How many of the members here living in the UK follow the news about programmes and laws launched by your government with regard to surveillance? You might not know, but you and maybe the whole of Europe, too, may soon be in for some awful shit. The latest brilliant surveillance idea involves storing ever e-Mail and every other "traffic" that goes through an Internet Service Provider in a so-called "black box". The costs will be covered by the government, which means you pay for getting your own basic rights stripped away and being treated like a potential criminal.
Why doesn't the government also pass a bill that forces all post offices in the country to open up every single letter, make a photo-copy of it and store it in a central archival? If that is not ok, why should internet surveillance be? Let's make no mistake, the terrorists who plan attacks are not using MSN and hotmail to exchange details, they use secure internet communication channels these days to hide their plans (maybe encrypted letters, too). Such laws serve no purpose other than to give the ignorant masses a false sense of security. Unfortunately the majority of the population is not informed properly and some of them would even happily trade their liberties for fake security.
Read for yourself:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/government-black-boxes-will-collect-every-email-992268.htmlhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7819230.stmHere's a nicely presented video about the Big Brother issue.
In recent times a lot of bad laws came to pass in Europe that affect the privacy and the civil liberties of each unsuspected citizen. The politicians have learned that in order to pass these laws they only have to use the usual scare tactics and rhetoric of how we're in imminent danger of terrorism and how the Internet needs to be controlled and censored to protect our children from predators or stop consummation of child pornography. When you're against those policies the implication might be that you don't care or even like those things, thus you are pushed into a child molester's corner. "You can't be for terrorism and for child abuse, now can you?" Of course every sane person is against those crimes, but those problems are not going to be resolved by creating a state that, as a precaution, spys on its citizens and stores detailed information about their private lives. In fact, I predict that these laws will cause resentment among some groups of the population and it could very well lead to the formation of a terrorist groups by Britains in Britain or by Germans in Germany etc.
How silly do these motherfucking politicians think people are? These developments make me even more sick than all of the religions combined. When is this madness going to stop? Why are people worried about terrorism when it kills almost 0 people per year in the Western world, while we are getting butt-fucked by our own governments?
I sadly have to say, the terrorists win.
Topic: Too much surveillance in the UK?