"It's a horrible place to live"
Re:Snowden banned from flying to UK
by enraged_camel on Friday June 14, 2013 @11:10AM
(#5880332)
In all fairness, it does sound like a horrible place to live. I mean, on top of all the problems he listed, you guys also have awful weather. :)
I'm not going to deny that our weather is awful :) but there is a lot of good too - a relatively free democracy (aside from all the questionable stuff listed above that let's face it is likely occurring in every western country, though we might be leading the way on CCTV) which is far, far less infiltrated by religious nuts than many countries, London which alone counts for a HELL of a lot :), lots of history, good cheddar cheese, and most important of all - weather-induced sense of humour! ;-)
It might be that "the neighbor's grass is always greener" but as an Italian living in the UK I think that 98% of the things here are way better. That 2% missing is the climate and the food. I really think the UK is a great place to live but as I said, maybe you hate it because you lived here too much and I love it because I am "relatively" new.
To be fair, all the 14 CCTV cameras on my street (!) have been sprayed, burned or shot.
That's the only crime going on around where I live.
People aren't putting up with this shit any more.
I think this graffiti project is quite funny. (http://www.irational.org/heath/cctv_sabotage/)
That is pretty cool.
The only problem being that you're probably going to get caught doing it.
Shame all they need to work around it is to have 2 or more cameras pointing at the same spot (which is usually the case in London.)
Thanks. I love paying extra tax to replace vandalised cameras.
They're not getting replaced, so you're not paying for it.
That's one option. Another option is insisting they be removed so that you're no longer exposed to the costs of damage incurred by the imposition of socially dubious programs.
Re:Snowden banned from flying to UK
by shawabawa3 on Friday June 14, 2013 @09:28AM
(#5879761)
> It's a horrible place to live
Well fuck you too.
Although I do agree with the rest of your post.
You forgot to mention there are a high proportion of whiners in the UK.
It's not even remotely a horrible place to live. On the strength of that idiocy I feel confident that you have never been anywhere else and that you have no opinons worth taking seriously. How old are you? 13?
Re:Snowden banned from flying to UK
by potatolicious on Friday June 14, 2013 @10:00AM
(#5879931)
He called (presumably) your country a bad place to live.
Your response is a drastic overreaction and is nothing more than an ad hominem attack on another user. Nothing in his post suggests he's never been elsewhere or that he's particularly immature.
Does your post seem like a reasonable response to anything?
It's [edit] certainly not the place to be if you want privacy.
RIPA (regulation of investigatory powers act) has been abused by local council staff spying on public to see if they live within a school catchment area or within an area qualifying for cheap parking. There are other abuses too.
We're bringing in a "snooper's charter" - this is just traffic data and not content of calls, but still, it's pretty unpleasant.
We had / have "Phorm" - deep packet inspection of customer internet traffic in order to serve ads.
The idea of national ID cards had a small number of opponents, but was mostly met with "meh". The thing that actually killed it was the cost to the individual. I'm sure that if they had kept the cost to £30 per person we'd all have ID cards today.
In theory GCHQ have strict regulatory oversight. I do know people who work for GCHQ. I never talk to them about work, and they never talk to me about work, but they do say that regulatory oversight is real and true.
But we don't have the US concept of "fruit of the poisoned tree" - in the US a wiretap needs a court order, and without that any evidence gained cannot be used in court. That forces cops to actually get the court order, or risk losing cases. In the UK we allow spies to gather this stuff, and police to take action on it, but we don't want it used in court because then it's a matter of public record and thus subject to scrutiny and we leak information about capabilities. I see the benefit in both approaches, but I can appreciate that some people would be horrified with the English approach.
We were complicit in torture of innocent, untried, uncharged, soldiers / terrorists / combatants.
We have detention without charge (http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/terroris...).
The UK has about 1% of the world population, but about 20% of the installed CCTV base.
Cheshire has a population of 700,000 people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire) but has over 12,000 CCTV cameras, of which about 500 - 600 are run by public authorities.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/02/cctv-cameras-watchi...)
We happily ship people to the US under our unbalanced extradition treaty.
tl;dr: He'd be nuts to want to come here.
{EDIT: Strikethrough [a horrible place to live, and] in response to people below}