civil liberties
19 Nov 2009
Are You Ready To Lose Your Privacy?
We spend an increasing amount of our lives online where traditional privacy protections fail to cover us. Now governments are getting set to exploit that, writes Mark Newton
Imagine, for a moment, the kind of world you'd be living in if information about every letter you sent and received through the mail was kept in a government database. Your love letters, junk mail, subscription magazines, business correspondence all itemised, categorised and serialised, searchable by any government employee who feels like checking up on you.Not troubling enough? How about if all of your reading material was reported as well, then analysed and logged. Books you'd borrowed from the library or bought from the local bookstore, research you've been carrying out for projects at work, political and religious tracts, all duly recorded in the same database.
If that's beginning to make you feel vaguely uncomfortable, add in a requirement that the database would also track your movements and the names of people you've been speaking to.
We don't live in that world at the moment, thanks largely to rights and privileges first secured in England in 1215 in the Great Charter of Freedoms, more popularly known as the Magna Carta. Although much of the Charter is no longer historically relevant (feudal death duties anyone?), enduring principles which the document pioneered include the notion that there are limits on the power of the state, and the creation of what we now call common law.
The evolution of those two ideas led to the principles expressed in 1628 by Sir Edward Coke in his Institutes of the Lawes of England which states, "A man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium" ("for where shall a man be safe, if it be not in his house?"). In more modern terms, this fragment of 17th century text is the free world's first privacy regulation, codified in the common law which was eventually exported to our land when Captain Cook planted the Union Jack here 150 years later. That is the law which mandated a requirement for search warrants by creating a presumptive prohibition on agents of the government entering your house to seize evidence of your private affairs.
Our modern society has grown up with certain expectations about the limits of law and government ever since including expectations asserting a degree of privacy in our affairs and papers. We live it and breathe it: we know that we can buy a copy of Mein Kampf and read it for scholarly interest without showing up on a government watch-list. We know we can quietly step out for a romantic rendezvous without needing to explain our actions to an Australian Taliban.
Given the pedigree and longevity of those expectations, it isn't surprising that we'd react with unease to a proposal to have records of our private correspondence, reading materials and movements hoovered-up into databases for post hoc governmental inspection. Hundreds of years of shared history tells us that the people who imply that encroachments on privacy are "only bad if you have something to hide" usually can't be trusted, and are virtually always wrong.
But we don't have hundreds of years of shared history on the internet and there's trouble brewing on the new frontier.
A draft bill has been presented in the UK, the birthplace of our common law, which will require British internet service providers (ISPs) to maintain logs of every phone call, every text message, every email and every website visited by English citizens. The law will mean that a record of every ISP customer's online movements and personal contacts will be kept for a year in databases available for inspection by anyone authorised by a senior police officer or a deputy head of department at a local authority.
If the UK passes the law, the country will enter a world in which a letter written with a pen on a piece of paper, sealed in an envelope and transmitted via Her Majesty's Post, will have its privacy protected by the full force of the law, with tampering punishable by imprisonment — but evidence of exactly the same letter sent as a PDF attached to an email message will be available to any mid-level public servant.
The bill has been delayed in response to ISP concerns over its technical and financial feasibility and it's unlikely to be introduced before the next general election but the Home Office has insisted it will "push it through" somehow.
This is all part of a pattern of behaviour which has been unfolding in the UK for the best part of a decade. Personal privacy has been under unrelenting assault by both sides of English politics for so long that it's hard to believe that the entire concept of personal privacy originated in the same place that's now frittering it away.
The UK has spent 10 years and hundreds of millions of pounds installing closed-circuit surveillance cameras on every lamp-post, street corner, bus and apartment complex, yet, subsequently, barely any improvements in public safety or security were achieved. "Control orders", introduced under 2005 anti-terrorism legislation, strip virtually all privacy from their subjects following an un-appealable declaration by the Home Secretary and have thus far been shown to be pointless by dint of the fact that none of the subjects of control orders have been actual terrorists and fully one third of them have revealed the ineffectiveness of the orders by absconding. Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) can arbitrarily deprive recipients of virtually all privacy, up to and including suffering the indignity of having their photographs posted on billboards near their homes, schools and workplaces, all in exchange for almost no impact on crime at all.
It isn't just the UK, either. In 2006, AT&T communications technician Mark Klein filed an affidavit asserting that exchange facilities operated by AT&T contained secret rooms where fibre optic cables were diverted into National Security Agency equipment carrying out warrantless wiretaps. More recently, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice asserted that the rooms were in telecommunications facilities all over the United States and were automatically monitoring the vast majority of the world's phone calls, faxes and internet communications for keywords to trigger more detailed automated surveillance. Tice's revelations included allegations that politicians and journalists were being secretly monitored, reminding those of us with long memories of the secret dossiers maintained by J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
These capricious encroachments on electronic privacy are bad enough today, but what of tomorrow?
As we move more of our lives online from the unwired world of meatspace, we're taking them into territory where our normal societal expectations of privacy may no longer apply. As we advance into the future more and more of our existence is being communicated electronically, therefore more and more of our existence is subject to monitoring, eavesdropping and logging.
Most of us are pretty sure that we can have a private conversation with someone by speaking quietly through the susurrus of a well-populated public place, using the background noise to render us more or less immune to eavesdropping. How many of us know how to similarly secure our online voices from prying ears?
The dwindling scope of privacy we're observing online today is always justified by explanations that sound credible until you take the same words and apply them to our traditional lives to see if the justifications pass the sniff-test. Restrictions on online privacy rarely do.
Privacy has always been a balance. Governments have always had occasional lawful excuses to interfere in citizens' private affairs, but since the time of the Magna Carta they've had to jump through procedural hoops, gain independent assent in the form of a warrant from a judge and limit the scope of their intrusiveness to the bare minimum of their immediate needs. The flipside is that law-abiding citizens have spent several hundred years enjoying life without government incursion into their private lives, business lives, intellectual lives and love lives. This dichotomy is one of the core defining attributes of our identity as members of a free society.
As we stumble onwards into our uncertain future, we should take pains to maintain those attributes in the new worlds opened up by technology. Given all the restrictions on official eavesdropping offline, is it fair and reasonable to give the Government unrestricted access to virtually every aspect of our lives in the event that we choose to encode them as bits and transmit them across a network?
If we have balance offline, we should have the same balance online, or run the risk of turning our future selves into something our current selves will deeply regret.
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What’s interesting is that protection of privacy and freedom from state intrusion used to be a core conservative value. Socialists were accused of being totalitarians and supporters of big government. Now it seems that the conservative side of politics has no problem with censorship, phone tapping, CCTV and anything else which curtails individual freedoms and individual expression.
The UK legislation is clearly absurd, and it falls into the pattern of other authoritarian legislation put forward in the guise of ‘security’, such as the US Patriot Act and Howard’s sedition legislation (which I don’t see has been repealed yet).
Of course such legislation should be resisted by everyone in the name of liberty, privacy and free speech.
However one unfortunate side effect of this increasing control of online information is that it makes people suspicious of genuine improvements that can be made in such areas as eHealth. Here it would be everyone’s advantage if medical records could be made available electronically across the medical space (GPs, Hospitals, specialists, pathologists, allied health &c), so long as permission is given by the patient and adequate safeguards are in place.
I fear that heavy hand government will discredit useful ideas like eHealth with their clumsy authoritarianism.
@calyptorhynchus:
One of the things I tried to get across in the article was that drawing analogies between online expectations and offline expectations is a reasonable way of determining what should happen in the future.
In the offline world, for example, it’s perfectly ok for a doctor to hand your medical records to a specialist as part of a referral; or to another GP when you relocate to another area and get a new family doctor. But it isn’t ok for your GP to post your medical records on the Internet, or to send them to the Government to aid their formulation of workers compensation claim statistics. I’d expect that workable electronic privacy safeguards would still allow the former type of behaviour while continuing to ban the latter.
One way legislators could accomplish that is by amending existing privacy-related laws to make it clear that they cover electronic distribution of data in the same way as any other kind of distribution. For example, rather than passing a completely new law to govern access to electronic mail, instead amend the existing law to say that "mail" is defined in terms which include email messages.
"As we move more of our lives online from the unwired world of meatspace, we’re taking them into territory where our normal societal expectations of privacy may no longer apply. As we advance into the future more and more of our existence is being communicated electronically, therefore more and more of our existence is subject to monitoring, eavesdropping and logging."
Let’s not get overly excited about this. People wiretap for information regardless of whether it is on the Internet or not, and because the Internet happens to be a place where sensitive/incriminating information can be conveniently obtained, it is only a matter or time that people will begin to seek ways to harness such a "resource". The sad thing, though, is that the Internet itself is not designed to have any particular end-point-to-end-point security. In other words, when you send something to someone else over it, anyone along the way of transit can take a look of the content without you or the receiver knowing. This is why encryption is needed when your communications require high confidentiality. It is simply naive to think that people aren’t watching you when you use the Internet, and, remember, crooks are always far more unforgiving that Joe Doe the Probie Constable in this regard.
The bottom-line is that when you sign up for an Internet connection, you have already handed over your privacy to the mercy of your ISP and whatever greaseball nerdlings working for it. Complaining about online "liberty" (which is practically non-existent) is not exactly going to help you or your personal security. Keep whatever you don’t want to share with others away from the Internet, lock your sensitive data with high-strength encryption algorithms, and you will be one free happy chappy (or lassy).
@JMonco:
When you say, "People wiretap for information regardless of whether it is on the Internet or not," you’re oversimplifying.
Off the Internet there are private spaces. One of the example is the "quiet discussion in a public place" picture I drew in the article. Another is correspondence by mail, where most countries have laws providing very strong protection to mail articles in the custody of a common carrier.
There’s a spectrum from meatspace-to-electronics which diminishes our privacy, though. Let me give you an example of that:
- I can have a private conversation with you face-to-face which can’t be monitored at all.
- I can have a private conversation with you on a telephone which can’t be monitored without an interception warrant.
- You can use a telephone to leave a private message for me on a cassette in an answering machine, which may be heard by other people if I choose, but which can’t be seized by unwanted third parties without a warrant, and if a warrant is used it’ll be done with my knowledge.
- You can use a telephone to leave a message for me on a voicemail system, which can be turned over to unwanted third parties without a warrant if they present a section 282 declaration under the Telecommunications Act to your telephone carrier without informing me at all.
At each step, the content of the conversation might be the same. But the degree of privacy protection afforded to it drops as the level of technological sophistication increases.
Is there any inherent reason to think that that should be the case?
Your suggestion that privacy shouldn’t be expected online because the network was never designed with end-to-end security is baseless. The postal system was never designed to have any end-to-end security either, and our societies have made up for that by providing the postal system with strong privacy laws which seem to deliver an acceptable level of security. You need to look at system holistically, and the legal framework surrounding the physical delivery is all part of the package.
Then you might ask why those same laws that provide postal security offline haven’t been enacted to provide electronic security online.
- mark
I hate to sound too libertarian in this regard, but there is really no reason to count on the government or ISP to provide privacy for you. Here’s why:
1) Take a look at the "Patriot Act" in the US. If the law enforcement entities want anything at all, it’s the reduction of red tapes they need to cut through in order to catch their suspects, and pollies are usually more than happy to support them in this regard.
2) It is much easier to infringe on someone privacy on newer technology platforms than on older ones. This is because newer technology platforms often come with higher complexity both in terms of the underlying mechanics and the associated social dynamics. If I wanted to intercept your mail and take a look at the content, I would probably need to arrange something along the line of a gang of Mexican bandits from an old Spaghetti Western movie. On the other hand, if I wanted to have a look at your conversations between you and your friend online, all I needed to do would be to simply divert all the outgoing data from your computer to one that I had set up in my bedroom. This is a classic scenario of a man-in-the-middle attack and the only way to prevent sensitive data from leaking to an unwanted third-party would be to enforce a secure protocol such as Secure Socket Layer version 3 or Transport Layer Security version 1. Online banking websites are usually implemented with these protocol, and provided that a high-strength encryption algorithm is properly incorporated, the communications between your computer and the bank web server is not supposed to be readable even to your ISP. This is the kind of security measures that you must have when you transmit sensitive information over the Internet, as opposed to counting on your neighbour to not steal your mail.
"At each step, the content of the conversation might be the same. But the degree of privacy protection afforded to it drops as the level of technological sophistication increases."
This is an unfortunate outcome, and the only way to protect yourself and your privacy in the 21st Century is to acknowledge the reality presented and to take positive steps to avoid personal and financial losses. Relying on your ISP or politicians to give you confidentiality is pretty as much the same as handing your house keys to a total stranger - it just doesn’t make sense.
@JMonco:
I feel like we’re talking at cross purposes.
Yes, there’s no argument that we can use cryptographic means to establish privacy online (assuming laws don’t force key disclosure — another little encroachment which keeps being pushed harder moment by moment).
But it seems odd to me that electronic communication is the one place in our society where we feel like we actually need to.
I don’t feel a strong need to encrypt my credit card number when I use it in a shop. I don’t ask people to send me encrypted mail through Australia Post. I haven’t bought scrambling devices for my telephone calls. It simply isn’t necessary to do any of those things, because breaking through the privacy barriers which protect those communications is so far outside our community norms that even criminals almost never do it.
You don’t need your mexican banditos to steal my mail; you can just pull it out of my letterbox at home while I’m at work. There’s virtually no physical security whatsoever, yet attacks like that almost never happen.
Society’s expectations are important. If you go before a judge and argue that something oughtn’t have happened, one of the factors she’ll weigh up in deciding the case is the reasonable expectations of a normal person. Part of the thesis of my article is that we’re moving forward into a world where normal people don’t have any reasonable expectation of privacy online — which will rapidly become self-fulfilling as cases come before courts, unless there’s pushback by we mere mortals to assert some kind of electronic privacy right.
In other words: We should be setting some standards, and getting upset when the Government breaches them.
- mark
"Yes, there’s no argument that we can use cryptographic means to establish privacy online (assuming laws don’t force key disclosure — another little encroachment which keeps being pushed harder moment by moment)."
Rest assured this is one of the few things that has almost no hope of being fulfilled in this particular economy. People nowadays rely more and more heavily on the Internet to conduct their business, and if the government insists on regulating encryption technologies (which the US did back in the 90’s) , the result will be an (likely) increase in electronic crimes and an overall unpleasant gap between this country and the rest of the Western world (and this is why eventually the Clinton Administration relaxed the export regulations for encryption technologies). The Rudd government has already got its hands burnt pretty badly with the ISP-side filter debacle, and it’s unlikely that it will try anything stupid again before the next election.
"But it seems odd to me that electronic communication is the one place in our society where we feel like we actually need to."
This has a lot to do with the social dynamics associated with new technologies. A new technology usually entails a set of technical knowledge that is largely alien to the general public, and usually when people is faced with an unfamiliar territory, they get intimidated. Take a look at the usual comments left by the readers at news.com.au and you will notice a huge social gap crafted between the Gen-Y and the rest of the age groups (and the administrators over there work around the clock to make sure things appear that way). The fear that the older generations can no longer protect their younger counterparts from potential harms is one of the main reasons that people want to see something (stupid) being done by the government, and the presence of fear-mongering media and characters such as Steve Fielding just isn’t helping with the situation at all.
"You don’t need your mexican banditos to steal my mail; you can just pull it out of my letterbox at home while I’m at work. There’s virtually no physical security whatsoever, yet attacks like that almost never happen."
The Mexican bandit thing is a better analogue for man-in-the-middle attacks and that’s why I used it instead of, say, pulling mail out of your letterbox (which could be likely were you in the wrong side of town). People don’t feel like mugging posties because that’s something hard to be done in broad daylight, and the potential pay-off is small. Stealing personal information online, on the other hand, is something that you can do at home without much required effort or risks, and the return can be enormous. The overall gain for illegally obtaining sensitive information online is what keeps Internet-related frauds and thefts on the increase.
"Society’s expectations are important. If you go before a judge and argue that something oughtn’t have happened, one of the factors she’ll weigh up in deciding the case is the reasonable expectations of a normal person."
Yes, this is true, and the sad thing, as I have mentioned, is that people are not necessarily familiar with new or emergent technologies. This often results in an unhealthy tendency for the government to shoot everyone (and often itself) in the foot. We live in the 21st Century but that doesn’t mean people are any smarter than they used to in the past, and with the increasing complex in the environment that we are in, we are pretty much expected to see more and more weird legislations to take place in democratic societies.
"In other words: We should be setting some standards, and getting upset when the Government breaches them."
Yes, but the majority of the public is not necessarily tech-savvy, and thus I have serious doubts as to whether such things will be executed effectively even if they exist.
Let me discuss a bit.
If the law can provide immunity, then it can be fine with data collection.
But such data collecting activity must have the right reasons based on strong evidences that forcing the authorities to react.
Immunity is nobody must be charged from what they do online - except three things (that I can think of): violence related issues (that are defined in detail), child abuse (pornography mainly), and crimes.
Apart from these three, using these data should be considered as a crime.
There must be laws against blackmailing anybody using these online data.
If somebody (including authorities and governments) is found misusing these data, some of these laws must open the ways for lawful punishment against the misuses and compensation to victims as they deserve without complication.
These complications must be addressed clearly.
If rumours are spread - based on online data, then whoever publishes these rumours must compensate the victims.
If somebody uses these rumours in public, must face the law.
The data that contains no evidence of these three things must be destroyed immediately or within a week. The evidences of crime activities may be collected.
There must be law against unlawful collection from free individuals.
We need protection. We also need to be protected by law.
BTW
(quote) The UK has spent 10 years and hundreds of millions of pounds installing closed-circuit surveillance cameras on every lamp-post, street corner, bus and apartment complex, and subsequently achieved barely any improvements in public safety or security. (end quote)
The authorities do not seem preventing crimes. So they do not reduce the rate of crimes. Are the cameras supposed to help preventing crimes somehow?
If there is a technology for email to use envelop and stamp, it might help. Envelope should protect the mail from being opened by someone other than the one addressed and the address could be used as the key to open the envelop. The stamp should help somehow like hiding the email addresses.
"Immunity is nobody must be charged from what they do online - except three things (that I can think of): violence related issues (that are defined in detail), child abuse (pornography mainly), and crimes."
You see, what gives me the chill here is the word "crimes". As I have mentioned, red tapes are the last things law enforcement entities want to see when they try to catch their suspects. Even though civil rights advocates had always had well-recognised significance (historically) in the US, all it took, as it turned out, was a fair amount of post-9/11 hysteria for legislations such as Title II of the Patriot Act to pass the Congress. And don’t forget Australia has always been a frump when it comes to civil rights.
"If somebody uses these rumours in public, must face the law."
Ever seen one of those annoying Evony ads poping up on your screen when you least expect it? Australia has arguably one of the most old-fashioned set of defamation laws in the Western World, and apparently the PRC-based operation is now taking advantage of this fact and suing a blogger for libel. If you think we don’t have anything regarding defamation on the Internet (despite not specifically), you are wrong, and it is one big, ugly beast that you last want to deal with.
"We need protection. We also need to be protected by law."
No, what we need is a serious look into the possibility of a referendum. Civil liberty is matter of principles, and when you enforce a set of principles, you need to make sure that it is stated clearly in the Constitution. We all know that the yanks have what they call the "Bill of Rights" (*plays "Stars and Stripes"*), which is comprised of the first ten amendments of their Constitution. In particular, the fourth amendment explicitly states that "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" without at least a properly issued warrant. Even this did not prevent legislations a la the Patriot Act from enacting under a Republican Administration and surviving under a Democratic one. Hence, if you want something in the law that gives you the protection of your personal information outside your home from being searched, then you will need to put in place some clear definitions within the Constitution as to what is considered "personal information" and under what circumstances may it be viewed by an (un)authorised party. There is no way around that, and if you think a referendum of such nature is easy to get off the ground in this country, then, by all means, good luck with that.
JMonco
Part-time libertarian / town crier
Apparently the Muslim terrorist who committed the Fort Hood massacre sent many suspect emails to terrorist leaders which were intercepted and should have rung alarm bells with all US government intelligence and security departments.
But no, instead they raised his hackles further by denying him his resignation, forcing him to face the prospect of possibly having to kill innocent Muslims, in denial as to the possible threat he could pose, as revealed through his state of mind reflected by his online communications.
Our government is probably that stupid too you know!
We arrested a totally innocent Muslim (Haneef) on circumstantial evidence, so chances are Australian intelligence and security wouldn’t recognise a real threat until it was too late anyway.
@min:
You’ve kinda exposed the problem by proposing that "immunity is that nobody must be charged for what they do online," as if the online world is somehow different from the offline world.
One look at how a (say) 16 year old uses electronic communications shows the futility of making separate rule for online/offline conduct. Over the course of a day they’ll talk to their friends face-to-face, via SMS, via email, facebook/myspace updates, and telephone. Each contact will effectively count as a continuation of the same conversation, and the media used to carry the conversation is almost irrelevant. So why should their conversation be governed by different rules at different times of the day just because it’s carried by different technologies?
To my mind, it’s better to have one overriding set of expectations, one set of rules, and apply them consistently across all technologies.
It isn’t difficult to do that, we just haven’t done it yet because the Parliamentarians who define the rules don’t understand technology, and think the Internet is some kind of alien planet rather than an extension of our expressive and participatory selves.
We’ll do it eventually, it’s just a question of how foolish we’ll need to feel about the unsuitability of our mutually-contradicting communications regulatory systems before we step back and look at whether the complexity and argument created by the existence of the rules is worth any perceived benefit the rules are creating.
To state that western countries are democratic is now a fallacy & the rule of Communism is taking a hold on our scared rabbit society. Politicians aren’t resolving terrorism, they are creating it. The more one pries into an others life & refuses to allow judicial resolution to problems but enforces the invasion of privacy & instigate the control of population with a totally underhanded means. Just think of an instance where you might have a legal battle, that needs to be defended from allegations made against you but the information that the government has on you, just condemns you before a trial can be had.
The first ingredient for terrorism is religion & the second is their weapon. Whether that weapon be a gun or psychological warfare it is still a weapon & a person will retaliate when constantly cornered.
@Atheistno1
Oh please, I don’t wish to slag other posters, but you’re embarrassing atheists. Religion is not the first ingredient of terrorism and has never been.
Libertarian and Christian, TheGreatestLocustOnEarth
Libertarian and Christian, TheGreatestLocustOnEarth
I am to the major part going to have to agree with Athiestno1 as there has been more deaths because of religion than all plagues put together
Further who and what do you consider all this fighting and wars are by and over
Thanks
From Dave
This is simply not true, unless your definition of religion encompasses all ideology. Wars and Terrorism are primarily political, and have been for most of our existence. Religion is just the convenient "elusive scapegoat" for real-world geopolitical issues. Especially over last century, most war and terror was conducted by relatively irreligious ideologies.
I concede religious viewpoints are a minor influence, as religion is often pivotal to one’s political allegiance. But one must then include all religious viewpoints here, (Yes, including beloved Atheism, which is as equally guilty of horrendous atrocities as any other religion). Mistaking religion as a principal cause in war and terrorism denies the complexity of these struggles and the good that religion has actually administered.
Most people will acknowledge that war and terrorism are an unfortunate condition of struggling, conflicted man, not of imperialistic religions.
It is certainly not my Christianity that engages with these conflicts.
TheGreatestLocusOnEarth (TGLOE), Atheism is not religion. In fact, religion is a figment of your imagination & that imagination that is used to push myths & superficial beliefs by the religious mentally ill (RMI), is psychological warfare & the main base for discrimination. It would be advisable for you to re-read the history books & the Roman Catholic Religions war on humanity.
TheGreatestLocustOnEarth
"This is simply not true, unless your definition of religion encompasses all ideology. Wars and Terrorism are primarily political, and have been for most of our existence."
How long did the crusades last? The great inquisitions? The witch hunts? The Stewarts of England? the Tudors of England? Israel and Palestine? The Jews with the Nazis
These are but a few in the long long list over the centuries
I suppose they that died in those few that I have mentioned didn’t die because of religion.
I suppose these people died of a peaceful death not from terror of religions
The Great Spanish Inqisitions "Riegned Terror" in the name of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church right across Europe
As I stated, more deaths have occurred in the name of religion through out recorded history than all plagues put together
Religions and the Legal Professions are the manipulative forces driving the governments and the Powers that be
Thanks for your time
From Dave
"Religions and the Legal Professions are the manipulative forces driving the governments and the Powers that be"
That I’ll have to ask respected historians and anthropologists about for confirmation. Besides, what does it have anything to do with the Internet? Being off-topic much?
JMonco, in case you haven’t worked it out yet, it is the religious governments that have played the gullible public into a scared fearing frenzy & instigated a total undermining of human rights, in order to remove everyone of their privacy.
Still off the topic in your mind?
"Religious governments"? I mean, are you sure about that? How about PRC? Burma? Vietnam? Zimbabwe? Hey, I didn’t realise Robert Mugabe was actually that religious until you came along and enlightened me with the "truth"! Sheeze…
JMonco, you might want to come back to reality, the discussion is about our governments & you have gone way off topic. If you persist to imply there is a GOD, I’m sure the Taliban & Kevin Rudd’s Catholic Church will agree with you but I know it’s just a figment of one’s imagination.
"the discussion is about our governments & you have gone way off topic."
Interesting… Does your day job involve moving goal posts around in football fields? Because this is the impression I am getting.
Mind if I jog your memory a bit with this profound utterance of yours?
"In fact, religion is a figment of your imagination & that imagination that is used to push myths & superficial beliefs by the religious mentally ill (RMI), is psychological warfare & the main base for discrimination. It would be advisable for you to re-read the history books & the Roman Catholic Religions war on humanity."
There! Some guy telling others people to read up on human history about religion but somehow ignoring the parts about political motivations that are clearly not faith-related. Don’t pretend people aren’t sick and tired of your ridiculous nonsense about some arcane religious conspiracies. You are given a voice where you are, because, clearly, up until this very moment, Canberra still isn’t the new Vatican (or Taliban, depending on when and where you want to change the subject) and the black helicopters aren’t really coming here to snipe your sorry butt. Please, just take your med and leave us normal people alone already.
JMonco, it’s such a shame to see the religious side of nastiness coming out in you. I can only assume that your imagination is working overtime because after all, your only human like the rest of us, even if you think your above us all because you have an imaginary man called GOD & that’s exactly where the idea that it’s alright to remove another’s privacy for the sake of your pretentious beliefs.
"because you have an imaginary man called GOD"
Yep, just keep labelling people religious whenever they don’t agree with you for whatever reasons, because that will really help your cause.
What a fruitcake…
@Atheistno1
Atheism is a religious viewpoint. I would be tempted to even suggest that Atheism (when its philosophy is seriously considered i.e. not by atheists who have chosen their faith out of comfort, but by those whose faith was explored with reason), as a purely metaphysical explanation, (and thus wholly dependent on faith, much like "unscientific" Christianity), and with its very (western) "religious" fruits: objectivity, morality, lifestyle and rituals is, in fact, a religion. But this is not exactly pertinent to our discussion.
Why atheism is less dependent on faith, less imperialistic and more objective and scientific then theism is truly beyond me (and most of the greatest philosophers to have graced this earth). Or why the horrendous atrocities of State-atheism should be any better than those horrendous atrocities committed by those who make claim to serve a god. Please read that paragraph again.
@david grayson (and to Atheistno1)
Firstly, Catholicism is not my religion, and therefore I share no responsibility with it. But more importantly, Catholicism is not, nor has ever been, wholly independent of the state and therefore to claim that Catholicism’s war on "Heretics" and Muslims (not to mention a variety of other religions, sects and political rivals) are solely religious and independent of geopolitical power struggles, typical of the state, is absurd. What’s more, Christianity is entirely incompatible with (non-spiritual) violent conflict and thus, government struggles.
Israel and Palestine is as much secular geopolitical struggle as it is religious struggle. If not, more so. The Jews and Nazis? If you are including all ideology within a religious category, then fine, I’ll happily include atheism. But if every ideology is religion, and if everyone has an ideology, than it seems reasonable that war/conflict/imperialism etc. and ideology are innate needs and conditions of man. Not the needs and conditions of religions themselves. This complies beautifully with the condition of man as expounded in the Christian Scriptures.
I am possibly mistaken here, but it would seem that your real challenge is to the illegitimacy (and thus, use) of power, not religion. In which case, if I can say so without making offense, may I recommend Guerin’s book, "Anarchism" as a good, accessible and short overview.
I am a strongly convicted Christian and Anarchist, having found both perfectly compatible and equal with the "truest" interpretation of both beliefs.
I wish you well.
I forgot to add:
@JMonco
Sorry, about this off-topic. I just couldn’t resist discussing religion and conflict. It’s a topic many people are confused about and it’s often an impediment to a personal, religious faith. I wouldn’t worry too much about Atheistno1, I am quite sure he’s a troll.
Sorry, about this off-topic. I just couldn’t resist discussing religion and conflict.
I am sorry that you have made your choice and decided to keep dragging the discussion miles and miles off-topic. That clearly isn’t your fault, is it?
Now back to the subject… :)
Apparently the Muslim terrorist who committed the Fort Hood massacre sent many suspect emails to terrorist leaders which were intercepted and should have rung alarm bells with all US government intelligence and security departments.
This is kind of interesting because, apparently, the US had enough trouble keeping the adequate number of troops both in homeland and abroad, and there was little doubt that the authorities would want to downplay the questionable messages between Maj. Hasan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki just for the sake of the soldiers’ morale. Yes, al-Awlaki is pretty much the US equivalent of Sheik Haron, and Hasan was known to worship at his mosque on a regular basis. Having the information was one thing, but finding the right way to react was another, and only God knew that the man would eventually snap and shoot everyone at the base. Yes, it was a pretty stupid mistake in retrospect, but I doubt that anyone before the incident had the foresight to see the whole thing coming.
Likewise, the whole "Internet liberty" debate is pretty much based on the assumption that we have the enough foresight to know if this or that legislation will give us better security or just drop a stone on our feet. The reality, however, is that most people don’t even have the slightest idea about how their ISPs operate, how encryption technologies work or how data are transferred over the Internet. When it comes to regulating the Internet, law-makers can only make the best guess and hope that everything will work out at the end (see also: former US senator Ted Stevens). Thus, when you asks for a set of standards that can protect your privacy online, chances are you will end up with a set that does a half-baked job or, worse, the opposite.
Government intrusion into the private lives of citizens has always been a given reality, but what ebbs and wanes is public understanding of that fact.
As the general public understands the dangers associated with government control so are governments held in check and privacy is assured, but as that same public becomes complacent and ignorant or afraid so too do they lose their right to privacy, together with many other rights.
Even without control of the internet governments are known to commit public skulduggery with lies and misinformation.
An international example everyone has noticed is how the Israel hasbara called "Megaphone" mysteriously appeared at the same time Livni made her debut. The sudden number of people calling for attacks on Iran and the "protection" of Israel by bloggers with bad English is obvious to everyone.
The issue is, ultimately, judicial oversight. Without it a society cannot refer to itself as either "free" or "democratic", and yet Australia joins Europe and other "Western" states with their draconian "anti-terror" laws
European anti-terror laws enable security agencies to monitor phone calls and e-mails without any judicial oversight. In Britain the monitoring includes access to detailed internet records that are available for inspection by no less than 653 government agencies, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with security or intelligence, and all without any judicial review and yet, like us, those dim witted English still mistakenly believe they are free.
Jmonco, it’s not because someone doesn’t agree with me, it’s because you are the one with the imaginary man in your head & only ‘think’ you know better & I won’t resort to calling you names to prove your mental status, you already have. The same goes for your friend (TGLoE) that insists Atheism is a religious view point because those are exactly the argumentative mentalities that stand over others & inflict their opinion for the sake of their own sickness. To remove someones privacy because people with scared paranoia, worry that they will be exposed for what they really are; Antagonistic religious mentalities in absolute denial looking for someone to blame for their own misfortunes & inequities, pumping out propagandist rhetoric & common myths to take every advantage of their own lies. You can come back with another excuse but because I am an Atheist, I usually just ignore religious dribble, so please, stick a bit closer to the subject & leave the personal attacks for your therapist appointment.
European anti-terror laws enable security agencies to monitor phone calls and e-mails without any judicial oversight. In Britain the monitoring includes access to detailed internet records that are available for inspection by no less than 653 government agencies, most of which have nothing whatsoever to do with security or intelligence, and all without any judicial review and yet, like us, those dim witted English still mistakenly believe they are free
What bemuses me here is the ability of these non-security/intelligence agencies’ ability to obtain such records. Do they need Google search results from random individual for approving rural land developments or something? Or someone’s porn stash for planning public transports? Even if you take privacy out of the picture this is still nothing short of absurd.
Maybe we should just stick with Jon Stewart’s explanation of the Internet for now.
Considering any government’s first impulse is to stay in power, it’s no surprise really that governments everywhere would be seizing the opportunity to invade citizens’ privacy if it means it can help them stay in power.
The balance will shift and when the people can stand no more, they’ll rise up. We’ve just been living in a lucky time where basic rights have been respected thanks to such past uprisings. It looks like that time is drawing to an end.
http://zielwolf.blogspot.com
Zielwolf, I’ll second that motion.