia since Primakov's first government, was caught doing basically the same as Portugal, in exchange for some dubious "intelligence collaboration," but it looks like they may have found a scapegoat: https://www.dw.com/en/trial-opens-against-german-intelligenc...
I was taking your claims somewhat seriously until you massively misrepresented the very case for which you even provide an article. Now I guess all of what you are saying is either massive misrepresentation or plain false.
The guy was passing info about German agents to the US, not about foreigners/dissidents, and is facing life in prison for it. Embarrassing to betray your country and job for €1600/month. But it would be pretty odd if the German intelligence had a strategy of passing info about its own agents to the US.
I conclude that PT is likely an exception and the rest above probably made up conspiracy theories.
The information on betrayed weapon transfer comes from Telegram channels of Belarus opposition I frequent. I, on record, wrote about it 2 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887403 Now it became clear for what Poland sold them out for.
It seems all of those were chechens? At least the ones you linked to were denied asylum seekers, one of them seemingly being convicted for illegal posession of firearms before getting returned. This is due to the anti immigrant stance of the government, it has nothing to do with aiding dictators. No idea who the others are, there is literally zero info on them. By that standard, everyone europe ever sent back to areas like the middle east falls into the same category. This is very different from spying on or handing over your own citizens to these regimes.
You must have access to very special intel. Because I have never heard of these political refugee that France deported. I would to read some more info about it if it exist. I personally know a russian political refugee. Once the political refugee statute acquired you're basically a French citizen so there is NO WAY you 'll be deported.
Someone said the current generation replaced the religions of Gods with the religion of Government: they put a lot of faith and trust into Governments and then play amazed when they fail.
Governments (and cities are local governments, for the matter) have huge powers in what they can do and what they can do to the citizens. For example in Romania, my country, government entities are practically exempted from GDPR; they also exempt banks and other regulated entities from GDPR rules on collecting data in weird ways, for example there is a national bank rule that the banks need to collect personal data about account holders, no matter the age or amount, that does not apply to the account holder but allows the bank to freeze all your accounts if you don't comply. They really don't need to know your mother's name, but they get it this way and GDPR protection agency never takes action on these situations.
Lisbon city giving such data to embassies is not a mistake or stupidity, it is abuse of power. They have a power that is just transferred at elections to different masters, but they act like they own, in a feudal way, the people. As someone recently said (about taxes): "where are they going to go? We put a minimum everywhere, so there is no escape"
I wonder if this has/had anything to do with the recent investment from China in Portugal? Part of the terms and conditions? If so, it puts a new, dark spin on African investment by China.
What’s amazing is the wrongdoers blame a 70s law, when GDPR is place, and well know. The only legitimate entity to receive such information was PSP(the police responsible) no one else, not even the government.
For me this is the tip of the iceberg, privacy violations in city councils can be used for personal gains and organized crime.
76 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread(Article in Portuguese: https://sicnoticias.pt/pais/2021-06-11-Camara-de-Lisboa-pode...)
Public records can however only be accessed by request, and only by a Swedish citizen, so this situation probably wouldn’t fall under that exception had this happened in Sweden. IANAL but I think this would have been a violation of the GDPR had it happened in Sweden, and a quite serious one at that. Formally I think it could also fall under various espionage laws since there are foreign powers involved (but probably not in practice).
I understand if Portugal made itself economically dependent on imports from a China for example, and China asked „if Lisbon happed to know any trouble-makers“?
But sending it out to anyone who asked, China, Israel, Russia, probably Arab states…
Why?
Like drunk drivers. They were just stupid and did not mean anything bad. Right? Sorry but if part of the government stuff that creates the rules is that "smart" they should be in janitorial positions. Problem is government nearly always gets away with anything they do.
Low quality, but high level bureaucrats.
I don't think it was a case of pandering to economically important regimes, it was more like disgusting and malicious incompetence, like most things that come out of the public sector in Lisbon with this government
If attributed to stupidity, someone got lazy about looking up where protests and their relevant embassies were and so started sending out every protest's every detail to every relevant embassy.
If attributed to malice, to hide the fact that they're providing this to Angola and China by providing it to everyone.
- This was found out by sheer luck. The city hall did not warn that it was sharing personal/private information with any entity.
- At the moment, there is no thinkable reason for this procedure. It seems the foreign embassies did not ask for any kind of information.
- This procedure (apparently) started in 2011 and Lisbon’s mayor at that time is now the current Prime Minister, leader of the ruling party.
Journalists have had this information since January and decided doing nothing anything about it. Also relevant that candidates for local elections are lining up at the moment.
Nevertheless the procedure should have been known by the Mayor and reviewed ages ago.
This is the reason why mass data collection by the likes of Google and Facebook is so dangerous; not because of whether we can trust people now to do the right thing with it but because it depends upon trusting future holders of that information.
This whole situation is rather shocking to me. I feel naive. Which, as a deeply cynical and suspicious person, is not a good feeling.
By law, if you’re planning a rally/event/etc you have to make a request to your local mayorship, who then approves it (or not) while informing the police about it, so that security details can be planned.
Since the rallies in question involved displays related to certain countries or were held in front of embassies (like the one supporting Navalny, which brought this case to the limelight), the embassies were also informed about who the organisers were.
As some one on the comments already mentioned, it seems to be a case of Hanlon’s Razor albeit a very unfortunate (and disturbing) one
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_diplomatic_...
Fine. But Correia's "protest was held on the Largo de Camões, which is nowhere near the Chinese embassy," so that doesn't apply.
> related to certain countries
Sorry, this doesn't follow. If I show up for a Tiananmen massacre vigil in New York, Gracie Mansion doesn't and doesn't need to notify the Chinese embassy.
I did add an OR in the sentence you quote; exactly because of the example you shared and another on in support of the Palestinian cause held in front of a concert hall just before a Brazilian singer concert, that would go on tour to Israel after.
As for your second point, I totally agree with your point. My previous comment isn’t supposed to show any agreement with the episodes, but just a factual showing of what happened, and how this has been general malpractice rather than some shady intelligence underground operation.
Freedom in general or in reference to a particular type never means you can do whatever you want. The entire premise of civil society is that there are conditions on behavior. It is a fundamental principal that one person's freedom ends where another person's begins. Or as I've heard it said, "The freedom of your fist ends at the tip of my nose".
Because by implication, you're saying there should be no laws, since every law is a condition on freedom in some way. Is that your position on things?
As for dictators and the like: they adopt the words of civil society and spin it into propaganda. All you've pointed out it that bad people do bad things and lie about them, claiming they were good. You haven't addressed the problem of making sure my freedom isn't taken away when someone else acts on what they believe is their freedom.
So, do you think there should be any laws at all? If not, I'm not sure we can have a reasonable conversation here. If so, I'm happy to discuss further, as long as it's not in sound bites and cliches.
I think you are doing philosophy here.
As for public gatherings? Sure: they can interfere with my freedom to go about my life. They might prevent me from leaving my home. They might cause dangerous situations. A reasonable level of oversight helps to minimize that sort of thing. Lisbon went well beyond that, I think we would agree.
So: laws or no laws?
Edit: From my interpretation of your tone, I doubt we're actually very far apart on the issue. Permits for this sort of planned thing should be easy to get and extremely hard to turn down. Spontaneous demonstrations should be given very wide latitude to allow them even without prior approval, with local authority only intervening to make sure things stay safe. Demonstrators themselves should be held to a high level of accountability for their actions if things turn bad, but local authorities should be held to an extremely high standard of accountability if they interfere inappropriately.
But there are the difficult questions: keeping things safe, inappropriate interference... these are places where lines have to be drawn. They are gray areas. They take human judgement because one-size-fits-all policies don't actually fit all. This is a fundamental problem for civil society because people differ in their beliefs on where to draw the line. And people are fallible, they can make mistakes in judgement. People are also corruptible, or come with their own biases. It makes things difficult and messy, but that is the hard work that it takes to give people as much freedom as possible without sacrificing one person's freedom for someone else's. Even then there must be compromises: I think it's a very reasonable restriction on my freedom of movement to have to wait in traffic for a while because other people are exercising their freedom to assemble and protest etc.
My observation is that uou can tell the countries that embrace freedom from those that are tyrannies by whether or not they struggle with these questions vs. having one imposed on them without any recourse save revolution.
But it's still a matter of degree. England is much more free than China, but compared to the US its freedom of expression is much more limited by libel laws. While in the US, privacy-related freedom is much more limited compared to the EU with GDPR (even as flawed as that still is).
We are different because things are very clear to me. Crystal clear. There are nothing "grey lines" there.
Keeping freedom of assembly behind so hoops to jump on a pretext "It's not me who is prohibiting this! Rules do! I'm doing it for your safety!" is very convenient for every bad government around. Otherwise it's entirely pointless.
1. Lots of angry people don't need any freedom of assembly to whack anybody good.
2. Everybody else will not do that anyway.
3. Whacking somebody good, is an act of assault, you either have a riot, civil war, or already a revolution.
What if I want to hold a gathering in the same place at the same time? Which gathering gets the space? Why should my freedom to assemble be limited because of your freedom to assemble? That's an issue that getting a permit resolves: simple scheduling of resources.
Maybe the protest is against a business I work for: What about my freedom to go to work without people shouting at me about how awful I am for working there?
Maybe the protest causes extra traffic at a busy time of day. I have a heart attack and die because the extra traffic meant the ambulance couldn't get there on time. My right to life was taken away because of the gathering, but it's an easy issue to resolve by with a permit process to ensure minimal disruptions.
What if the gathering is in the middle of the street because they're protesting building the road further through natural lands? My freedom of free movement is taken away.
I can go on and on about how something as seemingly simple as freedom of assembly has the potential to impact other people's freedom, because freedom is not as simple as you want it to be.
You insist things are black and white but when I point out a complexity, you ignore it except to repeat yourself in different ways. You have not provided any actual justification. You say that a freedom is not a freedom if there are preconditions but never answer the issue of how all laws are preconditions on freedom.
The questions I raise are not philosophical: you cannot rationally make any claims about freedom if you have not thought through these very basic issues. If you have not examined these questions then your opinions are built on air and emotion, not clear thinking and reason.
I'm done here though. Feel free to respond, but I won't reply only to have you repeat yourself and ignore anything that contradicts your wish for things to be black and white.
Then, you bear with it. You are a big boy.
> Maybe the protest causes extra traffic at a busy time of day. I have a heart attack and die because the extra traffic meant the ambulance couldn't get there on time. My right to life was taken away because of the gathering, but it's an easy issue to resolve by with a permit process to ensure minimal disruptions.
> What if I want to hold a gathering in the same place at the same time? Which gathering gets the space? Why should my freedom to assemble be limited because of your freedom to assemble? That's an issue that getting a permit resolves: simple scheduling of resources.
You are nitpicking
> how all laws are preconditions on freedom.
Indeed they are. You will have no parliament, and parliamentarians to complain about in the first place if you lose the state apparatus to an usurper.
I defeated your argument.
When you become comfortable operating this way, you'l do anything to maintain your relationship. And I kid you not, A large chunk of Portugals economy is powered by Angola.
What do you mean by "large"?
perhaps the circles that YOU frequent are powered by them.
- https://www.politico.eu/article/angola-portugal-investment-e...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/16/are-portuguese-banks-too-exp...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_dos_Santos#Investments_...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/europe/angola-portu...
GDP is $257.391 billion, again what "large" part of the Portuguese economy is powered by Angola? Again, what do you mean by "large"?
Now, if a country has their hands in some of another country's largest companies, and many of them in key sectors such as banks, telecoms and energy, and in many cases becoming the biggest shareholder in such holdings, to the point where a countries own parliament has to hold sessions to protect their own bank's exposure to Angola, well, call it what you want, I'd call that large.
I worked for one of Portugal's great energy companies, both in Portugal and in Angola. I was working for them in Angola, when they were struggling financially because they could not compete with other European and and Chinese companies, both in Europe, South America and Africa, and I was there when the Angolan president's daughter bought the company and I was there when the company employees were relieved that deals would now become easier because the new majority shareholder also had the power to make the Angolan utility company sign new deals. In fact, the president's daughter forced the national utility to also become a shareholder. Even more, the forced the utility to also pay for her part of the shares. And the proud Portuguese company clapped through it all.
It is a major political scandal in Portugal, and does look like the town hall president will not survive without resigning.
It is a clear case of "Hanlon's Razor" although a very unfortunate one.
As someone who's lived here all his life: doubtful.
Sadly I have to agree, the prime minister already escaped some scandals and Medina will not be any different
France deports Russians with protected refugee status upon KGB requests in exchange for Russia staying away from them in Africa
Poland plays double games with Belorussian opposition, promising assisting in smuggling weapons, and then handing them over to Lukasenka in exchange for jailed Polish citizens
Austria happily trades political refugees for basically everything now
Italy has a record as an only country to secretly, extralegally, abduct, jail, and then hand over completely uninvolved family of a political activist not to some evil empire, but to the complete joke regime of Kazakhstan in exchange for god knows what, but assumedly plain wire transfer of cash to the chief of SISMI, for which he was forced to later resign. https://www.unionedirittiumani.it/litalia-riconosce-lo-statu...
Denmark previously deported Syrian political refugees "by mistake" upon direct requests from Damascus, and now wants to deport them officially
Germany's BND was uncomfortably close with Russia since Primakov's first government, was caught doing basically the same as Portugal, in exchange for some dubious "intelligence collaboration," but it looks like they may have found a scapegoat: https://www.dw.com/en/trial-opens-against-german-intelligenc...
UK, US... comments redundant.
I was taking your claims somewhat seriously until you massively misrepresented the very case for which you even provide an article. Now I guess all of what you are saying is either massive misrepresentation or plain false.
The guy was passing info about German agents to the US, not about foreigners/dissidents, and is facing life in prison for it. Embarrassing to betray your country and job for €1600/month. But it would be pretty odd if the German intelligence had a strategy of passing info about its own agents to the US.
I conclude that PT is likely an exception and the rest above probably made up conspiracy theories.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/05/20/concern-over-four-eth...
https://www.ft.com/content/cfc93283-32b9-4fa7-a769-44df294e7...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54090389
The information on betrayed weapon transfer comes from Telegram channels of Belarus opposition I frequent. I, on record, wrote about it 2 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887403 Now it became clear for what Poland sold them out for.
Tamaev Hasan - social activist from Gudermes
Malik Tayipov - niece of Gen. Dudayev who was born in Europe, and never been outside of it, on a "terrorism" charge
Daniel Mamaev - social activist who lived in Austria for most of his adult life
Rasambek Isayev - journalist https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/324664/Tschetschene-abgeschoben-v...
Murad Aslamkhanov - dissident, blogger https://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/52168/
Dozens more
Governments (and cities are local governments, for the matter) have huge powers in what they can do and what they can do to the citizens. For example in Romania, my country, government entities are practically exempted from GDPR; they also exempt banks and other regulated entities from GDPR rules on collecting data in weird ways, for example there is a national bank rule that the banks need to collect personal data about account holders, no matter the age or amount, that does not apply to the account holder but allows the bank to freeze all your accounts if you don't comply. They really don't need to know your mother's name, but they get it this way and GDPR protection agency never takes action on these situations.
Lisbon city giving such data to embassies is not a mistake or stupidity, it is abuse of power. They have a power that is just transferred at elections to different masters, but they act like they own, in a feudal way, the people. As someone recently said (about taxes): "where are they going to go? We put a minimum everywhere, so there is no escape"
For me this is the tip of the iceberg, privacy violations in city councils can be used for personal gains and organized crime.