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Re:UK emergency phone and internet data storage law to be br... by smackay on Thursday July 10, 2014 @04:45AM (#8014226)
It's simply a matter of scale. You can ignore the fantasy economics touted by the politicians. For the most part, unless the country becomes a Banana Republic there simply won't be the resources available (and hopefully the will) to run a surveillance state. I also adhere to the, almost certainly naive, view that smaller European countries (at least in the vicinity of our close friends in Scandanavia) are generally better run with less likelihood of vested interests running amok.

EDIT: It can't be any worse than the path we are already on.

Re:UK emergency phone and internet data storage law to be br... by vidarh on Thursday July 10, 2014 @04:51AM (#8014243)
When it comes to surveillance, Scandinavia is not a beacon. Sweden has their notorious law that allows any signal passing the borders to be intercepted by military intelligence. Since most of Norways traffic out of the country goes via Sweden, that's caused a few issues...

And Norwegian security services have decades worth of history of blatantly illegal politically motivated surveillance (basically anyone to the left of the Norwegian equivalent of Labour used to be under extensive surveillance - some of it so blatant it was clearly intended to intimidate rather than uncover anything; it was supposedly stopped in the mid 90's, but given that the security services were illegally monitoring the head of the parliamentary committee investigating them while he was investigating them gives me zero confidence anything has changed)

Re:UK emergency phone and internet data storage law to be br... by peteretep on Thursday July 10, 2014 @05:46AM (#8014377)
So your argument is: you hope Scotland will vote for independence, because you think they'll be too poor to do digital surveillance?
Re:UK emergency phone and internet data storage law to be br... by insky on Thursday July 10, 2014 @05:07AM (#8014292)
Oh come on, digital copying is very, very cheap.