Completely off topic nit-pick, and not to devalue your point (which I fully agree with), but Frankenstein was the scientist not the monster.
Side note: well worth a read. Fascinating 19th century look at the psychology of man.
What it's not supposed to be is what everyone wants, fair, right or ensuring people's information is kept secret from the government.
In short, politicians do what their voters demand.
The media constantly harassing the population with the big bad scary terrorist who's out to get you, of course people watching said media are going to be scared of that, even if the chances are remote.
People "want" this because they are scared of a primarily fabricated threat. What people really want is for the "threat" to go away, but that's as simple as having better media that doesn't distort truth for financial gains.
Contrast this to media entities, in a position of trust, twisting the world to conform to whatever they gain most out of. Do you yourself feel that the mass media sources you are familiar with fairly represent and report on the issues they address?
In theory, I definitely support a surveilance state, with powerful law-enforcement agencies. In practice, none of the states on Earth are trustworthy enough not to abuse that power.
I did not mean simple in terms of implementation; you're absolutely right :)
> and restrict freedom of the press while you're doing it
Yeah. I think there's better ways. There's a lot to it... we need to incentivize media to report on the facts without twisting them, criminalize abuses of trust and power, create meaningful "trust rating" systems that actually impact audiences' willingness to follow certain sources (like we have with restaurants).
"You can't say x" is a pointless game of whack-a-mole and has the arbiter as a single point of failure. We need a better system altogether.
Sadly, politicians quite like the ability to manipulate the public via their friends in the press, and very few of them are going to campaign for making that less effective.
I believe that media outlets used to have to compete on credibility - a little critical thinking distributed throughout the population made a difference. But with so much consolidation of mass media, especially behind the scenes, one is left picking between only a few fundamental options. If they're all trash, where else are you going to go? It much tougher to take a principled stand and reject all mass media outlets rather than the easy route of identifying with the ones that better stroke your biases.
There are no meaningful checks on the surveillance powers of GCHQ, it has broken the law with impunity, and surveils the very people supposed to keep it in check.
While I agree the UK is still democratic (for what that's worth), I think you'd find it hard to prove that people want terrorism laws to be misused or extended, but they are certainly indifferent to it unless it affects them clearly and directly. The population did not vote for dragnet surveillance or draconian terrorism laws, because they never had a choice - both major parties have proposed and passed draconian counter-terrorism laws, and misused them for other ends and on people who are clearly not terrorists.
So you're incorrect in stating that voters demanded this.
The actual fear these days is pretty low. The government manufactured consent for "chasing terrorists" by 9/11 and is now relying upon political inertia to keep and gradually expand those powers.
>In short, politicians do what their voters demand.
Or rather, politicians try to shape voter opinion in such a way that they accept the reforms being rammed down their throats without too much protest.
But for certain issues they line up behind the government. The Snowden files story was initially fully covered only by the Guardian -- who have since had a change of Editor after their offices were raided by the security services and equipment smashed. There has been (until now) almost no coverage that the government wants to pass the snoopers charter soon. There is no coverage that the 'emergency' DRIP bill from last year is due for renewal before Christmas. Due to the way that DRIP was rammed through Parliament last year in defiance of normal procedure my MP promised me a robust debate before the renewal. It looks like it will go through without so much as whisper.
EDITED as the telegraph currently has a front page article on the snoopers charter on its website. I hope that there is time for people to lobby their MPs (which is what killed it off last time).
As for Snowden, even on this website where people actually understand the potential of surveillance techniques it's the stories about his personal situation and options, as widely run in all UK newspapers from all angles, that seem to have captured the imagination more than the details of what was revealed. And I'm not sure he and his allies, who sought to carefully control how PRISM was reported, even offered the files to other UK newspapers...
Are they? If they are it's irrational, you're far more likely to be killed by a falling fridge or alcohol induced liver damage. Attacking a bogyman in an attempt to take eyes off what your government is really doing is quite sickening.
Everyone would be significantly better off if we stopped parading around with 'defense' funding and put it to something with a perceivable impact like public healthcare. It's ridiculous that people are justifying this sort of enormous waste of time and resources as worthwhile.
You ask what they're actually afraid of and it's knife crime, snakes and dying alone. Dying in a terrorist attack is probably, like, #75 on that list.
Unfortunately they will be on this site as well and although the mods work hard on detecting voting rings and shills I doubt that they'll be able to detect state level work.
Try telling that to someone who doesn't drink.
For example, when you're comparing prices at a store, you might be so rational that you perfectly compute the expected payoff for each product and choose the optimal one. But does your brain work the same way when deciding whether to steal the product too? If the expected payoff for that was higher, would you just go ahead and steal it?
Don't you think people might not think the same way about the more common cases and the less common cases?
Both of the terror attacks in question were stabbings of individual victims (Mohammed Saleem and Lee Rigby). Both were killed.
So in fact, assuming conditions remain as they've been for the last five years (and for several years before that), one appears to be at least as likely to have ones laptop seized than getting harmed in a terror attack. On the other hand, the harm of the latter is still clearly worse, given that both victims were murdered.
There were also 3 bombing attempts (all by the same far right extremist - Pavlo Lapshyn - trying to kill muslims, but spectacularly failing because nobody were present when his bombs went off).
A further two planned attacks never happend (one involved a plan to bomb an EDL rally, but the would-be terrorists arrived to late and left without doing anything; one involved plans that were never attempted set into life at the time the people in question were arrested). The calibre of would-be terrorists in the UK thankfully seem to be rather low.
[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-prevent...
If you look at the number of seizures under the terrorism act and compare that to number of terrorist attacks over the same period, i bet there have been more seizures than attacks.
The thinking goes, its ok for the government to snoop on the everybody in the name of catching terrorists.. because I am not a terrorist and they won't snoop on me.
It's always strange to me to compare the response to Islamic terrorism with the response to IRA terrorism. The latter was more deadly in the UK, but the illiberal response was mostly contained within Northern Ireland itself. Yet people seem far more scared about Islamic terrorism and far more willing to encourage a brutal response. Is this simply down to racism?
(Censorship has long been an issue though. See: Spycatcher, the Zircon affair, Matrix-Churchill, and "Gerry Adams' words are read by an actor")
The 3.5k killings perpetrated by all sides over the course of the Troubles over many years also rather pales in comparison with the body count in the overseas conflicts that ISIS is also recruiting for.
This is absolutely true and the security services have largely refused to learn the right lessons from NI.
The thing about the overseas conflicts is that they're overseas, and there are many more countries and intelligence services involved on various sides. That makes them a lot harder to tackle and purely domestic solutions somewhat futile.
After reading the "Welcome" page, this post should probably be deleted, even though I think it is at least vaguely relevent, but is effectively comedy. Sorry about that.
I really balk at these fatalistic one-liners. Voters vote for packages of politicians and views. Particularly in the UK with its silly voting system there are very few options for voters to tell the politicians what they feel with any acceptable degree of nuance.
Politicians do stuff the majority disagree with all the time. That alone shows your statement to be false.
A common issue is, of course, that the solutions politicians come up with for problems we want solved, doesn't always agree with us.
E.g. the fact that we do not want paedophiles in our lives doesn't mean that we want the politicians to cover up scandals like Jimmy Savile. It is a perversion of intent. Or would you claim that that is what the voters demand?
I suppose you're one of these poor bairns who quakes under his bedsheets at the thought of the ghost of Bin Laden coming back to be Muslim in your presence?
Because I remember a million voters marching against the iraq war in 2003 and the politicians did nothing about those voters demands, what they did was whatever tony had agreed with george 12 months earlier regardless of the will of the people.
The democracy we have is a Frankenstein version of the democracy many think we have. And in the same way you would hesitate at calling Frankenstein human, I would hesitate at calling what we have a democracy.
I'll still have it over the alternatives but what a mediocre state we've ended up in.
Needs to be fixed.