8 ms·

Government accused of 'full-frontal attack' on whistleblowers

155 points by secfirstmd 10y ago

kevinbowman 10y ago
Note that this is the UK government
- I_am_neo 10y ago
  Any government on this path is a tyrannic old dinosaur in need of reform.
tracker1 10y ago
Just... wow. And people question the need for civil liberties organizations, or in the U.S. strong defenders of the bill of rights. Donating to the ACLU, EFF and NRA is something most of us should be doing.
- vvanders 10y ago
  One of those organizations isn't like the others.
  - knucklesandwich 10y ago
    You're getting downvoted, but you're right: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/gun-control-mass-incarceration-drug-war-nra-shooters/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/gun-control-mass-incarcer... The NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners.
    - wallace_f 10y ago
      The article appears to be stretching and reaching quite a bit to substantiate this proposition that the NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners. For example, this is one of the examples they provided to support their proposition: > DeJarion Echols was caught with forty-four grams of crack (along with $5,700 that was computed as another 450 grams) and an unloaded rifle under his bed, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The resulting sentence, handed down in 2006, was twenty years in federal prison: If we can agree that the federal government has no business wasting taxpayer dollars to lock people--who cause no harm to anyone else through recreational drug use--up in for-profit prisons, then that is the problem here. Further, discrimination does exist: prescription drug use is an illegal-yet-ignored marketplace of predominately White, upper-middle-class-on-up users who are not targeted by DEA enforcement the way street drugs are. This is consistent with the the Nixon administration's goal of targeting Blacks with the War on Drugs. Conclusions: discrimination and civil rights abuses do exist, but this particular article about the NRA is really desperately reaching for examples to support the idea here.
      - knucklesandwich 10y ago
        The central conceit of this article is that gun control as implemented in the US is racist (the NRA is discussed as an advocacy group that is hypocritical and ultimately supports many of these racist laws), which I agree with. That anecdote is not about the NRA, but there are others that are damning in my opinion. > The NRA, funded (to a significant but unclear degree) by an industry that depends on a huge market for illegal guns to ensure profitability, has called for putting those very same black-market (and, not incidentally often black) customers in prison for extremely long periods of time. > At the NRA’s May convention, Donald Trump, accepting the group’s endorsement, complained that “President Obama tried to take the guns from law-abiding Americans but has reduced prosecutions of violent criminals who use guns.” Trump, as usual, knew his audience well, and his speech was in line with a recent push by the NRA to double down on foreboding law-and-order talk, warning that liberals, in the name of reform, want to flood the streets with criminals and disarm the citizenry. > But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction. And it has relentlessly warned that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The notion is not only vigilante but profoundly carceral, grounding the right of certain people to own guns in the criminality of others. > When a Minnesota police officer shot Philando Castile dead by in his car, he was carrying a legal gun that his girlfriend has said he told the officer he possessed. His bloodied body, viewed by millions online, called the gun rights movement’s bluff: is a black man carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry a “good guy” when he is shot dead by the police? The NRA was criticized, seemingly even by its own members, for, like the officer who shot him, failing to acknowledge Castile’s right to carry. I think you're kidding yourself if you think the NRA exists to support anyone except for white gun owners and cops.
        bmelton 10y ago
        > But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction I don't mean to defend the NRA here -- as you'll see from my other comments while I recognize and appreciate the stated role they perform, I'm not their biggest fan. Regardless, that particular allegation doesn't carry much water for me. Speaking in broad strokes, every time there is a shooting, it seems incumbent on every gun owner to bear the responsibility for the bad action. Because we support the right to keep and bear arms, we are often cast by the media as the very reason that whomever was able to effect whatever recent spate of gun violence occurred, and must all be held accountable. Whenever politicians hold session, they urge to DO SOMETHING, and rarely care what that something is so long as they can show that they have been responsive in passing legislation that may positively affect this situation in a future outcome, even when it's unlikely to have any effect. If you're incapable or unwilling to cede to things like increased background checks, or unable to sign on to a blanket ban of muzzle shrouds (as our politicians so often request), there aren't a lot of politically viable options for "doing something", which casts the second amendment lot as obstructionist. What's left? Well, increased sentencing for gun felons. These increased sentences are regrettably more constitutional, because they at least are the result of due process, and do not infringe the rights of law abiding citizens. Are they good policy? I would argue not, but if you're faced with the nefariously binary options of removing rights from the law abiding vs. removing rights from proven criminals, it is easy to see how they routinely choose the latter.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    They all care about rights that are spelled out in the US constitution?
    - lmm 10y ago
      The US constitution seems like a peculiar thing to focus on, particularly for a story about a different country.
      - stale2002 10y ago
        The organizations mentioned are all US orgs that focus mostly on US constitutional issues.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I don't agree with everything the NRA or it's members support... there isn't an alternative organization that is working to protect second amendment rights that I'm aware of. The ACLU specifically takes a back seat on the issue and points to the NRA. Frankly, the NRA has plenty of money behind it.. but I feel that it's important to protect civil liberties spelled out by the constitution and implied under the 10th amendment.
    - bmelton 10y ago
      > there isn't an alternative organization that is working to protect second amendment rights that I'm aware of There are a few others: Gun Owners of America (GOA), Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), etc., but perhaps the biggest and most effective (though not nearly as large as the NRA) is the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) - who effects most of the change they desire through lawsuit. The two largest gun rights cases of our era (to date) are DC v Heller and Chicago v McDonald. Both of those cases were the result of a suit initiated by the Second Amendment Foundation. They're also better about keeping themselves single-issue than the NRA, which is good for me personally because outside of gun rights and safety, I disagree with the NRA on very little.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        Thank you for pointing the others out... will look into SAF.
neutronicus 10y ago
I don't think I've ever seen "full-frontal" modify anything other than "nudity" (possibly implicitly).
- wallace_f 10y ago
  Keeping the stereotype of software engineers in mind, I think it's funny that posts attempting to be funny are down-voted.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Time and place.
    - lightedman 10y ago
      Slashdot manages a balance of it. Why can't HN do the same? That's essentially one of the reasons I don't post a whole lot here. The 'community guidelines' are a real trainwreck to anyone who has experience running a community. I ran BBSes, half of these 'guidelines' were proven unworkable decades ago. But then again, engineers are rarely known for hindsight or historical perspective.
      - grzm 10y ago
        Slashdot manages a balance of it. Why can't HN do the same? While there may be similarities and overlap, Slashdot and HN are different communities and have different expectations and community standards. I don't think it's a matter of HN not managing the balance Slashdot has: it's more that HN's sense of where that balance should be is different. I'm sure there are plenty of members who frequent both sites, just as you do, and are aware and accepting of the differences.
        lightedman 10y ago
        Nobody bothers visiting Slashdot any more, just like nobody bothers with Soylent News. Note that any venerable name on either of those sites essentially doesn't post there any longer. Any accounts you see are either die-hard try-hards or bots/spammers.
open-source-ux 10y ago
I'm from the UK. The reason the British government can propose such outrageous laws is because a) we don't have a functioning opposition party capable of challenging or scrutinising the Government. The Labour party is completely spineless and ineffectual; and b) that lack of opposition has emboldened the Government to push through some of the most invasive surveillance laws in the Western World. The British Prime Minster, Theresa May, has a nasty authoritarian streak - she had it when she was Home Secretary responsible for domestic security, and she has it now with even more zeal as the Prime Minister. If you picture in your minds eye the most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics you could possibly imagine, you still won't come close to the giant sinkhole that is British politics right now. Utterly depressing.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  Not sure if hyperbole, or if you missed the U.S. election cycle. However, I assure you, many people can imagine most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics and are in fact watching it unfold in front of them...
  - wybiral 10y ago
    US citizen here. I can confirm this claim (and was thinking the exact same thing when I read that). Edit: Also, "unfold" is a more polite verb than I would have used there.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  The Labour party was, until pretty recently, overrun with exactly the same kinds of authoritarians (e.g. Yvette Cooper) and they're sabotaging the current leadership in a bid to get back power.
  - hd4 10y ago
    Honestly I hope they succeed, and from the ashes, we get a Labour/centre-left party with some actual integrity and credibility, because this current one has none and wouldn't get back into power anyway. Corbyn seems okay, but he seems to be stuck in the difficult position of leading a party of delusional Blairite idiots who think the people want the Labour party to go more to the right.
dajohnson89 10y ago
What I would like to see more in this conversation (on HN) is the potentially harmful effects of whistleblowing. It's nice that Snowden/das Spiegel/guardian were meticulous in making sure people weren't endangered by the leaks, but we can't count on it in general. State secrets are often nefarious. However, they are often well-meaning (nuclear weapons schematics, etc). It is highly non trivial to ascertain the long-term impact of intelligence leaks upon the state.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  If the government would like to provide some examples of concrete harm caused by whistleblowers, I'd be happy to evaluate their claims and asses, on balance, whether the benefits were worth the costs. They never do, though. They always just say "it's classified" and that we have to take them at their word that the damage was grave.
- d33 10y ago
  Well one could argue that one way to limit the risk of people blowing the whistle is by doing less evil in secret, isn't it?
  - phkahler 10y ago
    Part of the problem is that some parts of the government treat everything as a secret by default. That in itself changes the way people there think about things and how they act. I'm sure it helps foster habits that you want in place when people handle real secret information and it make it easy - you don't need to think about how to handle anything. But it's really not appropriate outside of being a convenience.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  If you're disclosing nuclear weapon plans you are not whistleblowing you are just a spy. Whistleblowers expose an organization for doing something illicit. If your job is to make nuclear weapons than that's not really illicit in that context. But if your job is to surveil enemies over seas and you are actually also surveilling people domestically (sorry, I mean collecting meta-data on) without warrants and doing it completely in the shadows, that is over the line.
vonklaus 10y ago
I just watched zero days, a great documentary about stuxnet. It is important to realize-- and this seems to be the films thesis, that secrecy is extremely damaging. It took 20-30 years for bioweapons, nuclear weapons, and chemical weapons treaties to be enacted and this process hasn't been started with cyber. Attacking whistleblowers is damaging because it is postponing inevitable discussions that need to happen and interfering with discourse nations need to have within themselves and with other counter-parties.
- strictnein 10y ago
  > "It is important to realize-- and this seems to be the films thesis, that secrecy is extremely damaging." Wow, I guess we watched the same documentary, but I didn't pull that message from that movie at all. Just seemed like kind of a two front warning to me: 1. Those type of cyber operations are extremely difficult to pull off effectively. Stuxnet did little to damper Iran's progress. 2. Those type of operations are extremely difficult to control. Stuxnet got into the wild, even though its original targets were airgapped networks and industrial machines.
  - tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
    Centralisation and trust in major players is whats damaging. The UK security services Behavioural Sciences Unit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38252470 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38252470 is not just identifying terrorists, its monitoring everyone. Your school reports, your NHS medical records, everything that is centralised is scooped up and used to profile you. If you profile as a criminal then you will be targeted. This is Minority Report Pre Cog from birth.
- tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
  Zero Day Only 40,000+ views at the time of writing. Only 50+ views in the last hour since posting. What a recruiting & training tool for the spooks. Who would have thought video's could have been a phishing tool to see what you are interested in from a psychological perspective? Watch this video and identify yourself to the spooks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X0Teo5AxQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X0Teo5AxQM Don't watch this video and keep the spooks guessing. Can you watch this video from another location? Do you use a search engine to find surreptious ways to watch this video? Can you find ways to exploit the IEEE standards drawn up for computer communication? Do you have the curiosity? Watching this video will give you an insight into the game where spooks provoke you to hack your mind whilst generating economic activity. Who do you trust? Purchasing so much online leaves your products vulnerable to interception. Can you obtain what you need offline anonymously with minimal digital traces? Do you trust your anonymous source? What benign everyday instruments can you use to wear down your opponent psychologically? Can you mess with their washing machine, fit a device which washes their clothes at a higher temp randomly to shrink their clothes forcing them to spend money and deplete their funds? This is an example of whats called Resource Burn. Can you alter your opponents car engine management system to make the vehicle break down? Can you mess around with your opponents building heating controls if the users temperature setting interface communicates with the boiler using radio frequency? Can you mess with their voice controlled systems? Can you intercept and listen into their wireless telephone handsets that plug into landlines, like a fake mobile phone tower intercepts mobile phones? Do you buy some food products like ground beef or hand made sausages from a local meat supplier? Is this made on the premises instead of being pre-packaged? If so can you drug the food products whilst co-opting the supplier into drugging the ground beef under the pretence of your opponents needs to take their meds? Can you obtain copies of relevant authorities and produce fake the letters to mess with your opponent? What these examples show you above is that technology which has existed for years is liable to being hacked and can be used as a psychological tool to wear down your opponent. Likewise people can be tricked into believing anything someone in a position of authority including fake documentation can be coerced into working for you. What makes your religious beliefs any more right or wrong than the empirical evidence of scientific or mathematical study, if the science and maths is only observing and functioning in one plane of an unknown dimension could be explained by quantum physics? And all the time your online activity is tracked and monitored. What do you do? Do you like being spied on? Do you feel safe because you think you have done nothing? Or are you unknowingly helping to keep the criminals in power by engaging with their diverse mechanisms of human control? Who or what do you trust? Can you tell the difference between right and wrong? Did your education brainwash in the same way religion brainwashes. Are you addicted to technology and gadgets? What would you do to keep your lifestyle, your possessions?
wallace_f 10y ago
This is one of the atrocities involving civil and human rights abuses by government that has nothing to do with neither Trump nor Clinton. However, the media, even in the UK, is more concerned with Trump than the abuses of government, which are what really threatens human liberty and welfare.
- moxious 10y ago
  Each president that expands the president's power manages to forget that he gives those powers to the next person. Which is how Trump now has quite the surveillance apparatus.
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    Presidents may not hold anywhere near as much power as we believe. Eisenhower seemed to be very concerned in his warning of this when he was leaving office half a century ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
    - adventured 10y ago
      We got a dramatic demonstration of this in action, when the CIA performed a media hatchet job on Trump shortly after his election victory (the intelligence agencies are notorious for doing things like this, it happened numerous times during the Bush Administration). Which then prompted him to make the CIA his first stop after the inauguration, to show his belly and let them know he wasn't a threat to them. It's pretty clear where the power rests in the US.
      - mercer 10y ago
        Assuming this is true, who exactly would have the power? The director of the CIA?
  - mercer 10y ago
    Interesting... I'm now wondering, based on what I know about Trump, what he would do with the sudden access he has. Does he (potentially) have the full apparatus of the NSA/CIA/FBI at his disposal, or does it not quite work this way? If not, what would he need to do to get access to this kind of information, and would it be or become public information that this happened?
pmoriarty 10y ago
"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." -- Bertrand Russell
timthorn 10y ago
The title here is inaccurate (at time of posting: Government accused of 'full-frontal attack' on whistleblowers) This is a proposal from the Law Commission, an independent body that advises the Government, and might or might not be taken up as a policy position. The title in the article makes the distinction clear.
iamben 10y ago
When you roll in the whole 'handing over of social media passwords' thing (currently suggested in the US, but if mass adopted no doubt followed elsewhere) all this becomes even more scary. Dare to criticise a government? Don't even think about travelling there. Criticise your own government - expect that to be shared back. Who's going to want to challenge anything any government says? No one that wants an easy life. Frightening.
I_am_neo 10y ago
Gee, should I be asking "why" instead?

155 points by secfirstmd 10y ago

kevinbowman 10y ago

Note that this is the UK government

I_am_neo 10y ago
Any government on this path is a tyrannic old dinosaur in need of reform.

tracker1 10y ago

Just... wow. And people question the need for civil liberties organizations, or in the U.S. strong defenders of the bill of rights. Donating to the ACLU, EFF and NRA is something most of us should be doing.

vvanders 10y ago
One of those organizations isn't like the others.
- knucklesandwich 10y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but you're right: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/gun-control-mass-incarceration-drug-war-nra-shooters/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/gun-control-mass-incarcer... The NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners.
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    The article appears to be stretching and reaching quite a bit to substantiate this proposition that the NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners. For example, this is one of the examples they provided to support their proposition: > DeJarion Echols was caught with forty-four grams of crack (along with $5,700 that was computed as another 450 grams) and an unloaded rifle under his bed, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The resulting sentence, handed down in 2006, was twenty years in federal prison: If we can agree that the federal government has no business wasting taxpayer dollars to lock people--who cause no harm to anyone else through recreational drug use--up in for-profit prisons, then that is the problem here. Further, discrimination does exist: prescription drug use is an illegal-yet-ignored marketplace of predominately White, upper-middle-class-on-up users who are not targeted by DEA enforcement the way street drugs are. This is consistent with the the Nixon administration's goal of targeting Blacks with the War on Drugs. Conclusions: discrimination and civil rights abuses do exist, but this particular article about the NRA is really desperately reaching for examples to support the idea here.
    - knucklesandwich 10y ago
      The central conceit of this article is that gun control as implemented in the US is racist (the NRA is discussed as an advocacy group that is hypocritical and ultimately supports many of these racist laws), which I agree with. That anecdote is not about the NRA, but there are others that are damning in my opinion. > The NRA, funded (to a significant but unclear degree) by an industry that depends on a huge market for illegal guns to ensure profitability, has called for putting those very same black-market (and, not incidentally often black) customers in prison for extremely long periods of time. > At the NRA’s May convention, Donald Trump, accepting the group’s endorsement, complained that “President Obama tried to take the guns from law-abiding Americans but has reduced prosecutions of violent criminals who use guns.” Trump, as usual, knew his audience well, and his speech was in line with a recent push by the NRA to double down on foreboding law-and-order talk, warning that liberals, in the name of reform, want to flood the streets with criminals and disarm the citizenry. > But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction. And it has relentlessly warned that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The notion is not only vigilante but profoundly carceral, grounding the right of certain people to own guns in the criminality of others. > When a Minnesota police officer shot Philando Castile dead by in his car, he was carrying a legal gun that his girlfriend has said he told the officer he possessed. His bloodied body, viewed by millions online, called the gun rights movement’s bluff: is a black man carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry a “good guy” when he is shot dead by the police? The NRA was criticized, seemingly even by its own members, for, like the officer who shot him, failing to acknowledge Castile’s right to carry. I think you're kidding yourself if you think the NRA exists to support anyone except for white gun owners and cops.
      - bmelton 10y ago
        > But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction I don't mean to defend the NRA here -- as you'll see from my other comments while I recognize and appreciate the stated role they perform, I'm not their biggest fan. Regardless, that particular allegation doesn't carry much water for me. Speaking in broad strokes, every time there is a shooting, it seems incumbent on every gun owner to bear the responsibility for the bad action. Because we support the right to keep and bear arms, we are often cast by the media as the very reason that whomever was able to effect whatever recent spate of gun violence occurred, and must all be held accountable. Whenever politicians hold session, they urge to DO SOMETHING, and rarely care what that something is so long as they can show that they have been responsive in passing legislation that may positively affect this situation in a future outcome, even when it's unlikely to have any effect. If you're incapable or unwilling to cede to things like increased background checks, or unable to sign on to a blanket ban of muzzle shrouds (as our politicians so often request), there aren't a lot of politically viable options for "doing something", which casts the second amendment lot as obstructionist. What's left? Well, increased sentencing for gun felons. These increased sentences are regrettably more constitutional, because they at least are the result of due process, and do not infringe the rights of law abiding citizens. Are they good policy? I would argue not, but if you're faced with the nefariously binary options of removing rights from the law abiding vs. removing rights from proven criminals, it is easy to see how they routinely choose the latter.
- stale2002 10y ago
  They all care about rights that are spelled out in the US constitution?
  - lmm 10y ago
    The US constitution seems like a peculiar thing to focus on, particularly for a story about a different country.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      The organizations mentioned are all US orgs that focus mostly on US constitutional issues.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I don't agree with everything the NRA or it's members support... there isn't an alternative organization that is working to protect second amendment rights that I'm aware of. The ACLU specifically takes a back seat on the issue and points to the NRA. Frankly, the NRA has plenty of money behind it.. but I feel that it's important to protect civil liberties spelled out by the constitution and implied under the 10th amendment.
  - bmelton 10y ago
    > there isn't an alternative organization that is working to protect second amendment rights that I'm aware of There are a few others: Gun Owners of America (GOA), Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), etc., but perhaps the biggest and most effective (though not nearly as large as the NRA) is the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) - who effects most of the change they desire through lawsuit. The two largest gun rights cases of our era (to date) are DC v Heller and Chicago v McDonald. Both of those cases were the result of a suit initiated by the Second Amendment Foundation. They're also better about keeping themselves single-issue than the NRA, which is good for me personally because outside of gun rights and safety, I disagree with the NRA on very little.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Thank you for pointing the others out... will look into SAF.

neutronicus 10y ago

I don't think I've ever seen "full-frontal" modify anything other than "nudity" (possibly implicitly).

wallace_f 10y ago
Keeping the stereotype of software engineers in mind, I think it's funny that posts attempting to be funny are down-voted.
- grzm 10y ago
  Time and place.
  - lightedman 10y ago
    Slashdot manages a balance of it. Why can't HN do the same? That's essentially one of the reasons I don't post a whole lot here. The 'community guidelines' are a real trainwreck to anyone who has experience running a community. I ran BBSes, half of these 'guidelines' were proven unworkable decades ago. But then again, engineers are rarely known for hindsight or historical perspective.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Slashdot manages a balance of it. Why can't HN do the same? While there may be similarities and overlap, Slashdot and HN are different communities and have different expectations and community standards. I don't think it's a matter of HN not managing the balance Slashdot has: it's more that HN's sense of where that balance should be is different. I'm sure there are plenty of members who frequent both sites, just as you do, and are aware and accepting of the differences.
      - lightedman 10y ago
        Nobody bothers visiting Slashdot any more, just like nobody bothers with Soylent News. Note that any venerable name on either of those sites essentially doesn't post there any longer. Any accounts you see are either die-hard try-hards or bots/spammers.

open-source-ux 10y ago

I'm from the UK. The reason the British government can propose such outrageous laws is because a) we don't have a functioning opposition party capable of challenging or scrutinising the Government. The Labour party is completely spineless and ineffectual; and b) that lack of opposition has emboldened the Government to push through some of the most invasive surveillance laws in the Western World. The British Prime Minster, Theresa May, has a nasty authoritarian streak - she had it when she was Home Secretary responsible for domestic security, and she has it now with even more zeal as the Prime Minister. If you picture in your minds eye the most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics you could possibly imagine, you still won't come close to the giant sinkhole that is British politics right now. Utterly depressing.

vonklaus 10y ago
Not sure if hyperbole, or if you missed the U.S. election cycle. However, I assure you, many people can imagine most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics and are in fact watching it unfold in front of them...
- wybiral 10y ago
  US citizen here. I can confirm this claim (and was thinking the exact same thing when I read that). Edit: Also, "unfold" is a more polite verb than I would have used there.
crdoconnor 10y ago
The Labour party was, until pretty recently, overrun with exactly the same kinds of authoritarians (e.g. Yvette Cooper) and they're sabotaging the current leadership in a bid to get back power.
- hd4 10y ago
  Honestly I hope they succeed, and from the ashes, we get a Labour/centre-left party with some actual integrity and credibility, because this current one has none and wouldn't get back into power anyway. Corbyn seems okay, but he seems to be stuck in the difficult position of leading a party of delusional Blairite idiots who think the people want the Labour party to go more to the right.

dajohnson89 10y ago

What I would like to see more in this conversation (on HN) is the potentially harmful effects of whistleblowing. It's nice that Snowden/das Spiegel/guardian were meticulous in making sure people weren't endangered by the leaks, but we can't count on it in general. State secrets are often nefarious. However, they are often well-meaning (nuclear weapons schematics, etc). It is highly non trivial to ascertain the long-term impact of intelligence leaks upon the state.

Analemma_ 10y ago
If the government would like to provide some examples of concrete harm caused by whistleblowers, I'd be happy to evaluate their claims and asses, on balance, whether the benefits were worth the costs. They never do, though. They always just say "it's classified" and that we have to take them at their word that the damage was grave.
d33 10y ago
Well one could argue that one way to limit the risk of people blowing the whistle is by doing less evil in secret, isn't it?
- phkahler 10y ago
  Part of the problem is that some parts of the government treat everything as a secret by default. That in itself changes the way people there think about things and how they act. I'm sure it helps foster habits that you want in place when people handle real secret information and it make it easy - you don't need to think about how to handle anything. But it's really not appropriate outside of being a convenience.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
If you're disclosing nuclear weapon plans you are not whistleblowing you are just a spy. Whistleblowers expose an organization for doing something illicit. If your job is to make nuclear weapons than that's not really illicit in that context. But if your job is to surveil enemies over seas and you are actually also surveilling people domestically (sorry, I mean collecting meta-data on) without warrants and doing it completely in the shadows, that is over the line.

vonklaus 10y ago

I just watched zero days, a great documentary about stuxnet. It is important to realize-- and this seems to be the films thesis, that secrecy is extremely damaging. It took 20-30 years for bioweapons, nuclear weapons, and chemical weapons treaties to be enacted and this process hasn't been started with cyber. Attacking whistleblowers is damaging because it is postponing inevitable discussions that need to happen and interfering with discourse nations need to have within themselves and with other counter-parties.

strictnein 10y ago
> "It is important to realize-- and this seems to be the films thesis, that secrecy is extremely damaging." Wow, I guess we watched the same documentary, but I didn't pull that message from that movie at all. Just seemed like kind of a two front warning to me: 1. Those type of cyber operations are extremely difficult to pull off effectively. Stuxnet did little to damper Iran's progress. 2. Those type of operations are extremely difficult to control. Stuxnet got into the wild, even though its original targets were airgapped networks and industrial machines.
- tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
  Centralisation and trust in major players is whats damaging. The UK security services Behavioural Sciences Unit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38252470 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38252470 is not just identifying terrorists, its monitoring everyone. Your school reports, your NHS medical records, everything that is centralised is scooped up and used to profile you. If you profile as a criminal then you will be targeted. This is Minority Report Pre Cog from birth.
tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
Zero Day Only 40,000+ views at the time of writing. Only 50+ views in the last hour since posting. What a recruiting & training tool for the spooks. Who would have thought video's could have been a phishing tool to see what you are interested in from a psychological perspective? Watch this video and identify yourself to the spooks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X0Teo5AxQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X0Teo5AxQM Don't watch this video and keep the spooks guessing. Can you watch this video from another location? Do you use a search engine to find surreptious ways to watch this video? Can you find ways to exploit the IEEE standards drawn up for computer communication? Do you have the curiosity? Watching this video will give you an insight into the game where spooks provoke you to hack your mind whilst generating economic activity. Who do you trust? Purchasing so much online leaves your products vulnerable to interception. Can you obtain what you need offline anonymously with minimal digital traces? Do you trust your anonymous source? What benign everyday instruments can you use to wear down your opponent psychologically? Can you mess with their washing machine, fit a device which washes their clothes at a higher temp randomly to shrink their clothes forcing them to spend money and deplete their funds? This is an example of whats called Resource Burn. Can you alter your opponents car engine management system to make the vehicle break down? Can you mess around with your opponents building heating controls if the users temperature setting interface communicates with the boiler using radio frequency? Can you mess with their voice controlled systems? Can you intercept and listen into their wireless telephone handsets that plug into landlines, like a fake mobile phone tower intercepts mobile phones? Do you buy some food products like ground beef or hand made sausages from a local meat supplier? Is this made on the premises instead of being pre-packaged? If so can you drug the food products whilst co-opting the supplier into drugging the ground beef under the pretence of your opponents needs to take their meds? Can you obtain copies of relevant authorities and produce fake the letters to mess with your opponent? What these examples show you above is that technology which has existed for years is liable to being hacked and can be used as a psychological tool to wear down your opponent. Likewise people can be tricked into believing anything someone in a position of authority including fake documentation can be coerced into working for you. What makes your religious beliefs any more right or wrong than the empirical evidence of scientific or mathematical study, if the science and maths is only observing and functioning in one plane of an unknown dimension could be explained by quantum physics? And all the time your online activity is tracked and monitored. What do you do? Do you like being spied on? Do you feel safe because you think you have done nothing? Or are you unknowingly helping to keep the criminals in power by engaging with their diverse mechanisms of human control? Who or what do you trust? Can you tell the difference between right and wrong? Did your education brainwash in the same way religion brainwashes. Are you addicted to technology and gadgets? What would you do to keep your lifestyle, your possessions?

wallace_f 10y ago

This is one of the atrocities involving civil and human rights abuses by government that has nothing to do with neither Trump nor Clinton. However, the media, even in the UK, is more concerned with Trump than the abuses of government, which are what really threatens human liberty and welfare.

moxious 10y ago
Each president that expands the president's power manages to forget that he gives those powers to the next person. Which is how Trump now has quite the surveillance apparatus.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  Presidents may not hold anywhere near as much power as we believe. Eisenhower seemed to be very concerned in his warning of this when he was leaving office half a century ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
  - adventured 10y ago
    We got a dramatic demonstration of this in action, when the CIA performed a media hatchet job on Trump shortly after his election victory (the intelligence agencies are notorious for doing things like this, it happened numerous times during the Bush Administration). Which then prompted him to make the CIA his first stop after the inauguration, to show his belly and let them know he wasn't a threat to them. It's pretty clear where the power rests in the US.
    - mercer 10y ago
      Assuming this is true, who exactly would have the power? The director of the CIA?
- mercer 10y ago
  Interesting... I'm now wondering, based on what I know about Trump, what he would do with the sudden access he has. Does he (potentially) have the full apparatus of the NSA/CIA/FBI at his disposal, or does it not quite work this way? If not, what would he need to do to get access to this kind of information, and would it be or become public information that this happened?

pmoriarty 10y ago

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." -- Bertrand Russell

timthorn 10y ago

The title here is inaccurate (at time of posting: Government accused of 'full-frontal attack' on whistleblowers) This is a proposal from the Law Commission, an independent body that advises the Government, and might or might not be taken up as a policy position. The title in the article makes the distinction clear.

iamben 10y ago

When you roll in the whole 'handing over of social media passwords' thing (currently suggested in the US, but if mass adopted no doubt followed elsewhere) all this becomes even more scary. Dare to criticise a government? Don't even think about travelling there. Criticise your own government - expect that to be shared back. Who's going to want to challenge anything any government says? No one that wants an easy life. Frightening.

I_am_neo 10y ago

Gee, should I be asking "why" instead?