People the world over have determined they're fine with this kind of surveillance as long as it's the "other side's" protesters that are being surveilled. We saw it here in Canada during the Trucker's protest. The ship has sailed.
Same for most of the protests out there. You should not support surveillance even if you're against cause of protest. The government will come for you sooner or later.
I am not sure. US just had a bigger protest over 'cop city' and you can find all sorts of interpretations of the event from 'they righteous' to 'they terrorists'. Trucker's protest was similarly divided in US ( I don't know how it was portrayed/received in Canada.
I think what I am saying is wrong with regards to:
'People the world over have determined they're fine '
If anything, I am actually seeing regular people paying attention to sanctions, BSA, BIS and similar. Naturally, it is possible that is because it started to affect more regular people, but yeah.. I am not certain you are right.
That's exactly what he's saying. It wasn't divided between people who believe in the rights of protestors and people who didn't; it was divided between pro and anti-vaxxers, which is largely to say between the political Left and Right. I don't know if there ever was a political core that cared more about their principles of governance (good or bad) than their "side" but it's gone now. The people who dismissed the threat of BLM protests/riots being COVID super-spreader events in 2020 wanted truckers lynched for clogging up a city and honking their horns. On the other side, the same people cheering on an entire city in gridlock and effectively tortured by constant horn noise wanted police to gun down entire crowds for looting a Walmart. Both of them cloaked their defenses with cries of "free speech!" and both called for repression in the name of order and safety. Those of us who apply the same principles to people we love and hate, speech we cheer and find nauseating, are an endangered species.
Thank you. That makes more sense. I think I did not parse parent's post right. I personally want to believe I apply the principles evenly, but uncharitable interpretation can do a lot to point out even slightest inconsistency derived from competing priorities ( and everyone has different ranking of those ).
Do you feel like it is applying the same principles to people you both love and hate to characterize BLM protests as riots and truckers protests as "honking their horns"?
Perhaps it was the coverage I saw but I didn't see any looting, property destruction, or any fights with law enforcement with the truckers protest. That's not to say it didn't happen. Could be the difference between the US and Canada media.
The truckers also had bouncy houses, food tents and trucks, DJs and dancing in the street. Seems like a good time compared to CHOP and other autonomous zones where people were murdered.
It's trivial to find examples of food tents, clashing with police, and DJs in both groups, so it's probably a difference in the media you are watching, and these aren't very good examples.
I think it may make more sense to try to make a judgement as to the reason for the protests. My best understanding of the truckers protest they were protesting Canada requiring truckers who crossed the US-Canada border to be vaccinated, while the BLM protesters were protesting US police negligence, uses of force, and perceived lack of oversight.
Maybe the split is more about those who judge the reasons for protesting vs the methods of protesting rather than left vs right. In any case I don't think counting bouncy houses is productive.
BLM protests were many separate events, containing both peaceful protests and riots. The trucker protests were largely a single event, which, while economically destructive, did not involve burning buildings or overturned police cars.
Also it seems like you didn't make it to the next sentence, where I characterized the trucker protest as an entire city in gridlock and effectively tortured by constant horn noise.
>> I don't know how it was portrayed/received in Canada.
1/3 of the country, the anti-Trudeau bit, could see no wrong in the trucker protests. The rest of the country saw a bunch of entitled jerks being jerks. They weren't even real truckers, more like business owners who owned trucks. Rank-and-file truckers don't have the time nor resources to go on multi-week vacations across the country. The large number of immigrants who drive trucks in Canada were also not represented. The icing on the cake was the hot tub. American protesters at January 6th brought a gallows. The Ottawa "truckers" brought a hot tub.
Every weekend in my area a few huge pickups get together to drive around with their "F*ck Trudeau" flags, the remnants of the trucker protest movement. Everyone else just looks at them wondering where they get enough money to waste gas driving huge trucks around in circles on a Saturday.
> The large number of immigrants who drive trucks in Canada were also not represented.
There are famous videos of Sikh truck drivers on other drivers shoulders, as the crowd dances to Indian music - near the bouncy castle.
But would it be illegitimate if it appealed to one demographic more than another?
> Rank-and-file truckers don't have the time nor resources to go on multi-week vacations across the country.
They were out of a job so they had time.
> The icing on the cake was the hot tub. American protesters at January 6th brought a gallows. The Ottawa "truckers" brought a hot tub.
How is this good or bad? Lots of people enjoy hot-tubbing in cold weather.
> 1/3 of the country, the anti-Trudeau bit, could see no wrong in the trucker protests.
No chance any of their supporters are there because they agree with the issues? You feel that everyone who supported them was doing so because they disliked the PM?
Do you also feel that everyone who spoke out against them was a supporter of the PM? What opinions are legitimate opinions and which ones do people only have to support their party?
The canada trucker protests are not a great pro-privacy example. Given the weapons that were found at the border protest, and the subsequent prosecutions for those possessing them (conspiracy to murder cops), any data requests seem to have served a legitimate purpose.
If the potential for a few felony prosecutions for a few attempted crimes is your standard for abridging privacy, it was always a very low standard. People you aren't watching are always committing crimes, even more than people who are being watched. If the potential for any sort or level of crime creates a legitimate purpose, there's a legitimate purpose in surveilling everyone, at all times.
That won't happen, though, it will be governments and corporations surveilling everyone else while remaining completely opaque themselves.
A few felony convictions? This isn't stealing a car or passing a bad check. These guys are charged with conspiring to kill police officers. They were found bringing guns and tactical items to a remote protest location while chatting about using those guns to kill people. Even if the cops were violating people's rights, this is not the best situation to be arguing for civil liberties. There are anti-logging and anti-pipeline protests where canada's cops have used similar surveillance. Those are the better situations for winning civil liberties debates. The trucker protests are very much an uphill arguement.
>These guys are charged with conspiring to kill police officers. They were found bringing guns and tactical items to a remote protest location while chatting about using those guns to kill people.
Could you define and point to evidence of exactly how many of "these guys" there were doing this? Can the government with its penchant for mendacity? There were many thousands and thousands of protestors. It's not hard to find a few casually discussing illegal activity and using that as a justification for painting the rest black.
>Even if the cops were violating people's rights, this is not the best situation to be arguing for civil liberties.
No, this is exactly the best situation for arguing in favor of not blatantly violating civil liberties, because it should especially be argued for groups that aren't part of the social mainstream. That's the real test of how seriously a country takes such rules about civil liberties. Any asshole can argue for civil liberties in favor of widely popular, media-favored protests against logging and pipelines.
I think parent was referring to the large trucker protest in Ottawa where several privacy violations occurred (e.g. freezing bank accounts) despite the protests being mostly peaceful.
Highly doubtful. It's a "citizens commission" which means a bunch of people decide whose reports to republish. Nothing even attempting to be truthful or bipartisan.
The reports switch between describing attempted murder - trucks accelerating at pedestrians, etc - and crazy harassment like asking an asian man to do "a dragon dance" and then beating him with "blunt objects" when he refused, which didn't do any damage such that the police refused his report.
> "The pastor recalled convoy supporters, some of whom routinely urinated on his church, even taking issue with a sign indicating the church was broadcasting its masses online due to provincial public health restrictions: “One of them pointed a fist towards me shouting ‘you should obey God instead of F-ing Trudeau’.”"
Pointed a fist(?) and yelled a rude message about a politician. Oh, the harm! No photos of the urinators though - which supposedly kept happening.
The only likely crime (likely a crime and likely happened) I spotted in their report was someone pushing a photographer's camera away. Annoying, and criminal, but totally unpunished at all rallies and protests. The police literally don't react to anything less than theft of a camera or punching the photographer.
If I show up to your event carrying a weapon without your knowledge, is it your fault or mine? If we treat it as your fault, haven't we found a perfect way to keep you from ever holding events?
Yes. If the cops submitted a thousand data requests and 999 of them came back with nothing, but one of them prevented someone from gunning down people, then they are were justifiable requests. Anyone wanting to argue about cops overreaching and breaking rules should point to a situation where the cops didn't find anything horrible.
I don't think an 0.1% success rate is at all valid, though I recognize it was a verbal flourish rather than a statistical claim. I am distinctly unsympathetic to the Canada trucker protest, but you're applying the logic of prison surveillance to regular society and that is a sure recipe for a bad outcome. If safety is this important to you, then you might be happier in an authoritarian country like Singapore or Saudi Arabia.
Lol. There was so much more to this. The cops had informants. They had undercover people. They were also chatting with the protest leadership about how a small number of dangerous people had "infiltrated" the protest movement. And, in the end, the cops seem to have been correct in their suspicions. The investigation isolated and arrested a very small number of people not for carrying weapons but for organizing to kill people. Few if any legitimate protesters were punished for anything. The events at Coutts seems to be a case of canada's police system working well in a unusual situation.
From the article above: "Protest organizer Marco Van Huigenbos said the protest was "infiltrated by an extreme element" and a decision was made for the remaining group to roll out from Coutts on Tuesday morning."
Now demonstration is a fundamental right, and privacy is a fundamental right too. And no circumstance allows the police violating these rights, no matter how right wing they are, and how fuked up your brain is.
What are you even talking about? That is literally the same tactic used against leftists. That you think only the right wing in persecuted in this way is telling.
This narrative relies on a media narrative. The media focus is always on the right-wing resistance, because that serves as the narrative to manufacture consent for police and surveillance powers (look at these evil white supremacists!".)
As a person firmly on the left (like, the actual left, not Joe-Bernie-whatever), I detest what happened to the trucker protests, and the anti-covid lockdown protests, which were all, in the media, portrayed as radical and violent right-wingers - when that was, when you saw any in person, NEVER the core of them and not even a large minority.
The media has you believe otherwise. It pars-pro-totos the most radical element as the core, or the whole, of them, which then bludgeons the milquetoast left (party-political left type) into acquiesce with the police/banking powers used against them. "after all, we do have to contain the right wing!"
And then these police powers set a precedent, and then they're established, and then they get converted into code with little opposition from what deems itself "progressive" civil society. And then we all sit in it.
>The media focus is always on the right-wing resistance
Are you serious? Were you not alive in 2020 during the George Floyd protests? I could literally list hundreds of other examples just since then. The Cop City protests near Atlanta where an activist was just murdered by the police under very suspicious circumstances, for example.
No, most leftists have similar comments. The gp's comments above might as well come from someone like Noam Chomsky, they are not some brave new position.
It's exactly centrists, or just-left-of-center liberal types, that go for this left authoritarianism. Which is more often than not quickly turned against more left positions much more quickly than against the right.
Nothing. Most leftists are anti-authoritarian and want strict limits on the power of the state.
The small number that reify authoritarian regimes like the USSR/DPRK are known as 'tankies' (a reference to sending in tanks to crush the 1956 rebellion in Hungary). They are unpopular and regarded as either very immature or (if they're really serious) not much better than Nazis. 'Red-brown alliance' refers to the tendency of left wing authoritarians to sooner or later make common cause with right wing authoritarians because it seems expedient to team up to overthrow the prevailing liberal order, not unlike the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that saw Hitler and Stalin divide up Poland. Authoritarian types tend to keep drifting right because right wing politics explicitly reify hierarchy and tend towards monarchy.
'The left' is highly fragmented in western countries, ranging from distributionists who like technology OK but want a flatter economic/industrial structure that treats capital like a library rather than an object of accumulation; to anti-civ types that want to dismantle industrial society altogether. Fortunately the latter tend to select themselves out and take up living in shacks instead.
Leftism simply means "like the left wing of the French legislature in the late 1700s" which by tradition is where the socialists sat. Using it for other views would be like saying "I'm an atheist, my god is like ..."
In the USA people who have a live-and-let-live attitude tend to think they're leftists despite actual of-the-day leftists being as authoritarian as the rightists. Left and right, in their original sense, were both strongly authoritarian by today's standards.
How do you mean corporate liberalism, is this a flavor? What do corporations have to do with it other than espousing the beliefs of the day?
I don't think "like the left wing of the French legislature in the late 1700s" is a very good description of what leftism means to people in the modern day. It has influences from what you describe, but also influences from many leftist writers and philosophers since. It's nothing like your atheism example, since what leftism means to people changes over time with culture, and even your example falls apart, because people when pushed people's views could boil down to "nature is god" or "entropy is god" or literally "there is no god" and yet all would easily be considered atheists by themselves and others. So they, too, are a varied group.
> I don't think "like the left wing of the French legislature in the late 1700s" is a very good description of what leftism means to people in the modern day.
That's why 'left' and 'right' have little objective meaning. They're more tribal than explanatory.
> what leftism means to people changes over time with culture
Correct, I don't think there's a good idea what it means in the USA right now, let alone worldwide and across time.
> influences from many leftist writers and philosophers
That's a circular definition though. How do you know they were leftists? By the current or the old meaning? Do old works suddenly become leftist works as the term changes and their author would now qualify as a leftist?
> people's views could boil down to [mistaking a god for a theism] and yet all would easily be considered atheists by themselves and others
There's a difference between a god and a theism so they'd simply be mistaken.
It's not so black and white and it's not circular. You can consider all of the above and the terms can be useful. The least useful is sticking to a hard definition, deciding noone qualifies, and therefore the term is "meaningless".
In other words, it's fine if you consider a definition of leftism that includes anarchists, Marxists, collectivists, social democratists and many others to be incorrect, but large groups of people use the term that way and communicate just fine.
> the least useful is sticking to a hard definition, deciding noone qualifies, and therefore the term is "meaningless".
The point of the term is a political identifier. If it doesn't encompass anything you believe in but includes your mortal enemies it's not much good.
> large groups of people use the term that way and communicate just fine.
No, they don't. I don't know anyone "on the left" who would happily use it knowing the full scope of what others using it identified as - and validly under your definition. Surely they aren't communicating anything meaningful.
Worse, it encourages those people to label others using their own lax standards, such that everyone who isn't an anarchist, or a marxist, etc, is the polar opposite - "the right". The left is a grab bag, the right is simply everything else.
These terms signify a side a culture war but don't indicate any views or policies which may actually differ between them. They mark "us vs them" without being too specific to swap who is who when needed.
> If it doesn't encompass anything you believe in but includes your mortal enemies it's not much good.
> No, they don't. I don't know anyone "on the left" who would happily use it knowing the full scope of what others using it identified as - and validly under your definition. Surely they aren't communicating anything meaningful.
You're entitled to your own opinion dude, but political ideologies will spend all day arguing between submovements what does and doesn't qualify, and yet it's still possible to get an outline and then make predictions and discourse from there. Leftist or Conservative, you can hear arguing between tankies and anarchists, between "fiscal conservatives" and fundamentalists, mostly at the fringes, because the fringes disagree with the most.
I think what you're trying to say is that the modern left and right are defined by their opposition to eachother ("culture war") and not their value and policy positions. But they do have opposing value and policy opinions, and it's not very hard to write a list. And then you can give names to these opposing groups of values and policy opinions. And you can talk about them and it's not meaningless because there are obvious real-world associations between the values in each group.
"The left of the 1700s French legislature" no longer accurately describes any modern political association so that's probably not a useful lens.
> you can hear arguing between tankies and anarchists
Those people are the legitimate users of the term 'Leftist'. As I was saying, very few normal people would be willing to use a term that lumps them with strident communists who yearn for the good days of the USSR.
It's one thing that some other members of the tribe are commies, but "The Left" was literally coined and adopted by them. (Well, socialists, but no difference.)
The Left fully adopted the post modernist rhetoric of the French philosophers in the 60s and 70s, including actual literal pedophiles trying to remove age of consent laws in order to "queer children before they are stifled by the patriarchy". Again, not something normal people would support if they knew.
The only way this functions is by being so tribal that nobody looks at who else is in the group because they're so busy screaming at everyone outside the group. As proof that it's an identity and not a useful descriptor - your leftist status can be stripped from you and you will be identified as "far right" if you disagree with certain tribal truths.
"The left" is a label people adopt, "the right" is how they label everyone they disagree with. It's a very religious thing, to view all opposition as part of a united collective that wants to destroy you.
> Leftist or Conservative
Conservative what though? That's almost as empty as leftist. As in careful planning, or as in pushing your religion? You have to add 'Fiscal' to conservative before it begins to represent an actual viewpoint instead of a tribal marker.
> it's not meaningless because there are obvious real-world associations between the values in each group.
But vastly less meaning than any actual descriptive. Terms like fiscal conservative, socially liberal, democratic fundamentalist, etc, at least mention the issues a person could believe.
You're free to call yourself whatever you will, but it's undeniable that left/right, conservative, progressive, etc, are so broad that they're identities instead of platforms.
> You have to add 'Fiscal' to conservative before it begins to represent an actual viewpoint instead of a tribal marker.
> You're free to call yourself whatever you will, but it's undeniable that left/right, conservative, progressive, etc, are so broad that they're identities instead of platforms
I think we _almost_ agree here, except that they are both identities and platforms.
> "The left" is a label people adopt, "the right" is how they label everyone they disagree with.
Do you feel this is unique to "The left"?
> including actual literal pedophiles trying to remove age of consent laws in order to "queer children before they are stifled by the patriarchy"
You've gone off the rails my dude, and I have no reason to believe you are communicating with a modicum of good faith anymore.
Keep investigating, just remember, they're watching you, just waiting for you to make a small misstep. They want to take away your freedom. They want to turn your children gay. They track your phone location. Stay vigilant. They are always watching.
No, the right is defined by the left, but woke is defined by the people who oppose it, etc. It's one of many. Conservative and liberal are a circle jerk where each is an identity and a slur to threaten dissidents with. (Despite Liberal, at least, having deeper roots than are currently meant by those who use it, it's now meaningless in most places.)
The left is perhaps a bit worse than some identities for being communist, and being used to explaining millions of deaths in terms of progress...
Left/right bothers me even more than liberal/conservative though because it's a reductive lens that people try to push onto everyone around despite it having little to no historical impact on most of them.
> You've gone off the rails my dude, and I have no reason to believe you are communicating with a modicum of good faith anymore.
It's a mere search away but that's just it. I could guarantee that you weren't going to go look because you don't want it to be true. It's a giant umbrella of things nobody is really happy with so nobody looks carefully.
I'm not really talking about actual leftists who embrace their ideology but shrill ideologues with identities and how the term is incorrectly used by many, even for themselves. And it isn't that this specific philosophy is bad, though it seems so, but that it's more officially a leftist platform than a lot of what people would think is.
That most supposed leftists wouldn't support this, if asked away from their peers, is the point.
> I think we _almost_ agree here, except that they are both identities and platforms.
Sure, then I'm just saying that leftist, conservative, etc, are all the way at the 'almost entirely an identity with almost no connection to policy' and 'fiscal conservative' is perhaps roughly in the middle, and some sort of hypothetical amazing group may exist which is vastly more focused on policy than identity.
> Keep investigating, just remember, they're watching you, just waiting for you to make a small misstep. They want to take away your freedom. They want to turn your children gay. They track your phone location. Stay vigilant. They are always watching.
That's pretty funny considering you're the one talking about good faith.
And yes, hello. They do track our phones. Congratulations on conflating a huge issue of national security with your identity politics.
Those articles are really not relevant to the conversation, because yet again, the left in {{CURRENTYEAR}} is not defined by these people from the 20th century.
> some sort of hypothetical amazing group may exist which is vastly more focused on policy than identity
I think you should look for it. I honestly can't think of anything that would meet your standard.
> And yes, hello. They do track our phones.
I mean they track you personally. They are always watching. Be careful out there!
> I mean they track you personally. They are always watching. Be careful out there!
Your defensiveness hides some of the only truth in your post. Yes brother, they personally track all of us. Do you think this is good?
Have you thought of asking someone why you answer honesty with scorn and sarcasm?
> the left in {{CURRENTYEAR}} is not defined by these people from the 20th century.
Ho ho. That's like saying communism isn't influenced by Marx because he's dead. If anyone reads any leftist philosophy that's what they're getting. Who do you think the left's thought leaders are then, and how do they repudiate the past wrong-think or do they pretend it's not there?
For instance, if you read some of the earlier American political leaders they were racist and owned slaves, and now their parties repudiate these views and actions. Where are the leftists that disclaim forced collectivism and the rest of the centuries of nonsense, if you want to tell me that the movement changed?
Last I looked though, socialists and communists are still a central part of the movement.
> > more focused on policy than identity
> I think you should look for it. I honestly can't think of anything that would meet your standard.
That's easy - community groups of citizens motivated to fix something. You aren't worrying about a name and national attention and the intellectual legacy of your team, you're just a bunch of parents doing what needs to be done. It gets rarer the further you go from the individuals.
> Nothing. Most leftists are anti-authoritarian and want strict limits on the power of the state.
> 'The left' is highly fragmented in western countries
These two things seem incongruent.
I like how both yours and the other reply to me make it a point to say 'no true lefty' and only the 'bad' ones are authoritarian and would get ostracized but also lefties don't ostracize. The other reply claims that centrist lefties are really the authoritarian ones and you say the extreme lefties are the authoritarian ones.
Who are we left with?
Also, I was downvoted, I assume by lefties who "aren't lefties", for asking.
I detect a pattern.
To further reply to you both if "just-left-of-center liberal types" are bad, and extreme left tankies are bad, and they all call each other authoritarian and accuse one another of not being the real lefties -- this according to you -- how is one to best interact with a stranger who identifies as a leftie?
Bonus question: further down thread I was told " If the cops submitted a thousand data requests and 999 of them came back with nothing, but one of them prevented someone from gunning down people, then they are were justifiable requests." -- since some lefties are authoritarian/violent tankie types shouldn't the police be investigating lefties none stop?
I'm not sure why. I know lots of people with different ideological tendencies (some of which I think are wrong or even silly) but with whom I have some core values in common.
I think the best way to approach people of unfamiliar political viewpoints is to spend more time listening and less time badgering.
If the left is highly fragmented it is hard to make generalizations like "most leftists are anti-authoritarian". You yourself mention the tankies and others with an authoritarian bend.
You might say they are not true lefties and are not representative but they say the same about you.
> I think the best way to approach people of unfamiliar political viewpoints is to spend more time listening and less time badgering.
I am all ears, it is not my intention to badger. The question is posited to you in good faith -- to me those you deem "bad lefties" are still lefties and leave a bad taste in my mouth.
The proclivity towards censorship and authoritarian behavior, "well intentioned" and often justified as necessary for whatever reason, is not new and has sadly started being fashionable on the left again as of late. This, as is tradition, is the undoing of your movement.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask if you can't agree about the subject amongst yourselves how an outsider should interact with you, it is not like I can automatically tell right away who is which flavor. What should I do about the "bad" ones?
They can be highly fragmented and still have plenty of common ground (which is what they need to focus on, but the corporate State has been very adept at weaponizing identity politics to prevent this). Tankies are a tiny minority.
I know a lot of left wing people and have been in and around the political community for a long time, so I have a reasonably good intuition of the scope and influence of different tendencies. I haven't bothered to gather hard data on it, which seems like it would be hard to come by in any case.
What should I do about the "bad" ones?
Not hang out with or spend time on them if you don't find their views tenable. I sometimes critique such groups privately or publicly to dissuade people from joining or giving them credibility; for example somewhat well-known groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Party of Socialism and Liberation are little more than grifts that encourage people to volunteer their time/libery in whatever political cause is trending right now, and cycle donation money back toward a small coterie of ideological profiteers. Both of them have roots in 60s radicalism. The RCP are Maoists deep down, PSL have more Stalinist tendencies I think. But they're much more preoccupied with being dissatisfied about the state of things than plotting about how they'd oppress their enemies once they take over, because their whole organizing model is based on 20th century mass politics.
But their actual membership and influence are very low, with a high degree of turnover. The RCP, for example, has a youtube channel but few of their videos get even 1000 views despite them nominally being a national organization. That's why such groups go where the crowds are in hopes of picking up new recruits; they have little or no capacity to drive anything, and are not sufficiently obnoxious to start fights with anyone else. Instead they show up with banners, posters and megaphones, hand out signs to anyone who will take one, and try to scoot themselves towards the front of any sort of march or photo opportunity to look relevant. They don't actually do much besides publicize themselves and solicit donations. Some of these go back into printing more agit-prop and some financially supports the staffers/leaders, though from what I can tell it's pretty small beer. You never see them organizing strikes or trying to set up community services like eg Food Not Bombs.
Honestly, I think a lot of people are pretty sick of protests in general, regardless of their political affiliation (probably not on HN, since we're extremely online and libertarian, but ask your grandma and see what she says).
Whether it's the left doing it or the right, it seems that many protests have nothing to do with the "movement" at all and are just thinly veiled excuses to act like an ape and smear shit on the wall.
Do you have any objective information to support that? Certainly some reactionary groups want to stop protests, which are a threat to authoritarian power.
The reason is protests are often very effective; they are a threat to their power. Look at Israel now, for example. Look at the US Constitution, which went out of its way to protect protests.
They never collect profiles of anyone who's a law abiding, non-protesting citizen who always does what they're told. Docile, compliant, obedient Dutch people are almost never profiled. Be docile, compliant and obedient and you will not have a problem with the police - it's super simple.
Same can be said about the politicians... do what the people want, if you're unsure, hold a referendum, and people won't protest in the streets and you won't need bodyguards to go outside.
On the other hand, on a venn diagram of what creates violence and (anti government) terrorism, they're causing more and more overlap of ever larger circles.
This is a strange characterization. "Docile" can also just mean "follow rule of law". The latter suddenly doesn't sound so odd.
If the police is violating the law then there's no discussion and they need to be corrected. Otherwise, aren't we supposed to follow the law? If we disagree with the law and want it changed, now that is a different process. But there's no need to be disobedient for disobedience's sake, or just for the sake of not appearing "docile".
We Dutch are also good complainers so I don't think we can be described as "docile", even if "just be normal and you're already crazy enough" is a local saying.
This is not true, there've been multiple cases where entire neighborhoods were summoned to submit DNA as part of some investigation (usually involving abuse of a minor).
Also, all license plates scanned by speed cameras (very prevalent on the highways here) are stored for months.
The Dutch are famously cash averse, aren't they? ...or at least their retail banks are. So we are maybe half dozen steps away from "expiring" the money of the blacklisted or shadow banned.
> Ten of the 67 demonstrators have never been arrested.
This feels like a very select group of people to be honest. Extrapolating these numbers to “demonstrators” in general seems like a bit of a stretch, regardless of whether this is right or wrong.
So how did the police find out about the identities of the 10 people who have never been arrested? Because they posted to social media about them attending a demonstration? How was it connected to them being demonstrators? Where their identities collected during protests but they weren't arrested? Article leaves that open.
Pure speculation: Your national ID is linked to your cell phone via the payments and the banking system. IMEIs are globally unique and its possible to triangulate cell phones by constantly monitoring signal strength to nearby towers. Intelligence agencies know where almost every person is at all times since most people have their cell phone turned on and on their person as they move around. The solution is obtaining SIM cards and cell phones without ID, which is probably why that is outlawed in many places.
This reminds me a bit of the recent discussion here about networked security cameras using cloud storage.
Many people seem to have a very simplistic idea about how the law, law enforcement, and courts work.
Laws are always selectively enforced. Police, prosecutors, and courts are not going to simply round up petty criminals such as serial package thieves just because victims suddenly have HD video footage of the (countless) perpetrators. They have other priorities.
Political crime is back with a vengeance, even in the 'liberal' west, and pursuing threats to the existing socio-political and economic order will always take priority. The main issue with pervasive surveillance systems isn't that they are used to detect and prosecute ordinary street crime or nuisance infractions (though the latter can become burdensome). The problem is that these systems will be used to pursue 'special' categories of crime such as political activism. (Expect those categories to creep and expand just as flimsy justifications such as 'conspiracy' and 'incitement' proliferate.)
Expect the full force of the surveillance and control systems being constructed now to be used extensively to maintain public order and pursue threats to public order.
Remember, the primary role of the police is to maintain order. Everything else they might do is secondary to that.
I hate to bring up Julian Assange as he is such a polarizing and widely reviled character - but it is clear now that several governments saw him as a sufficiently dire threat to that they felt justified pouring gargantuan resources into neutralizing him. This never happens with ordinary criminals except in sensational cases where the public is out for blood. I do not know if Assange himself was ever considered such a big threat, but I suspect the systemic risk threatening the whole system was great enough to justify making an example of him to deter others (at least from the perspective of the US and UK governments).
And back to the networked cameras. Your own surveillance system is ultimately spying on you and creating records of your activities that probably should not exist - and should you store your data locally, and some of it happens to conveniently go missing, it could incriminate you, whereas this would not be an issue if it never existed in the first place. It brings up the old 'if you have nothing to hide' argument. Yet here we see evidence that largely benign political activities are deemed sufficiently threatening to justify closer scrutiny.
Pardon the sloppiness of this comment. I posted it piecemeal with many edits.
Any EU state institution which can package their motives behind a shallow "national security" excuse can exempt itself from GDPR. And whose motives are really shallow (like it could be in this case, haven't read the article), the only way forward is to bring them to court and test their "national security" excuse.
No it's not... When you ask them for your file they may return a letter ending with "we have no info about you but if you publish the content of this letter you go to prison"
It happend to me. ( In the Netherlands)
Damn, that's terrible. Do I understand correctly, you asked the police to give you what they have on you, under GDPR?
Does GDPR make exceptions for police? (If I was a criminal and being investigated, I imagine it would defeat the purpose if they had to tell me everything they knew about me.)
Not quite. GDPR applies to governments as well. But there is a legal basis called "public task":
"the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law"
So no the govt can't "just" spy on you. But if they have, say, a court order, or let's say the law allows it if they have sufficient evidence, then yes. Otherwise, government bodies are expected to behave like everyone else.
My experience is that government bodies tend to be more concerned with legal compliance than private entities.
