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A comment on Snooper's charter to extend police access to phone and internet data. Parent comment

Re:Snooper's charter to extend police access to phone and in... by CM30 on Tuesday March 01, 2016 @11:29AM (#11203760)
To be fair, that doesn't seem all too different to the situation in the US, and this is coming from someone living in the UK. Remember, sites like Hacker News are only a small percentage of the population, and there's a much larger group either completely or nearly completely oblivious to the actions of the NSA or what not.

But yeah, people here don't really know all too much about this spying, and they sadly don't seem to care much if they do know. That depresses me, and makes me despair about how spinless much of humanity seems to have become.

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Re:Snooper's charter to extend police access to phone and in... by newman314 on Tuesday March 01, 2016 @11:44AM (#11203882)
To be clear, Theresa May just seems to be much more blatant about it because "terrorists and pedophiles"

She seems to be a real life personification of Delores Umbridge with all her unpleasantness.

But hey, there's also the current sh*tshow aka US presidential campaign.. :)

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Re:Snooper's charter to extend police access to phone and in... by anexprogrammer on Tuesday March 01, 2016 @12:06PM (#11204118)
Let's be clear, most UK Home Secretaries of the last quarter century have been blatantly ripping away hard won freedoms. Even David Blunkett, once famous for "the people's republic of Sheffield" ended up slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.

The Daily Mail has played the because terrorism, think of the children cards for 100+ years, but now every kneejerk campaign results in equally kneejerk legislation.

I'm old enough to remember some of the IRA activities. They did far more than ISIS and Al Quida put together, and it was ongoing. The political reaction was always "we will not change our society, or they win". The few pieces of legislation, even the kneejerk ones, were aimed squarely at them - remove the right to appear on TV, occasional internment. We didn't have to get half undressed to get on a plane.

FFS I spent one night driving around London because I happened to be staying in a hotel near Heathrow the night the IRA decided to mortar bomb the runway. Didn't result in strip searches or armed police on a regular basis. (Aside, that's the only occasion I've had a gun pointed at me - the Police who were turning away traffic trying to get to the hotels were all carrying MP5s, and carrying them as though they were about to use them).

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