> "[US political system] which is regarded as the best example of democracy, globally"
As far as I can tell, Switzerland has the best political system (with the most direct democracy) and it's really a shame that nobody seems to want to imitate it (which of course can be explained by the fact that it means more power goes to the People, not corporations/secret gvt agencies/etc, which are often allowed to buy politicians via "donations", accepted corruption called "lobbying", etc)
Switzerland has strong redistributive system. From a layman's perspective, it would seem this can be supported by the very high profits in the financial and high-end finished goods markets.
In an economy without such high GDP and average household income, I wonder if it would still be such an effective or model system.
It's a good point, and I wonder what is the ultimate underlying reason because I've heard many share that same opinion. Despite all the things the US political system gets "wrong" and other systems "get right" — somehow the US still calls the shots.
> Germans are especially sensitive about snooping due to their experiences in the Nazi era and in Communist East Germany, when the Stasi secret police built up a massive surveillance network.
I find it curious how this comment seems to appear often in NSA related articles. As if Germans had a degree of sensitivity (with regards to privacy) that's exaggerated. Makes no sense.
It's not that hard to understand if you compare it to the almost religious patriotic fervour that many americans display when it comes to loving their country and its way of life.
Although the US has a well-regulated militia enshrined in its constitution, based on a history of distrusting the government, a distrust of the powers that be has not lasted as far as the current day. Germany has precisely that.
While it's true that any reasonable person has a degree of sensitivity similar to the one you're suggesting should not be exaggerated, I think it's also fair to say that you're more likely to find considerably more people who say "The NSA can read my emails. I've done nothing wrong" in the US than in Germany.
Which is worse: the NSA having total control over all iPhones (citation? I obviously haven't been paying enough attention), or the NSA and all the (other) bad guys in the world having total control ...? Sure, they're both terrible, but I'd take the former over the latter.
> the Snowden leaks have shown that the NSA has total control over all iPhones
You mean: had total control over all the original iPhones that they could get physical access to. (back when jailbreaking was extremely simple and common)
From the slide on your very link: "The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant via close access methods. A remote installation capability will be pursued in a future release."
Basically how it worked was they jailbroke your iPhone and installed spyware on it. Is it quite likely that today, 7 years later, they have a remote 0day to do the same? Absolutely. But there's no proof that "the NSA has total control over all iPhones".
But the trend I see is companies telling us to regularly buy stuff we really don't need (and obviously throw away our "old" solutions). The world has way more pressing issues than yet-another-gadget. And the planet's resources are not unlimited.
I'm sorry that I'm not able to solve world hunger and world peace. Not sure why that means I cannot take it upon myself to hypothetically build a mobile computer-vision-powered app? Please enlighten.
It doesn't mean it. It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed.
Or, if not doomed, it's not getting any better in areas that matter.
(People laugh at words like "doomed", assuming everything will be as it was when they were growing up. For some lucky ones that's true. For others the worse happens, like a financial collapse or a world war, and then they "knew it all along it was going to happen").
> It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed.
True in the sense that if "enough people" believe the Internet's favourite scare-story of imminent-financial-collapse (growing in popularity ever since Y2K) then it will indeed by necessity finally happen ;)
What "scare story"? Financial collapse already happened in 2008.
People paid a trillion in the US alone, out of their pockets, to ameliorate it (plus close to another trillion they lented to Detroit). And tons of middle/working class jobs are not coming back in the foreseeable future.
And that's the US. For some European economies it is even worse -- they got from 30% unemployment to double the suicide rates in 3-4 years time.
That sure was a big crisis but the word collapse for me implies total breakdown == after something collapsed, it no longer exists. The "financial system" still exists seemingly, even if arguably not in its best shape ever since.
You're right that the science and practice of morality hasn't moved that much over the past 50 years while the science of technology has jumped by orders of magnitude, and that this is a problem that needs addressing. That doesn't mean we should stop evolving the state of the art in technology though. This is not an either/or situation. Ethical science relies on the advancement of technology, and vice versa.
One fairly obvious application of that is to have motorbikes that can act like Google self-driving car. If we replace most cars by two-wheels (say, with a roof for confort under the rain) we divide to a third the oil consumption for transport, i.e. a third of world’s oil spending.
That's 20% saving on global non-renewables. “Niche”?
> David Miranda Detention Legal Under Terrorism Law
Nowadays, everything is "terrorism". It's funny, because before Bush, nobody knew that word. Nobody ever talked about such a thing. It was something that was talked about maybe once in every 5 years. Nowadays, you can't read the news 1 single day without something being labeled "terrorism". Yesterday, it was the Ukrainian gov't calling the people in the tents "terrorists".
Yes sure you had IRA, ETA in Spain. Although they were making regular appearance in the media, that was not a daily drivel.
Suddenly 9/11 and everything any government in the world does not sanctify is labelled terrorism, and adequate action as demonstrated by the US is required. Break a window during protest: terrorism, complain loudly about stuff: suspected terrorist.
You cannot deny that since 9/11 lot of freedom have been given up in the name of fighting terrorism ? How is it that Spain/UK with active terrorist movement did not have those laws before ? How is it that we are dead scarred of this "muslim terrorist leaving in a cave in Afganistan/Syria/Irak/ next target", but we were fine living next-door to our homemade ones ?
Long before 9/11, I travelled with bottle of wine from spain to the uk and bottle of whisky to spain from the uk. Both when the IRA and ETA were active.
Nowadays, it is not possible in case some terr'ist muslim (sorry no racism, but that's the current media scapegoat) want to "blow our freedom away".
How is it that Spain/UK with active terrorist movement did not have those laws before ?
They (the UK) did. They had the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in the 1980s. They had interment without trial. They had aggressive police on the streets. They had police shooting at protesters. They had the head of government (Thatcher) saying "We don't negotiate with terrorists". They had secret service spying on people of the wrong ethnicity.
I remember going to Northern Ireland in the 90s and being questioned by military with machine guns at the border. These things did exist.
Omagh is NI; but the important point here was the militarized police force was (for better or for worse, given the number of mainland attacks) confined to NI. Much of the special powers granted only applied to NI. I'm not saying it wasn't a problem on the mainland — by any measure, it was — but one must realize the extra powers granted were limited.
Actually as a resident of the UK, it was a "meh" thing. The word terrorist was still an extreme word used in rare circumstances even back in the height of the bombings.
And no one really actually cared about it that much.
Now it's a label for every crime. "The defendant is a terrorist unit proven otherwise".
I loved to London in 2000. I just realised today that there were at least 5 bombings and one rocket propelled grenade fired at Mi6 headquarters in the two first years I lived here - I only remember two (the car bomb outside BBC offices and the Ealing bomb where they'd phoned in a misleading warning naming a street that doesn't exist).
The rest apparently got so little media attention that I either didn't notice them or have forgotten all about it.
Of course that was well past the peak of the bombings, but it seems like a good illustration of how much of a "meh" thing it actually was.
To be fair, though, 9/11 was on a whole different order of magnitude to what the IRA attempted, and the IRA were never suicide bombers which made them easier to deter.
As pointed out below, there was much less fuss about it, even after the Brighton hotel bombing, and much less restriction of civil liberties in mainland UK. (Civil liberties restrictions and human righs violations in Northern Ireland, on the other hand ...)
Back To The Future is my favorite example of the pre-90s perception of terrorists - gullible, ambitious beyond their means, a comical mix of bloodthirsty and inept, and only really dangerous if you stand still right in front of one with your hands in the air.
I think public perception started to shift well before 9/11, with 1995 being a critical turning point with the one-two punch of Oklahoma City and the capture of the Unabomber.
This hasn't changed. Mandela was once (stupidly) thought a terrorist by the current British prime minister. People's definition of terrorism constantly changes. I'm sure there are many people in the Middle East that consider the US a terrorist. It's a ridiculous classification as it's far too vague.
Edit: does the person who down voted this feel like explaining why? I don't see how it doesn't add to the conversation.
Also, this was at the height of the cold war and the ANC was a communist organisation. Nobody in the west wanted South Africa becoming part of the USSR's sphere of influence. There was a large amoung of realpolitik involved.
"Mandela was leader of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe which he co-founded. "he coordinated a sabotage campaign against military and government targets, and made plans for a possible guerrilla war if sabotage failed to end apartheid". If that's not terrorism (systematic use of violence as a means of coercion for political purposes) what is? The morality of this is another discussion.
> terrorism (systematic use of violence as a means of coercion for political purposes)
All warfare seems to fit under this definition. Commonly explicitly added qualifiers are "against civilians" or "by non-state actors". Another implicit one is "by people the speaker doesn't like".
I understand she was in power at the time. Cameron was linked however to this[1] 'hang Mandela' campaign poster. I'm not positive but I believe he apologised in parliament after Mandela's death.
I'm pretty sure that they both "considered Mandela to be a terrorist", and most of the rest of the Conservative party at the time did too. But at the time nobody cared what David Cameron thought.
Before he was turned into a Nice Older Gentleman Who Wanted Freedom, Nelson Mandela was a real revolutionary. Governments hate to admit it when revolutionaries win.
Upvoted, I strongly agree. Sure there were many acts of terror committed in the past, but I remember we started using the label terrorist in my country after 9/11. We used to call people like IRA bombers, etc. zamachowiec (Polish for assassin, but covers suicide bombings and similar stuff), guerilla warriors, etc. but everyone suddenly became terrorist after the Towers fell.
The IRA were called "terrorist" by the UK Government at the time. They had the "Prevention of Terrorism Acts"[1], and the then head of Government (Thatcher), said they wouldn't negotiate with terrorists.
There were various terrorist operations in the 80ies that were in the news. I would find it probable that the word is more used/abused these days, but the statement above is factually incorrect.
David Miranda was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which was written and voted into law before George W Bush was elected President of the United States.
It's "funny" how our western system hypocritically decries censorship in China, North Korea et al. when we do the exact same thing, just in a little bit more hidden/less detectable way.
Parent comment wasn't comparing UK to NK. Just pointing out that my Prime Minister has spoken in a luke warm sort of way about human rights in China and in a slightly more vigourous way about human rights in NK while knowing all the time that GCHQ were carrying out very detailed observation of oppositional Web sites. My perception was that the parent post was more about the hypocrisy of our political leaders than the UK being a totalitarian country.
I agree that any suggestion that the UK is similar to NK is absurd. However, George Orwell did once point out that a revolution and the subsequent imposition of terror in the UK would actually be very easy to do within our legal system...
He is talking solely about how the governments treat internet users, so your comment makes as little sense as me mentioning that the British empire killed far more innocent people than NK ever did.
Most NK residents don't have any access. The ones that do have very heavily filtered Internet access. North Koreans who watch a prohibited tv show are executed or repeatedly raped while in prison or starved while in prison.
Comparin the treatment of North Korean Internet users to the treatment of UK Internet users is obscene.
It dilutes the actual point: UK government should not monitor the activities of its citizens without judicial oversight and very narrow reasons. That is an abuse of human rights and it is justifiably something to get angry about. But comparing "monitoring what people send to a website that distributes state secrets" with "forcing a woman to drown her new born baby in a bucket because she read the wrong book" is sub-optimal.
As far as I can tell, Switzerland has the best political system (with the most direct democracy) and it's really a shame that nobody seems to want to imitate it (which of course can be explained by the fact that it means more power goes to the People, not corporations/secret gvt agencies/etc, which are often allowed to buy politicians via "donations", accepted corruption called "lobbying", etc)