Strong guarantees of privacy are essential to enable political dissent. Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke.
Without privacy individuals are unable to explore, consider and evaluate diverging ideals, and eventually reach new personal convictions which may in time turn the tide against the status quo. Instead, the fermentation of ideas is cut short, as most people are unable to stand the push-back inflicted on them by society at an early stage in their thought-process, leading to self-censorship and group-think.
Society incurs much more damage from so many angles, ranging from murders to car accidents to diseases, that it does not need to jump in such abject terror at the thought of political violence - still a comparatively rare occurence in most places on this earth - so as to trample on the very foundation of every democracy:
Which is the freedom of the individual in his own thoughts, to form his own personal opinions unimpeded by institutionalised social pressure.
The mass-scale erosion of privacy must be stopped before it is too late to reverse the trend.
This happens even when people do not realize it is happening to them. Self-censorship is not always a conscious process, and an increased ability to enforce the status quo means a decreased ability for people to even recognize that the status quo can be challenged.
Without privacy, marijuana legalization would not be anywhere close to where it is today. Womens suffrage would have taken decades further. The American Revolution would have been stamped out.
The ability to harbor unpopular opinions is essential to progress. And privacy is essential for that.
Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke.
I think in many ways we're already there, but it's society as a whole causing this rather than government(s) specifically.
Heaven forbid you have an opinion on (for example) gay marriage if that opinion is anything BUT full throated support. Look at what happened to Brendan Eich.
We definitely need to resist government oversight, but the problem is much bigger than that IMHO.
That is different from, for example, what happened to the Occupy movement. Brendan Eich was not investigated by the FBI, nor was he wiretapped, nor was a confidential informant sent to tempt him into an illegal act.
If Brendan Eich's views on gays having the freedom to marry were not opposed by a large number of people relevant to his leadership position at Mozilla, and if Mozilla did not have a corporate culture that was overtly welcoming to LGBT individuals, it would not have mattered. In fact it demonstrably did not matter until Brendan Eich came into a leadership position where he could change Mozilla's culture.
A surveillance state, on the other hand, is devoted to preserving itself at the expense of everyone and anyone else. That's not the same thing.
"...but it's society as a whole causing this rather than government(s) specifically"
It sounds like you are claiming that state surveillance is actually a subset of social pressure surrounding what's socially acceptable behavior. You claim the latter to be a bigger and more serious problem. Perhaps you did not mean to claim that, but that is how it sounds.
Socially acceptable behavior is always changing as generations come and go.
For everyone's well-being, governments must always trend away from oppression, not toward.
Whatever you think about equality issues, surely we can agree that these things are not really the same, and government oppression certainly is not a subset of social norm issues.
> It sounds like you are claiming that state surveillance is actually a subset of social pressure surrounding what's socially acceptable behavior. You claim the latter to be a bigger and more serious problem
He didn't say it was a bigger problem, he said the problem is bigger than just the government. In other words, it's all part of the same problem.
Governments are not Other. They are part of a society's self-regulatory machinery. Democratic governments in particular are a reflection of society at large. If a government is behaving badly, the root cause has something to do with the society.
That's how I read GP and I can't disagree.
> Socially acceptable behavior is always changing as generations come and go.
Legally acceptable behavior is also always changing as generations come and go. From a sociological perspective laws are simply the formalization of very strong social norms.
reading between the lines this sounds to me like an attempt to kill the bill the amendments were added to rather than sneak the amendments into an easy bill.
seriously. the home secretary authorising every journey in and out of the UK with one or more schemes..... never going to happen.
While you should be allowed to express whatever viewpoint you have regarding gay marriage, I have yet to see an argument against which is not rooted in bigotry.
Is your argument that people should be allowed to spew bigoted and hateful nonsense without facing any social repercussion whatsoever?
Well no, I'm saying society has become hyper-sensitive to anyone expressing a view that isn't fitting with the current trend.
spew, bigoted, hateful - emotive words that illustrate my point exactly (as does the downvote). Even a discussion about a discussion about gay marriage is enough to incur wrath from some.
My real argument would be that in many cases rational discussions should be possible without social justice warriors trampling all over freedom of speech.
I have yet to see an argument against which is not rooted in bigotry.
I can give you one.
The state should have no involvement in the institution of marriage, and instead the latter should be privatized and handled by non-governmental organizations. The terms of a marriage contract should be outlined solely by the individuals (or the service/organization providing the contract for individuals), which can then be optionally arbitrated by courts and/or registered with a state entity so as to work out issues like visitation rights.
Only then will marriage equality be achieved.
That said, this is more of an "anti-marriage" (at least in its current conception) argument than a specifically anti-gay marriage one, but it naturally intersects with gay and all other forms of marriage.
The anti-gay marriage part comes into play when you say that legal recognition of same-sex marriages serves as a feel-good quick patch solution that will only slow down or even diminish support for more profound solutions to the problem of marriage equality.
"Anti-marriage" is a completely different, basically unrelated position than "anti-gay marriage," just as, say, "anti-gun ownership" is a completely different position than "only white people should be allowed to own guns." You've presented a coherent, non-bigoted argument for the anti-marriage position; it does nothing to legitimize the anti-gay marriage position.
> You've presented a coherent, non-bigoted argument for the anti-marriage position; it does nothing to legitimize the anti-gay marriage position.
That was already covered. The argument is that allowing gay marriage will reduce support for the anti-marriage position. If gay marriage is denied then supporters of gay marriage will prefer to support the anti-marriage position rather than supporting marriage when they can't participate in it, which is preferred if you're anti-marriage.
Ironically the corollary to this argument is that allowing gay marriage preserves the institution of marriage.
That's a fascinating argument that feels a bit too clever. Do many people actually hold this position, or is it more of an interesting train of thought?
When you replace all the social functions of the state with a collection of privatised NGOs, those NGOs just become the state and you are back to square one, only with even less representation.
Replace gay marriage with racial segregation. What should be the social repercussions, if any, when a person advocates racial segregation?
At what point does a good faith disagreement become taboo?
Edited: A closer analogy would be interracial marriage. Laws prohibiting interracial marriage weren't struct down until 1967. Could a respectful person advocate banning interracial marriages ?
> At what point does a good faith disagreement become taboo?
It should be never.
Let's take your example. For sake of argument I'm going to make an argument against interracial marriage.
The US has a great diversity of cultural identities which are largely tied to race. For example, African Americans make up 13.2% of the US population and have a unique history and music, their own vernacular (AAVE), etc. We should seek to preserve these diverse cultural identities, but they are generally lost in families where the parents come from different cultural/racial groups. For example, if the current generation chooses mates without regard to race then in the next generation only 1.74% of offspring will have two African American parents. In the following generation the number drops to 0.03%. The entire third generation would fit into a typical school auditorium and the fourth generation would be extinct. The same would be true of every other unique culture in the country in a single-digit number of generations.
Am I now supposed to be shunned for making that argument? What part of it is even logically invalid? You can disagree with it on the basis of priorities. I disagree with it. But why is a person making that argument a bad person? Why should that line of discourse be verboten? If you think the argument is wrong then say why. If you have to run the people you disagree with out of town because you can't refute their positions, chances are you're the bad guy.
"Replace gay marriage with racial segregation. What should be the social repercussions, if any, when a person advocates racial segregation?"
How about we replace gay marriage with Christian? I have found that in the same circles that want acceptance and open thinking start to sing a different tune when it comes to religion.
There's no one source which any Scotsman claims defines a Scotsman, though, whereas pretty much the core part of the definition of Christianity is following the teachings of Christ (it's in the name!), which the vast majority of bigots-who-call-themselves-Christians certainly don't.
That's still a tough one though. Do we stop at just the words of Jesus, or do we include the teachings of the apostles? And if we include the apostles, what about the Catholic 'continuation' of that? Or what about reinterpretations by self-proclaimed prophets that are part of the many fascinating, sometimes scary, and sometimes sizable 'sects'?
Many (non-religious) gay people don't like gay marriage. I agree with the previous comment that the level of social pressure on the issue has reached ridiculous levels.
You can't have a conversation about it without one of those awful social disclaimers "now I support gay marriage but..." tacked on to your opinion.
I don't like any form of marriage, gay or otherwise, but I like discrimination even less. There should be a heavy social cost associated with wearing certain opinions on one's sleeve... and there is, as Brendan Eich discovered.
In short, this is exactly what social behavior is for: moving civilization forward as a whole. If people like Eich insist on being left behind, they have that right, but they don't have the right to drag the rest of us down with them.
Who said you weren't "allowed to voice" your opinion? Only the government (or terrorists) can stop you.
That's very different from social pressure. You have a right to speak, and to not be physically restrained from doing so, but you don't have a right to be free of any social consequences that follow. You're free to talk your way into a job, or out of one.
You seem to have missed my point. Every desirable opinion that people hold today was once an undesirable opinion in years past.
It's only by radical people going against the grain that we have ended up with the relatively free and liberal society we have today.
Support for "heavy social pressure" is support for the status quo. Personally, I'm hoping for some improvement in the state of things during my lifetime.
Unfortunately, people who share your point of view don't appear to have thought it through very far. For instance, a consequence of what you're saying would be that Mozilla wouldn't have had the right to fire Eich over his unrelated political actions. To some of us, that's almost as objectionable as restrictions on speech.
Here's a hint, if you want to understand my point of view: it's easy to identify the Bad Guy in any conversation. It's whoever resorts to the threat of physical force first. Apart from that, it's all fair game: no one has the right to remain unoffended.
I agree with you, but let me make a counter-argument. My apologies for coming across a bit pedantic perhaps, but I think this is an important problem.
Social pressure can have a big impact, and while it's not the same as physical force (or the threat of it), I think there are cases where it can be harmful enough to blur the line that I once thought would be easily drawn at 'physical force'.
There are areas in 'free societies' where being openly gay, or openly atheist is legal, but is (or was) socially unacceptable. Finding work as a gay or atheist teacher in such areas might be close to impossible, but for various reasons leaving such an area might be equally close to impossible or at least highly undesirable.
As a result, there are gay teachers who, practically speaking, cannot be gay, not even in the 'privacy' of their home, even though legally they are protected from physical violence. There are also atheist couples who are all but forced to go to church on Sundays lest they incur the social exclusion of all those around them.
While I don't know if a state-enforced no-discrimination policy is a good or even acceptable solution, I find it hard to dismiss this thought outright. Perhaps it is.
And so in the case of Eich, for example, the only reason why I feel that Mozilla had the 'right' to fire him is that I find it hard to believe that this keeps him from living a good life outside of Mozilla. But if society were to change and all companies were to fire Eich for his views, then perhaps government intercession to prevent this might be necessary.
Because yes, I do think we need to protect those who have ideas we don't like, to the point where we might have to actively interact with them on a regular basis. In fact, I think it's a good thing. 'Good' beliefs should regularly be challenged.
That said, I'm peppering the post with 'mights' and 'perhapses' because I also see the drawbacks and practical difficulties of this approach. Forcing a Christian school to allow a gay atheist teacher to work there might not solve the social exclusion issue, for example.
But all I'm trying to say is that I find it much more difficult now to take the stance that we should draw the line at physical force. We're too reliant as humans on social contact and fulfillment to ignore the dangers of social exclusion.
Right. You are free to have your opinions. But if you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job, shunned completely from your community, or bullied online.
It's not even about the truth anymore. Even mainstream news organizations spin and lie about what actually happened, with real-world consequences (and no consequences for the news orgs or the reporters). Every news outlet spread lies about the Ferguson incident, before we even had any credible witnesses or facts. When the facts finally came out, they continued to spread the same lies (and many continued to believe them).
In the past couple of years, there have been dozens of reporters that have gotten fired for an obvious mistake that was deemed 'offensive' by the likes of political activist groups and used as fuel to fire them. It's just another form of bullying.
Many people don't even know that Al Sharpton will threaten companies and demand money or work in exchange for not going after them publicly. Pepsi paid him thousands per year in the 90s and XM radio actually gave him his own show for a couple of years to get him to stop talking about the "homeless charlie" incident that happened a few years back. A quick Google search will show you many companies that essentially pay him hush money. It tells me that when he cries racism, it's not about bettering society, but lining his pockets. It seems this is public knowledge now. Why isn't he in jail?
I don't really use Facebook besides some simple private messaging between friends. Why? I can predict the coming storm that many people don't seem to see. Anything online can and will be used to instantly form an opinion about you and your life style. Not having the right "culture fit" might just mean someone in management doesn't agree with your political opinions.
The ex-Mozilla CEO is another good example of the problem with today's society. He donated a small amount of money to a cause he believed in and was bullied and ridiculed online until he quit.
If it had been the reverse (he supported gay-marriage and was bullied until he quit) many of those same people would be crying out about how we need to stop online bullying and probably demand the government step in. If I were the Mozilla CEO, I would have set an example and found the people that worked for the company that spewed the most hate against me and fired them on the spot.
As I've gotten older, I have found that most people are the same: they preach open and honesty..until it's for a cause that they disagree with. Then, they just want to silence and discredit the opposition.
> As I've gotten older, I have found that most people are the same: they preach open and honesty..until it's for a cause that they disagree with. Then, they just want to silence and discredit the opposition.
This is depressingly true. Tolerance of only the ideas that the group agrees with, otherwise it's [insert something dumb here] and it needs to be stopped!
The depressing truth I find in all of this is that often, seemingly irrelevant viewpoints seem to trump actual issues that are actually under the control of the individuals concerned.
Gay marriage is an extremely important issue. No doubt. But the CEO of Mozilla has hardly any influence upon that. He runs a software company. He may employ a few homosexuals, that's about it. His donations are relatively meagre and Firefox doesn't censor content its' viewers access.
Where's the backlash against negative practices perpetrated by a few that impact on huge swathes of the population? Companies conspiring with the USG (see PRISM), anti-consumer practices (Apple, Microsoft etc), companies that kill (tobacco, fast food, etc).
It seems like we're stuck in a place where social issues that affect minorities result in visceral, emotional responses, whereas the bigger stuff is 'just business', like we're just bored of it. That bugs me.
Perhaps it's just the attribution onto an individual.
I've met one. He also didn't want gays in the military. This was because he wanted the entire concepts of marriage and the military not to exist in the first place though.
I do know quite a few folk who were against the civil partnership law in the UK, but that was because they wanted marriage equality, rather than a marriage-lite.
> Many (non-religious) gay people don't like gay marriage.
The person you're responding to never said that all anti-gay marriage arguments are religious. They said that all of them are rooted in bigotry.
Do you believe it's acceptable to disapprove of people who are opposed to interracial marriage? If so, how exactly is being anti-gay marriage more justified and less bigoted?
I only put the (non-religious) in to preempt the response "the only gay people who disapprove of gay marriage are self-conflicted fundamentalists".
I believe the objection that many gay people have is that they perceive gay marriage as attempt to push heterosexual norms of monogamy and family life onto a culture of people who have often rejected them (and suffered heavy criticism for that rejection, plus blame for HIV).
So rather ironically, gay marriage becomes a tool by the heterosexual population to "straighten out" gay people.
Whether or not you are swayed by that argument (personally I am not), it's not true to say that all arguments against gay marriage are rooted in bigotry.
By closing their mind and throwing labels like "bigot" at their opponents, the grandparent poster loses the opportunity learn about the world. That's truly unfortunate.
I was going to say that social repercussions are prone to be abused, but I think it's more accurate to say that social repercussions are abuse.
For every source of bigoted and hateful nonsense that is silenced, there are a hundred victims of thoughtless discrimination and a dozen people using their social power to punish those they hold grudges against.
The various civil rights movements got where they are today through the use of social repercussions. Do you think we'd be legalising same-sex marriage over the globe, for example, if it were still socially acceptable to look down on gay people as lesser beings? Or do you think we'd still be chemically castrating gay men?
The lack of social repercussions for things means the status quo stays, because there's no reason for it not to so long as it doesn't directly affect the majority in a way that they can see.
EDIT: Additionally, frankly, you can't make me interact with people, or support people, who refuse to accept that I exist as a real, healthy person who doesn't need to be "fixed". That goes against all manner of rights, and is severely unhealthy for me.
> The various civil rights movements got where they are today through the use of social repercussions.
I don't think this was the case. Look at, for example, the abolitionist movement. You'll find the social repercussions directed against the movement. It took over twenty years of convincing people of the justice of their cause, despite the forces used against them.
> The lack of social repercussions for things means the status quo stays
Isn't it more likely that social repercussions will be used to enforce the status quo? Only when change has already won can it use social force to complete its victory.
> Isn't it more likely that social repercussions will be used to enforce the status quo? Only when change has already won can it use social force to complete its victory.
Not quite. It works in two steps. At the first, while an idea is growing, there are social repercussions against it. Once it reaches a certain mass, the social repercussions start working against the majority.
Even a relatively small minority can affect the majority through social repercussions, by definition, doubly so if the members of the minority are still relatively hidden - if they can't be attacked directly.
In the UK, there's serious social repercussions against supporting UKIP, and they're still plenty strong.
There's a difference between being socially rebuked for stating an unpopular opinion (which is what happened to Eich), and being followed and threatened by the FBI, wiretapped, put on a no-fly list, or imprisoned.
Problems are connected, but still separate. I agree Social Justice Warriors are a cancer on society, but this kind of government actions is like getting attacked and cut by a knife. Sure, the cancer might make everything go to hell eventually, but the knife wound needs to be patched up now, before we bleed out of our freedom of though.
I would like to be optimistic, but I fear we are caught in the pull of a stable orbit in the political system. Plutocracy and Surveillance go hand in hand, and the more government falls to those who can afford it; the more surveillance there will be as the oligarchs attempt to defend their theft.
I'm not sure. Millions of people cared enough about the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to take to the streets in protest, but the wars couldn't be stopped until the military-industrial complex sated itself. I suspect the same will be true of privacy rights, both online and off.
Governments are very, very good at paying lip service to democratic values while doing what they want behind closed doors.
Agreed. I think many people would naturally recoil from "big brother government oversight" but see no issue using similar means to have people found and locked up for calling someone an unpleasant name on twitter.
Zuck was right. Privacy is dead. There is no such thing anymore. No true democracy without a free vote. In the EU, we have to click 'agree to cookies' on every site whilst every newborn's DNA is stored digitally. They're mocking us. It is irreversible. The genie is out. It's over.
1. This practice is not done anywhere in the EU AFAIK, only in the US.
2. Only the biological DNA sample is kept, not any digital version of it. It would obviously be cost-prohibitive to fully sequence the gnome of every single newborn baby.
But other than that, he's right. DNA samples of every newborn baby in the US is indeed being kept by the government, indefinitely and without parental consent.
Since when was cost a factor? Try storing everyones' phone calls! Each person can fit on a 750M CD. It may be true that they haven't gotten through sequencing them all yet. Genomics England and Illumina (US) are the contractors. PM David Cameron is particularly keen, recently gave them £300 million. He wants everyone tagged 'within a generation'. And yes you can all ignore me and downvote me because it makes no difference. UK, US, Australia all the same. With your DNA on file - you are an open book.
Well I am drunk, so my ex Deputy PM gets the alcohol version of constituency letters
Attn: Lord Prescott
House of Lords
Saturday 24 January 2015
Paul R Brian
18 Regent Way
Kings Hill
Kent
ME19 4EB
Paul@mikadosoftware.com
07540456115
Dear Lord Prescott,
On Monday you have the opportunity to oppose a bill forcing ISPs to hold excessive amounts of private information in the hope some will be useful in the fight against crime and political crime.
This information may indeed be useful, but allowing only police and intelligence services to access it steps down the wrong path.
Please consider opposing this bill until sufficient steps can be put in place to allow full and unfettered access to everyone's data - by everyone.
A kingdom of the blind policed by the sighted is not free. A kingdom where all have eyes is equal, and can strive towards free.
Assume I live in a rather secure hole underground, by myself. There are very few things I can do, short of connecting to the outside world and interacting with something in an illegal manner, that can constitute a crime. Maybe I build something that can harm someone remotely, but that requires intent to do something to interact with the outside world, so I'm discounting that here. I'm talking about doing something in my own hole, by myself, with no intent of leaving or interacting with anyone else.
Should the data that constitutes my actions be available to 'everyone'? I argue it does not. It's not your data. It's my data.
Now if I decide to leave my hole and go out into the world and interact with others, things get more complicated. If there is an opportunity where my information becomes entangled with others, I'm all for sharing it with everyone, with one caveat. I'd like to know who accessed my data, and if they accessed it simultaneously with other people's data, I'd like to know their data as well. I'm down with charging for it as well. Keeps the costs of doing surveillance on everyone high.
BTW, I'm well aware of the dilemma you are attempting to put your Lord into here. I just don't think it's that easy to dispel.
I'm up for charging for personal data, for making entangled data available and many other options - what I don't see is a binary choice between "we need access to everyone's data to catch the bad guys" and "liberty means anonymity"
Neither seem correct in our new world, and one of the many problems with this salvo in the "2nd crypto war" is it assumes the fight is on those grounds.
I think that means I am agreeing with you.
Do you get cable in your hole? It sounds like a nice place to retreat to :-)
If you consider personal data as unknown to everyone and public data known, it sorta ends up looking like randomness and order, with the opportunity for chaos to exist in between.
It does mean they can take the amendments back out.
Parliament previously rejected this after debate, so it's simply improper for it to be added to something else in the Lords. This "riders" trick is highly frowned upon here as an abuse of protocol.
If it's ever to be raised again like the highly controversial zombie legislation it is, it needs to be raised in the next session of the Commons, after the next General Election (e.g. Cameron probably would, along with his "let's ban encryption" muppetry). And the Lib Dems will probably oppose it again, as would the Greens and Pirate Party, should they hold any sway.
Even the Information Commissioner has strongly warned against the consequences of knee-jerk reactions in surveillance/privacy-impacting legislation like this.
And all of the MySociety sites appear to be down! For "maintenance". Coincidence? Conspiracy? How do I talk to my (elected or otherwise) representatives now?
The Labour party has a highly authoritarian wing. Possibly even a majority, it is certainly mainstream there. That is one of the reasons behind growing support for other parties, previously the Lib Dems, now the Greens, among former Labour voters.
No idea about most people, but I don't watch videos and always look for transcript. Had seen others doing the same, but, once again, no idea how common this is. If you have seen any research - would appreciate if you'd link to one.
Videos are slow. I can review a page of text in less than a minute. Watching the video for a same amount of information would take me much more than this, and rewinding back if some reference's unclear is a PITA.
The ECJ ruled the Data Retention Directive unlawful recently. However even if this is an article 8 violation that may take a while to have an effect (see the prisoner votes fiasco)
Probably arguable, but according to Article 4 (2) of the Lisbon Treaty:
[The EU] shall respect [Member States] essential State functions, including ensuring the territorial integrity of the State, maintaining law and order and safeguarding national security. In particular, national security remains the sole responsibility of each Member State.
The UK could insist that this is a national security measure.
It seems, in some countries, people are just waiting for the next terrorist act to bring out new ways to undermine the principles of democracy.
Without privacy and the possibility to express one self without fear, democracy is not possible. We create monstrous systems that become bigger and bigger and destroy democracy from within.
Not my post, but a comment that potentially explains what's happening here and provides an interesting viewpoint:
"I am a former parliamentary assistant with experience working on complex and controversial legislation. I do not think this is a bona fide attempt to pass the amendments.
1. Generally, the government lays amendments it actually wants to pass in the name of the minister leading on the bill. In this instance that's Lord Bates. He's put lots of other amendments on the list[1] but not this one.
2. In bill committees, MPs and peers often table amendments that they are not trying to pass. They do this to secure debating time, argue about the principles, and occasionally extract commitments from the government. They get the chance to make speeches and then withdraw the amendments without them ever going to a vote. I suspect the four peers who tabled this are trying to kick start a cross-bench movement in favour of stronger security laws. They'll use their chance to make speeches and then withdraw their amendment. (EDIT: They have since made clear that this is an earnest attempt to legalise the powers but as noted above, they are raising this without any co-operation with the government. Source[2].)
3. Even if this is a genuine attempt to insert this language, it is a highly irregular way to go about it and I would bet against it surviving a vote. Peers are very aware of the role they play in making legislation and they know they aren't supposed to ram in controversial language like this. It's for the elected members in the Commons, who have the democratic mandate, to make the crucial decisions and for the Lords to focus on technical elements. This would not go down well. In the Lords, the whole House votes at Committee stage. This means hundreds of peers, who are independently minded and relatively difficult to whip, would get to express their view. I would not expect them to let this by.
4. Even if it survived the committee, the Bill needs to go back to the Commons, in a process known as "ping pong". The new clauses would almost certainly be defeated by MPs because the Lib Dems would be whipped against it[3], depriving the government of its majority, and Labour has already said it won't support it either[4]. The numbers just aren't there.
I am not close to this issue and could not tell you what they are trying to do. This is all guess work. But it really does not look like a genuine attempt by the government, and I wouldn't say it stands much of a chance."
(I also replied to this on Reddit -- essentially, I agree that this isn't a government-sponsored amendment, but would argue that it is a sincere attempt to pass the amendments, conducted in the hope that the post-Charlie Hebdo atmosphere was sufficient to wave through the Comms Data Bill. I don't think the government wanted their fingers on it, but if it had received no reaction or support, they wouldn't have fought it hard either.)
The use of "Britons" sounds tone deaf to me, and hence a rather bad choice given that they presumably actually want to stop this (British, but more confused than anything).
I wrote the headline; I'm British. It's always a little awkward to pick a term here, as we don't usually like to refer to ourselves at all much. "Brits" was too informal for this. UK citizens would have sounded a bit too Airstrip One. Britons has a nice newspaperly ring, but I agree with you that it is potentially a little corny, so I believe we only use it for this particular page.
I also have to deal with the trickiness that the text has to simultaneously address UK people wanting to take action, and explain the action to curious people outside of the UK.
For instance, the main action uses different language:
Briton is the correct demonym for a citizen of the United Kingdom[0]. Britons is the preferred way to speak about all residents of the British Isles without having to use a qualifier, e.g. British people, People of Britain.
This is news to me and I have a problem with the term as it does not include citizens of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of The UK(Great Britain and NI), yet not part of Great Britain(England, Scotland and Wales) or Britain(England and Wales). The Irish, amongst others, do not refer to the islands as the British Isles due to the association with Britain.[1]
Yeah, there are a lot of subtleties and disagreements. To cite another example, do you include the Isle of Man? They've long been though of as a seperate people.
In addition, 'Irish' could mean a number of things (Northern or Southern/Eire, or in some parts of the world just of Irish descent).
The tumultuous political, military, and colonial history of the British Isles, Ireland, and the surrounding smaller islands has contributed to some very confusing nomenclature when talking about the places and people belonging to them.
The definition you linked doesn't seem to support your claim. I have no connection to the EFF, but I'm curious what a better word would be for a short call to action.
It is a very common way of identifying someone as British. e.g. headlines such as "8 hostages, including 2 Britons", "X million Britons now live in <popular location>" are common.
What a ridiculous clickbait headline from the EFF. The truth is buried 7 paragraphs down:
The amendments announced on Thursday will be formally included into the bill on Monday, in a committee meeting that was not planned to include a vote. The Lords will then have two more minor opportunities to debate the content of the bill before it is passed onto the elected House of Commons in its entirety for what is expected to be a simple up/down vote. Britain's members of parliament are currently distracted as they prepare for nationwide elections in May, which means it is highly likely that a major anti-terrorism bill like this will collect enough votes to pass.
If it's anything like the US system, the time to stop an amendment is before it becomes part of a Christmas-tree bill, rather than after. So I don't think this is burying the truth at all.
Why's that more alarming? "72 hours to stop the bill" is pretty alarming, but with the bill still in committee, there's still a a little longer for it to go yet. The third reading is scheduled in a fortnight.
Hi, Danny O'Brien from EFF, and the person who wrote the headline and the paragraph.
I'd say the headline is actually in this case more accurate, but I didn't really want to add another six paragraphs of insider politics to the blog post to explain why. Long-form HN comment readers are a different matter, of course, so here goes:
It's true there are three more readings in the Lords, but my understanding (and recollection from when I worked more on HoP issues) is that the majority of these are pretty perfunctory, especially with a bill like this which has a high government priority to get through before the end of the current Parliament. Essentially, once these amendments hitch a ride on the process, it will get steadily more difficult to unmoor them. They will cease to become amendments, and more a small part of a very important bill.
Rejecting amendments like this at any step is an unusual act, especially when they are promoted by peers with apparent strong domain knowledge. It's absolutely impossible if you don't actually have time to debate the details.
So what you have to do is to alert politicians to a procedural violation instead. Few politicians are experts on Internet surveillance, so wil not feel confident to go up against domain experts; all of them are experts, however, on the exact moments they might be being bypassed or steamrollered over. That's because they're politicians and human beings, and being sensitive to possible cheating among your peers (pun not intended) is built into their psychology.
That moment of steamrollering is on Monday. If the amendments go through on the nod on Monday without a fuss, then the moment will be lost where we can argue about a violation of procedure. After that, we will have to argue about the substance of the bill. And there is no parliamentary time allotted for arguments of substance, because the whole point of inserting these 18 pages of amendments so quickly is to bypass that debate.
TLDR; yes, there are other opportunities. No, we're really not confident at all that we could stop the bill at those points. The best and possibly only probable chance to stop the Snooper's Charter is on Monday.
(For those wondering how you even begin to make these calculations: EFF works with the Open Rights Group, Britain's own awesome digital rights group. ORG's advisory bench includes MPs and peers, so they walk us both through the probabilities. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/advisory )
Just to add, fellow HNers in the UK might want to support the Open Rights Group; Jim Killock gave a useful overview of their activities on a recent Linux Outlaws podcast [1] - motivated me to support the Open Rights Group [2].
I don't agree with the narrow definition of clickbait. I think any sensationalism in headline, for sake of gaining clicks and attention, can be considered clickbait. I saw Wikipedia also proclaims the same relation to ad revenue; I just disagree that it's the only interpretation as people have been using the term more broadly for a while now even if it's origins are of the online advertising world.
In this case, I wouldn't categorize the headline as sensationalist though, considering that it's accurate and the next 72 hours are actually important.
Without privacy individuals are unable to explore, consider and evaluate diverging ideals, and eventually reach new personal convictions which may in time turn the tide against the status quo. Instead, the fermentation of ideas is cut short, as most people are unable to stand the push-back inflicted on them by society at an early stage in their thought-process, leading to self-censorship and group-think.
Society incurs much more damage from so many angles, ranging from murders to car accidents to diseases, that it does not need to jump in such abject terror at the thought of political violence - still a comparatively rare occurence in most places on this earth - so as to trample on the very foundation of every democracy:
Which is the freedom of the individual in his own thoughts, to form his own personal opinions unimpeded by institutionalised social pressure.
The mass-scale erosion of privacy must be stopped before it is too late to reverse the trend.